How to Absorb Books 3x Faster (While Remembering More)

Welcome to Kwik Brain, bite-sized brain hacks for busy people who want to learn faster and achieve more. I'm your coach, Jim Kwik. Free your mind. Let's imagine if we could access 100% of our brain's capacity. I wasn't high, wasn't wired, just clear. I knew what I needed to do and how to do it. I know kung fu. Show me. Have you ever read a page in a book, got to the bottom, and realized you have no idea what you just read? By the way, quick plug, Limitless paperback edition. It has new material also. Get yours wherever you get books. Maybe you've tried reading something more, you know, for your career, your personal growth, your goals, but it takes you forever to finish even just one chapter. If this sounds like you, here's the good news. You're not alone. You know, one study found that the average person reads no more than one book a year, and it is declining. Not because they don't want to learn, but because no one ever taught them how to read for their brain that they have today. And we know readers are leaders, right? You read to succeed. If somebody has decades of experience they put into a book and you can sit down and read that book in a few days, you could download decades into days. That's the biggest advantage you could have in life and work and your career. It's Reading is to your mind what exercise is to your body. We were taught what to learn, but we were never really taught how to learn. Imagine if you could absorb books and not just read it faster, you know, maybe 2, 3 times faster like we do with our quick reading courses with students around the world. But imagine if you could actually remember what you read, you could focus, and it was just, you're better at it, so you do it more often, right? When you're good at something, you want to do it more because it's enjoyable. And so what we're going to talk about today is turning this learning or and reading into a superpower, all without spending hours a day. So you could catch up and keep up and finally get ahead. Today I'm gonna show you exactly some tips on how to do that. Obviously, I recommend going through our full program. It's a 21-day system, 15 minutes a day, which you're probably reading 15 minutes a day anyway. But in this video, I have the time to give you some tips. Training just takes time, right? So you could go to kwikreading, kwikreading.com. So in this video, you will learn a brain-based reading method that I've taught for over 34 years that not only boosts your reading speed, but your comprehension. How to understand and remember more of what you read the first time. The most important habit to triple your reading retention. And I'm gonna give you like a 7-day training plan to rewire your brain to learn faster. This is not speed reading in the traditional sense where people mostly associate it with skimming or scanning or skipping words. It's not frantic fast. This is really smart reading, reading with purpose, reading with strategy, reading with retention and memory. So let's dive in. Most people think reading slow is smarter, but slow reading for many people, most people actually steals your time and your comprehension. These were habits you learned when we first learned how to read back in school, and they taught you to read with your inner voice. Right? To say the words inside your mind, to move line by line, to reread sentences, to memorize instead of really focusing on understanding. These are okay strategies for children learning letters, but as adults, these habits become almost like anchors weighing us down. Here's what slows you down. Number 1, subvocalization, and that's the voice in your head saying every single word. It caps your reading speed to your speaking voice. You're limited to your talking speed, not your thinking speed. Number 2 is backskipping. If you ever found yourself rereading words or rereading whole lines, many times you don't even realize you're doing it, but it really kills not only your focus, but your understanding. And number 3, people don't have like a pre-reading strategy. It's always in the planning and the preparation, then it's performance in anything. If your brain doesn't know what to look for, know what's important, ask What is it gonna do? Your mind will wander. Does your mind wander when you read? And I would say number 4, reading everything at the same speed. Like when people, the average person reads about 200 words a minute and we graduate people on average 300% faster with better comprehension. So essentially reading something in 20 minutes that normally takes an hour, but you don't read everything at 400, 500, 600 words a minute. You need variable, right? Just like if you're playing golf, You don't use the same club every single time. For some things you read faster, for other things you might want to slow down, but it drains your most valuable resource when you're reading something and you're stuck at one setting because it wastes your time, and that's your most valuable resource. If you never get your emails, if you have books on your shelf you haven't read yet, right? You call it shelf help, not self-help. If you have all these work projects, then that could be a real challenge. The average person has to read like 4 or 5 hours a day just to keep up. If you could just double your reading speed and understanding, Wow, you can save 2 hours a day, 2 hours a day over the course of a year, even 1 hour a day over the course of years, 365 hours. I mean, you break that down into 40-hour work weeks, that's 2 months of productivity that you get back. I mean, this is such an essential skill. It's a must-have today in the age of information. And then finally, a challenge when it comes to reading, and we'll go to some solutions and some tips, is there's no memory activation, right? Your brain isn't isn't a storage container. It's not like a teacup that you fill in, you have to empty it. Your brain is more of a meaning maker. If you don't activate meaning, then you're never going to remember it. So it's not that you're bad at reading. Maybe it's just you're using outdated software, right? You get the updates to update your phone or your apps or your ChatGPT. Right, because it goes more, it's more efficient, it's faster, it's more accurate. Same thing with your reading ability. And, but when's the last time you upgraded your reading skill? When was the last time you took a class or a course or a program on reading, right? Most, for most people, again, it's when they were back in elementary school. So you're using outdated software and you wonder why you struggle. But here's the good news. Your brain at every age and stage is adaptable. It can upgrade and it can upgrade fast. That, that's the nature of what we do at Kwik, right? And today you'll learn a few tips. Again, Again, it's not a training because I don't have, you know, a few weeks with you like I do in the Kwik Reading Program. But let me just give you some quick tips that could give you a quick result. Before we get into a tip or technique, I want to share my simple learning formula. You might have heard it before, but remember, repetition is the mother of learning. So remember FAST, F-A-S-T. The F stands for forget. And what you want to do is temporarily forget what you already know about what you're reading. Right? Your mind is like a parachute, only works when it's open. And you can't learn something new if you feel like you know it already. So that could stall you. Number 1, forget about distractions. Turn off your phone, tell, you know, your environment that you're studying or that you need to be able to focus because distractions could obviously hinder your reading. That's kind of obvious. I also want to just temporarily forget about your limiting beliefs. If you have a belief that I'm a slow reader, I'm not a fast reader, just add a little word like yet there. Okay, I'm not a fast reader yet. I'm not a great reader yet. It just changes how it lands. The A in FAST is you want to be active. Remember, learning is not a spectator sport, so you could be active in many different ways. Some people like to ask questions, which I highly encourage, right? Questions are the answer. It sets your reticular activating system, puts a spotlight on what you're reading, so you're pulling information in. You know what's important. I would also say that you could also have a note-taking system. Or a highlighting system. Just a little caution, a little pet peeve that some people like to highlight everything. All the time people take pictures of Limitless and I'm very honored that so much of it is highlighted, but then it glows in the dark and that's not the goal. If everything is important, remember nothing is important. So if you make everything important, then nothing becomes important. So being active in your reading so it's not just passive, you're just not consuming information. The S, this is a big one, is state. All learning is state dependent. Learning is affected by how you feel. So how can you elevate your curiosity, your excitement, your energy? You can even rate yourself on a scale of 0 to 10 saying how excited or how much energy, what's my current state on a scale of 0 to 10? Maybe it's a 6. And then just say, play, be, you know, do this mental experiment. How can I make it a 7? How can I make it an 8? Maybe I have to, you know, get excited about the benefits that's gonna come from what I'm reading. Maybe I just have to play some music. Or do some breathing or change my posture or put a smile on my face just to make it a little bit more, because remember, information by itself is forgettable, but information when it's combined with an emotional state becomes unforgettable. And finally, the T in FAST is teach. When you learn to teach, you retain the information so much better, so much faster. They call it the explanation effect, right? And so when you learn it, if you had to give a presentation about it, the next day or, or later in that day, you would own that information. You would personalize it. You would organize it, right? So teaching creates focus. It creates understanding. It shows you the gaps of what you would know and what you not yet know, and it could also boost your retention. So this FAST method is very simple tip, but it primes your brain to absorb information more efficiently, more quickly. Now let's get into the techniques. So technique number 1, I want to talk about previewing a book before reading it. It gives your mind, it gives your brain a mental map so you absorb the information faster. Imagine actually going from New York to Los Angeles and you're driving cross-country before there was devices and GPS and so on to get you there. You have to look at a map. And so you're kind of previewing the map so you know what's coming up. So how do you do that when it comes to a book? Step 1, I would recommend you look at the table of contents, right? That's what the author put together as the structure, kind of the landmarks, if you will, of the book. And this tells your brain what's coming up next, right? And that activates maybe that visual part of your brain that sees things more in systems and you can see where things fit. Step 2, let's say you're going through a chapter. Look at the headers, look at the subheaders, look at the bold text. Sometimes if you're reading something technical like a textbook, look at those vocabulary words that kind of stand out because you haven't seen those words before. These are clues really to the main ideas of what you're reading. Step 3, I would challenge you to try something new. Read the first and last paragraphs of each chapter. These are usually the place where the author is providing context or some kind of summary at the end, and that gives you a little bit more information, right? These are your summary anchors. And step 4, remember to set a purpose. Without a reason, you won't get a result. Ask yourself, what do I want to get out of what I'm reading? What do I want to get out of this book? This step alone is so simple. It's common sense, but it's not common practice. It can make you 20, 30% more efficient because you're setting, again, your reticular activating system, which is your RAS, which determines what's important. And all of a sudden you go through and like, oh, that's a main idea. This is something that's important because you're shining a spotlight on the things that really matter. And so if you want to be more efficient, make sure you do that. You know, think of it like, like you're watching a movie trailer before you actually see the film, right? Your brain gets some kind of context and this context accelerates your understanding. It accelerates your comprehension. Technique number 2, breaking Subvocalization. Your inner voice is slowing you down. The average person speaks about 150 to 200 words per minute, but your brain processes words and images much faster. So the goal is to reduce subvocalization. You'll, you'll never do it completely. You know, even for me, I'll say certain words that I haven't seen before or see them very rarely. But one of the things you could do is start by using a visual pacer. A visual pacer could be your finger, a highlighter, a mouse on a computer, a pen, a pencil. Do you have too much to read but too little Are your shelves full of books that you haven't read yet and become shelf help, not self-help? And that's why I created the Kwik Reading Course. 15 minutes a day, 21 days will absolutely transform your life. Just go to kwikbrain.com/reading, use the code PODCAST15, and you'll get instant access. So because your eyes follow the motion, Right? Your eyes are conditioned in your nervous system to follow what moves in your environment. This alone can increase your reading speed and focus 25 to 50%. So that, that's a huge gain. 25, 50%, just underlining the words and following your finger as you're going across the page. Number 2, start grouping words together. Instead of reading word by word, At every fixation— a fixation is an eye stop— you could see the word. If you're looking at one word, you could probably see, if you relax your vision, the word before it and the word after it. So imagine there's 10 words per line, then fixation is you have to stop at all 10 words, as opposed to if you group those into 3 or 4 words, then you could get across the page with only 2 or 3 fixations. So that's a lot less taxing on your eyes, number one. But number two, It also is less time-consuming because you're making less starts and stops. Your brain naturally chunks information. You do this with stop signs and logos and phone numbers. You process them instantly because you're chunking groups, just like a child. You know, they had to look at the letters in order to understand the word. But now as an adult, you don't look at the individual letters when you're reading, you look at the word. So I'm saying, as a child goes from letter to word, Go from word to two or three words. Number three, try counting out loud while reading. And what does it do? It forces that inner voice to quiet because you can't be saying the words inside your mind while you're counting out loud. And you could trust try it for ten, fifteen, thirty seconds, and I could promise you it will feel strange. But if you condition over time, for some people it could work to mitigate the subvocalization. And some some people will will sing a song or they'll do A B. Sees or something to disrupt that inner talk. Because the truth is you don't have to say New York City to understand what New York City means, right? Just like a stop sign. You look at a stop sign, you don't say stop, but you comprehend. 95% of the words you come across in your daily reading, in emails, to books, to journals, to reports, to research, to ChatGPT, whatever, they're words you've seen before. So you don't have to say those words because saying it takes time. Remember, you already know how to read without saying every single word, just like you, you look at a word and you know the meaning because a picture is worth a thousand words. You're just reminding your brain and it's a conditioning training process. And that's what we do in Kwik Reading, right? We help people over time in those 21 days to reduce that subvocalization. So if they don't have to say the word, they could go a lot faster. Technique number 3 really involves focus training. And there's a rhythm to reading. You don't always have a reading problem. Usually it's a focus problem. And to strengthen your focus, you could pull from lots of different tools we teach in Quick Reading, Quick Productivity, Quick Recall, like something like the Pomodoro Technique. The Pomodoro Technique is where you focus. Like I have an egg, like not an egg, a tomato timer here for cooking. It's analog. I like everything that's analog. And I just set it for like 25 minutes. Or maybe you're reading for 20 minutes, and then you take a 5-minute brain break, and then you repeat. Because it keeps your attention high, your energy high, and you're sprinting through it knowing that there will be a finish line, if you will. So you're kind of sprinting. Your brain loves those sprints of reading. And you'll retain more by giving yourself dedicated focus time. And with a brain break, where you're integrating information, you're also benefiting from primacy and recency. I've talked about this in our podcast. Primacy is you tend to remember things in the beginning, and recency, you tend to remember things more recent, right? If I give you a list of 20 words, you probably remember the first few words and the last few words. Primacy and recency. By taking 15 or 20 minutes as a Pomodoro, you create more starts and stops, more primacy and recency, which could boost your recall, right? This is the science of memory. Technique number 4 is memory anchoring. Right? How do you remember what you read? Speed without memory is just useless, right? You read something and then you just don't remember it. There's no point in really reading it. So here's a few quick tips on how to retain more. Step 1, visualize the concepts. Your visual cortex takes up more real estate than other parts of your brain. People tend to remember what they see. Like, you tend to remember a face and forget a name, something that you heard. So you could try visualizing the concepts, and this makes them more interactive. You get to tap into your imagination, and Einstein said imagination is more powerful than knowledge. So you turn ideas into a picture, and the brain tends to remember images, not as much word for word, right? Step 2, make connections. All of learning is associations. They're connections. And how do you do that? You could do something simple like ask yourself a question like, how does this relate to my life? How does this relate to what I already know. What problems does this solve for me? That connection creates meaning, and meaning helps facilitate better memory. When something is meaningful to you, it's relevant to you, you're more likely to remember it. So like, what problem does this solve for me? So think about it. Like, you care about something when it is helping you with a problem, something that you're curious about. Step 3, teach it. If you wanna learn something, you teach it. You call somebody up, you leave a voicemail message, or, you know, or, or you're talking to your pet, or you're talking to maybe a plant, right? The key is to teach it out loud because if you just say it to yourself, we could kind of mail it in, if that makes sense. But this is to articulate, think about when you're reading something, information goes inside your brain, but to output it, right? You have the input of the reading, but to output it, something magical has to happen in between. You have to organize it, you have to personalize it. You have to understand it. So teaching activates more of your retrieval pathways, your recall pathways. Step 4, try summarizing what you just read. After every section or every chapter, maybe just take a pause and write. And I would encourage you to handwrite. We've done videos on note-taking and how handwriting notes far exceeds digital note-taking. But after every chapter, pause and write, what are my top 3 takeaways here? 7-day book absorption plan. Here's when the magic happens. Follow this plan for 7 days. On day 1, I want you to measure and map. I want you to check your current reading speed, and I want you to preview your book and set your purpose. You could easily measure your reading speed by setting a timer, have it go off in 60 seconds. Put a mark in the margin where you start, and then at the end of 60 seconds when your alarm goes off, put a mark in the margin, count the number of lines, and it gives you a base rate, right? You can't manage something unless you are able to measure it. Now on day 2, I want you to work on subvocalization and regression. Regression is the act of backskipping. You're going to do a lot less of it when you're using your finger to pace yourself. So on day 2, I want you to practice reading but following your finger while you read. Some people, again, will use a pen or a highlighter. You're not marking the book. And even when you're touching your book, I wouldn't actually touch your book. I would go right above so you're not friction. I read very fast with my finger. And, you know, sometimes I set a book on fire and that's a challenge. But there's something called friction, right? And also when you're doing using your finger, it helps you to also chunk those words into groups because you're going more rapidly. Day 3, I want you to focus on your focus. I want you to focus on your focus endurance, your focus stamina. And you could do something like 20-5 reading cycles. You could practice the 20 minutes on, 5-minute break. So you do a 20-minute Pomodoro technique, your alarm goes off, and then 5-minute brain break. And you're using that to hydrate, to move around. As your body moves, your brain grooves. You can do some Some educational kinesiology and movements that activate your brain that we've talked about in other videos and podcasts. And also remove distractions. Okay? It's very important. Distractions are the enemy to your focus, right? You want to feed your focus and starve your distractions. Day 4, let's focus on activating your memory. This is where I want you to practice visualizing or imagining key concepts. Anybody who can't imagine it, Imagine that you can imagine it. If you don't see it, maybe you could start to feel it. You could hear it. Maybe if there's a story and there's some associated smells or sensations or tastes, that's where using more of your imagination to be able to encode it stronger in your memory and in your learning. So you can visualize these key concepts. Some people will mind map and use visual concepts. If you've listened to our note-taking YouTube also as well. We could put that in the description, that link. Very, very popular. It says millions of views. Watch how you could do some visual note-taking and create those mental images. And then day 5, teach it to somebody else. So you read something, you could write about it, and then you could relate. Talk to somebody else and say it out loud. Explain— you finish a section or you finish a chapter and you explain it to somebody out loud. You call up Share takeaways with a buddy or a family member, or put it into a voice recorder, talk to your glass of water or a plant or a pet that I mentioned, right? And the important part is you're doing it out loud. And then day 6, I want you to do a quick summary. What if you wrote a half a page or one full page book summary or a chapter summary? You're retrieving the information out. So one way, you know, you'd learn it through relating it. You read it and you relate to talk about it, but then another one you might be writing it also as a way of capturing your big ideas. Day 7, I want you to apply. This is one of the most important steps. I feel like we don't understand something unless we could do it, and that's really the goal. You could ask yourself, how can I use this? When will I use this? You could schedule. I think for every hour you spend reading something or listening to a podcast, spend an equal hour implementing that idea, because if you don't, nothing changes. You didn't read a book, you just Turn pages if you're not executing that. All right? So choose one idea from the book or that chapter and take immediate action. Because what happens? Action turns into information and information's gonna turn into that transformation. And when you're acting, you create evidence that you are the person that you want to become. So just remember this in closing. You don't have, there's no such thing as a good or bad memory. There's a trained memory and an untrained memory. So you don't have a poor memory. You just have an untrained one. There's no class back in school called remembering. You don't have a poor memory. You have an untrained one. You need a better strategy for reading. And my goal today was to give you some ideas, some tips, some insights to be able to, to make some marked improvements. And you definitely will by doing that. So I want you to put in the comments or you can post on social media and make sure you tag us in there. As always, I'll repost some of them and we'll gift out a couple of signed copies of Limitless. But today is the start of upgrading your reading software. When's the last time you updated that, this app, right? The app that is controlled, you know, and controls all the other apps, you know? And so you've learned how to read with greater focus, how to be able to remember more, how to turn reading into a superpower. So here's your final question. What are you reading? What book are you going to read and absorb and focus and enjoy better and faster? And smarter this week? I want you to drop it in the comments. If you want more tools to train your brain, especially in the area of smart reading, go to kwikreading.com, K-W-I-K reading.com, which is the ultimate course. We have students in every country in the world, and in 21 days on average, improving your reading speed 300% with better comprehension. So it's not just on speed reading. It really is about smart reading, how to improve your focus, how to understand what you read, your reading comprehension, your reading enjoyment, and your reading retention. Okay, so again, kwiareading.com. I am your reading and your human intelligence brain coach, accelerated learning coach, and I really appreciate you being on this journey. It's time to lock it in. You deserve to have the success that you're studying and learning and reading so much about. Okay, so until next time, stay limitless.