How to Read a Book a Week 📚

How many of you would like to not only read faster, but understand more? Even if you're not reading it faster, understand more of what you read, right? So I'm gonna talk a little bit about smart reading and how you could read. All of my coaching clients over the past 30 years, the standard is getting people to read 1 book a week. You know, just like counting, 19, 22, 25, 28, 31, 34, 37. I'm gonna be doing this now. It's a great exercise. I think reading is the best exercise. Reading is to your mind what exercise is to your body. How do you read a book a week? Let me talk about that. Let me do a little bit more practice with you for speed reading and talk a little bit about reading comprehension, a couple of things you could do to boost your reading comprehension, even if you're not reading it faster. All right. The average— how many of you would— Like to read a book a week. All right. 52 books a year. I mean, that puts you in a different class. Imagine if you read 4 hours a day, emails and journals and reports, social media, research, whatever you're reading, and you double your reading speed, you save 2 hours a day. What's 2 hours a day over the course of a year? 365. So 365 times 2, right? 730. And so the idea here is you save 730 hours. Let's just say, let's make it really simple. Power of 1. You save, let's say you read faster, you save 1 hour a day, which is very, very realistic. How many hours is that? Put it in the chat. 365 hours. We all could do that math. Hopefully. That's 365 hours. If you mentally divide that by the number 40, like 40 hours in a week, What number do you have from there? How many weeks approximately? 9, Ruth? Yeah, absolutely. 9, more than 9 weeks of productivity you get back. That's like 9 weeks is 2 months. You get 2 months just saving an hour. How many of you would love to get an extra 2 months of extra time a year? So that's the power of reading, right? So let me show you how you can get through 1 book a week. We can just do math and just turn the rest of it today to math. So the average— when I was writing my book, I went on Amazon and I found out the medium number of words in a book is 64,000 approximately. And let's say the average person reads, I don't know, 200 words per minute. Many of you, even after that practice, read more than 200 words a minute. But let's just say a base of 200 words per minute. 3, uh, 64,000 divided by 200 is what? 320? 320 minutes to get through one book, right? So, so if you're dividing, and again, let me, let me, let me contextualize this. It's 3, it's, okay, I'm going to get through the math. 64,000 divided words divided by 200 words per minute. Equals about 320 minutes to get through one book for the average reader, let's say. If you divide 320 by 7 days in a week, that comes out to be about 40, about 45 minutes. So 45 minutes a day for one week will get you through one book. All right, so I just wanted to make this realistic. I mean, 45 minutes is a lot of time for, and many of us are very, very busy. It could be 20 minutes in the morning, 20, 25 minutes in the afternoon. And it could give you that edge. So it's not really impossible to read one book a week. Now think about it, what would you read? You know, many of you know that when I learned these skills when I was 18, I started to tutor. And one of my very first students, she was a college freshman, she read 30 books in 30 days. 30 books in 30 days. And many of you know, I asked her this question, like, not how, I taught her how. I wanted to know, her purpose. You know, going back to purpose times energy times small simple steps and I heard— she told me that her mother was dying of terminal cancer. Doctors gave her mom 2 months to live and the books she was reading were books that saved her mom's life. I said prayers, good wishes. 6 months later I get a call from this young lady and she's crying profusely and when she stops I realize they're tears of joy that her mother not only survived but is really getting better. Doctors don't know how, they don't know why. The doctors were calling it a miracle. But her mother, she 100% to the great advice she got from her daughter who learned it from all these books. And, you know, in that moment, I realized 2 things. I realized that if knowledge is power, then reading is your superpower. If knowledge is power, reading and learning is your superpower. And I realized also my mission in my life is helping people in this area, right? So I also found my dharma, my mission. And so 45 minutes a day. Now, Let's say we tripled your reading speed. Like, that's what we graduate people in 21 days. So you're reading something instead of 45 minutes, triple would be 15 minutes a day. So it's, you know, I, I remember there used to be across from my office, there used to be a Borders Books. Does anyone remember Borders Books? I used to go across the street during my like lunch break and I would get my tea with the L-theanine and everything, the green tea. And I would sit down, I would look at books on the shelf and I would take one up and, um, I don't know, I kind of feel a little bad about this. I would read it, finish it, and I would put it back, right? But I think I've bought a lot of books there and sent a lot of our clients there anyway, so I feel okay with that. But it's a real superpower to be able to have. For 4 and a half years, I read one book a day because I'm just so, you know, this high of learning new ideas. And the idea that you don't go to bed, your head, right, doesn't hit the pillow the same as, you know, that was the same as when it woke up. It's just different because you've invested in your own knowledge. And that's the best way to upgrade your brain. So those are some ideas. Let's practice this again, all right? Because practice makes what? Progress. Progress, right? So put your fingers out. Let's do the infinity sign. If you want, you could take your finger and just do a 1 like this, or you could take a pen and look at the top of the pen. But what I want you to do is put it out in front of you and just follow the infinity sign, and you're not moving your head. So this is where the review comes in. You're just staring at the top of your finger or the pen, and you're, you're making it like an 8 on its side. And slow down. You want to do this very slow. Remember, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Please breathe. For those of you I see in my peripheral vision that are holding their breath. And then go backwards. So this is an exercise. It's an eye exercise, right? It helps you to kind of strengthen those muscles. You're going side to side. You kind of see the kind of the box, right? And what's in the corners there, improving your maybe some of your peripheral vision also as well. All right. What I want you to do now is I want you to pick up where you left off. And I just want you to do one more round of practice. I'm not gonna even time you. Okay. The book right side up. And I want you just to read left to right and just go back and forth and read for your comprehension. Don't go any faster than you can understand. You don't have to time it or count or anything, but I just want you to— you're going right above the page. You could touch the page if you want. I don't, because when you go faster, the friction again, or touching the screen, you're going to move things around, but just go left to right. Just practice it. And just let's integrate the skill a little bit. Just go left to right, left to right. All right, stop. Let me give you some coaching. First of all, tell me how that felt compared to the first time you tried it. A bit better? Smoother? Faster? More focused? Good. More natural? And it still feels a little bit different, right? Because when you learn how to tie your shoe, you learn how to type, it feels a little different. It's kind of like typing. I mentioned this to the VIPs, but when I was in middle school, we had a typing class with real typewriters, right? They did a test for everybody and had a leaderboard on the chalkboard. They didn't have whiteboards back then. And I was number 1. And this is the first time I've ever excelled in any class all through elementary school, middle school, and then certainly beyond that. And the reason why is when I would visit grandparents, they didn't have any toys, but they had this rusty, dusty typewriter. And I just would play with that. And I invented this kind of 2-finger method. Right? And I would do that and I was like, wow, number one, quick. And I was like, wow, that kind of makes sense. 'Cause I was always kind of nicknamed slow 'cause I was very, I was in all the slow classes and kind of teased about that. So I had a sense of, for the first time, pride. And then about a week of just doing it like this, the teacher said, okay, I'm gonna teach you how to type. And I honestly was like, well, no, I'm ready to take the test. Like, I'm really, this is, I'm good at this. And they're like, no, no, you have to use all your fingers. And there's these home keys and everything. And it's interesting because I tried it, but what do you think happened to my typing speed? It went down, right? And of course, I want to stay number 1, so I continued doing what I was doing, use my 2 fingers. Interesting thing happened about a week into it. Everybody else, they didn't type or do anything, so it was easy for them to change. I went from number 1 to number 3. Uh, to number like 9. And, uh, you know, Scott would say 9 is fine, but I was just really upset with 9. And then I went all the way to the bottom. And it took my slow brain all that time to realize that, hey, that's not fair. All the other— everyone else is using 5 times more fingers. So I have to work that 5 times harder to get the same kind of results. And I realized that now I'm a very fast typer, but I would have to take, sometimes in life you have to take a step back to take leaps forward, right? To unlearn. And a big part, again, becoming a limitless learner is unlearning our limits because these limits were learned. Like I didn't, I wasn't born thinking I was broken. I learned that I was broken 'cause somebody told me that, right? And so reading is the same thing. And what we wanna do is reevaluate new ways. You know, I mentioned in the VIP, Typing. Do you ever wonder why the keyboard is the way it is? Like, it's not A, B, C, D, you know? Or why do you think it is the way it is? I'm curious. Does anyone— why would you guess? Not— many of you know, but if you don't know, what would you guess it is? Because you think it's optimized, right? It would be optimized by the frequency that you're going to use certain letters, because certain letters are used more. You want to optimize it into finger placement so you could go more efficiently. And that's actually not the reason. The reason it's spread out like this is actually to slow you down massively. Because those of you of, you know, our generation that remembers this, like before computers, like what would happen on a typewriter if you went too fast? It would jam up, right? Those legs would jam up and then you'd have to like peel them back and everything. So it's actually the keyboard is designed not to optimize, but actually to slow you down. And, and I'm not saying it's a conspiracy at all, but it's interesting how some things don't change, that we still go back to the old way, even there's something way more efficient. Same thing with reading, if that makes sense. Same thing with memory. How do people memorize things? They repeat it. They repeat the name 100 times. They repeat the 10 keys to a better brain 100 times. They repeat that grocery list of 10 brain foods 100 times. But I, I, I imagine most of you still remember that grocery list. Yeah. and the 10 Keys to the Limitless Brain, and you learned it once, right? And so when you understand how your memory works, you can work your memory. Same thing with reading. Like, I, I don't even think it's speed reading that we're graduating people on. I just think it's normal reading, right? When people read 200 words a minute and it's light fiction or something, you know, easy to understand, relatively easy to understand, I, they, I call it snailing because it feels like it's a— don't you sometimes feel like you're reading, it's like you're going at such a slow pace and you're like, how many more pages do I have? And that's not The kind of experience we want people to have. So, part of what we're doing the next 6 months together is strategically unlearning bad habits and then the natural— your natural genius kind of flows from that. So, it's reading, memory, focus, thinking, making better decisions, everything that I'm getting into flow, changing your habits, all the whole curriculum that we have for you. Now, for those of you who join the Limitless Mind, I highly recommend you go through the memory program. Because 31 days of memory training, you're just gonna remember everything else after that, you know? And you could do it at your own pace. You could skip a day if you want to. I encourage you though, 15 minutes a day. The first day I show you how to memorize, like I show you how to memorize a periodic table. I show you how to memorize languages. I show you how to memorize all these things that you might not believe is possible. But the way I tackle limiting beliefs when it comes to mindset, tapping is certainly a tool that I use on a regular, but also getting yourself to do something you never thought you could do. Yeah. Like some of you are reading 50% faster. Some of you double your reading speed. Some of you never thought you could remember 10 Keys to a Better Brain forwards and backwards, but then you, it challenges your presumptions or your lies, your limited ideas entertained, saying, wow, if I could do that in just a handful of minutes, what else can I do after 6 months? Right? You're a totally different person with a totally different life because everything comes from, from this, right? All right. So let me give you a little bit of coaching. Based on what I saw when you're reading, just to optimize this a little bit, a lot of you were reading like this. So how do I put this? When I'm looking at this book, and this is actually one of Richard Dolan's books, Performance: Decoding Human Excellence Through Sports Psychology. So I thought of using this rather than Limitless. So if I'm If I'm having this book, a lot of you I'm watching, you have the book flat on the table in front of you, right? Now, if I'm looking at this book and the book is flat, is it easier or harder to read? Are the words bigger or smaller at this angle? It's harder because the words are smaller at this angle. So the idea here is What some of you will do in order to see it better, you're either having the book here out of bad habit, and it's harder over time to read cuz it's gonna strain your eyes. Now, some of you are fixing that by keeping the book there and you're just bending over. You know what the problem is? We talk about the limitless mind system. There's learning styles, visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. We all have different ways of processing information, right? When you collapse like this, what happens? What do you notice happens? Neck pain, sure. Poor posture, strains your neck. Your neck, I mean, your head is like a bowling ball, right? So just having it like this puts an immense amount of strain on your spine and your neck. Poor breathing, lack of oxygen. So notice unconsciously, if your book is here and you Want to be able to see the words bigger, you compensate by dropping your head. And when you collapse your diaphragm, the lower 1/3 of your lungs absorbs 2/3 of the oxygen. I'll repeat that. When you collapse your diaphragm, you're not doing the deep breathing anymore because it's— you're collapsing it. The lower 1/3 of your lungs absorbs 2/3 of the oxygen. All right. And you wonder why you get tired. Because you're not getting enough air and oxygen to your brain. Now, knowing this, if you don't want to collapse your body like this and you go more in a kinesthetic mode, this is visual mode, right? Visual mode is this, where your posture is this. The words you use change, right? You have a very bright future, visual words, right? As opposed to, I feel downright upset, downright— I just feel, you know, into my feelings, right? So, If you're doing this and you still want to see it bigger, then what do you do? If you keep this up, then you have to— if you're not moving your body, what do you have to move? Your book, right? So just a little couple things that will help optimize over time. It's fine if you're reading for 5 minutes, right? But if you're sitting down and really studying over time, you're not going to have the mental endurance. And so for your— especially for your eyes. And a lot of people would want to get an updated doctor, uh, mm-hmm. get their eyes checked also, because it's really hard to read faster if things are blurry, and that's kind of obvious. So you go like this, and when I'm reading, I'll give you another tip. When you're going across the page, right here to here, another way to, to read faster is you don't have to go margin to margin. Do that when you're practicing, but you'll notice that your peripheral vision Could see the word to your left and to your right, even if it's not trained. Do you see that? Like, look at one word, any word on your book, and soften your gaze a little bit. Can you see what's on the left and to the right? They call that a fixation. So a fixation is an eye stop. A fixation is an eye stop. So when you're reading, let's say they're 10 words per line, what your eyes are doing is they're going 1, 2, 3, 4, stop, start, stop, start, stop, start, stop, 10 times across the page. That's very exhausting for your eyes, right? If you soften your peripheral vision, you could see like 3 or 4 words, then you only have to make like 2 or 3 stops across the page. And you're not backskipping because you're using your finger, right? So you're not unconsciously rereading words because the finger helps you move forward. So what I'd love for you to do, one of the things you don't— don't do it now. Well, yeah, you just actually, let's do it now. Pick up where you left off. And then instead of going all the way margin to margin, just kind of go in a few centimeters or maybe an inch. In and an inch from your left and to your right, and just go in the more towards the middle and still notice you could still see the words at the ends, at the start, in the beginning. Just feel that. Just take a moment. You know, I'm not going to time you, but just practice going left and right. And stop for a second and notice, like, if your understanding is less, notice if you're talking to yourself, right? If you're talking to yourself saying, is this really working? Am I doing this right? You're not going to understand what you read. Is that fair? Yeah. So the idea here is through habit, if you're doing it, eventually you're not going to Hear that talk, right? 'Cause you'd be focused on the act of doing it. And that only comes through a little bit of practice. Remember, unconscious incompetence, you don't know speed reading exists, so you're unconsciously incompetent. Then conscious incompetence, you know, you don't know how to speed read. And then conscious competence, you're beginning to become more consciously competent where you could do it, but it takes your conscious effort and attention. The goal though, over the 21 days of practice that we have in our course is Unconscious competence where you practice, practice so much, it's just how you read. You don't, you not have to, you're not even consciously aware you're doing it. Like you're not consciously aware you're driving or tying your shoes, or when you're typing, you're not thinking about each key. You're just doing it naturally. And that's really the goal. The only way to get there though is through training and practice, right? And so I would encourage you, even if you're not— Kwik Reading is a different program. We cover a couple of days in, in the Limitless Mind program. Um, you could find it online, uh, or maybe our team could put a link if you're interested. interested in it. But I would save that for after the memory program, right? Because then when you have the memory program, you're going to remember everything that you read as it is, right? But my goal here today in the time that we have is to give you those tips. So just notice the book placement. Somebody asked if the book is really heavy, then just lean it on the table, right? So like, or you could cross your legs and I could put it right here on my knee and I could just look at it and I'm still keeping my upward posture, my visual modality, and I could just underline it And the weight of the book could be supported on your knee, or it could be supported on your desk, right? So you get— and everyone's a little bit idiosyncratic based on, you know, their muscles and how they're used to moving their body. But you could get used to any of this, even like these exercises that we've done. You get used to it after doing it a few times. Like even this second, this third time of just reading with your finger, was it easier? Yeah. And you only did it like 30 seconds, 30 seconds, and 30 seconds. Right? You practice for maybe 2 minutes. Imagine if you practiced it like 5 minutes a day, every day, you know, the difference and ingraining that. And it becomes a level of, of, of, of second nature, which is really, really the goal here. All right. So what we're unlearning bad habits to learn something brand new. And just like somebody mentioned this, is it a conspiracy with the typing? Some people suggest that, because what happened when you tried to use your finger, because you naturally did when you were a kid in school. What were you taught when you tried to use your finger, your kids tried to use their finger? No, right? And depending on what kind of school system you went to, I have friends that went through a school system where they had rulers and they would hit your finger to be able to not. And I'm not saying it's a conspiracy to keep you reading slow so you're uneducated and can be controlled. I'm not saying that at all. But it's interesting just to have that open mind to doing new things. And then ultimately, You are the expert of you. Like, all I say is you don't have to believe everything I'm saying. You know, this is just honed over all the academic papers I read and real-life experience of working with literally millions of individuals worldwide. So, I'd have to be not so smart to not see that there is a pattern to genius. But I'm just saying, test it for yourself. That's why I always say, like, all our stuff is measurable. Even in Limitless Mind, we test your focus, we reading, we test your reading, we test your memory before and after. This is how many names and faces we show you right on video. There's videos where I pull people on stage and when you introduce themselves, you try to remember them and I teach you a technique. And then afterwards, it's always this lift, right? And so those are a couple ideas to optimize your reading. You practice it as you like, and then you'll get to a point where you could read as fast as you could speak, a little bit higher. And then there's something called a subvocalization threshold. We mentioned subvocalization, that inner voice that keeps you reading slow. That takes training to get past that threshold. Because you could use your finger, but you're probably only going to go, if you're saying the words, as fast as you could speak, right? Which might be 400 words a minute, you know? But when we're gradually teaching people at 800 or 1,000 words per minute, they have to read. Nobody could talk that fast. The Guinness Book of World Records, she has the same birthday as me. Her name is Fran Capo. She's in the Guinness Book of World Records. She has been at our events and everything else, kind of like Scott, but for speaking. She broke the Yeah. So she speaks upwards of 650 words per minute, which is like 10 words per second. I honestly can't imagine being married and having a fight, like a debate with her, because it's going to be over before it even starts. But even she can't read faster than 600-something words a minute because she can't talk that fast, right? We've done some media together where I'm reading and she's speaking, and it's kind of fun. But she has this thing where she does bedtime stories where she does like really, really fast. Uh, like, so you know what it sounds like, 'cause if you put your audiobook, if you put my audiobook at 3x, it's like that fast, right? All right. So let's go a little bit more into reading comprehension. By the way, um, Richard Dolan, you could probably get this book on, uh, online. It's all about performance. All right. Let me give you some tips on reading comprehension. All right. There are 3 keys for reading comprehension. 3 parts are you read, and it has to start with that. You can't have comprehension. The first step is you read. The second is you relate, and then you write. And I'm just going to use an R because, you know, I just have to. I'm kind of like OCD about alliteration. All right. You read, you relate, and you write. Because comprehension, you could train yourself to have better comprehension. You could train yourself to have better comprehension. It's a muscle. And so let me give you an idea. So you read for your 15 minutes of practice a day, right? Or whatever, however long you're reading something. What I'm asking you to do afterwards is talk about what you read. Remember I talked about the explanation effect to accelerate your learning, to become a more limitless learner? I want you to get in the habit of when you read something, fiction or nonfiction. Now, by the way, these trainings, it might be easier to practice with fiction in the beginning to get the motor skill of following your eyes through the page because it's just going to be more understandable, right? I reserve nonfiction— I read mostly nonfiction, right? I do read fiction every night though because I don't want to read neuroscience and, you know, all the other books that I'm very interested in at night because it puts me into that— my executive brain, I start thinking and I want to Clear, right? So fiction reading helps me to just more relax. And also, by the way, fiction reading, for those of you who are obsessed with nonfiction, fiction reading, there are some real benefits. It has been shown to boost your EQ, your emotional quotient, improve your empathy, improve your imagination, the narrative, and seeing things from different points of view. Also, so many benefits, right? So you read, and what I'm going to ask you to do is spend 5 minutes relating. So you're talking to somebody about what you just read. And now in the beginning, it might be a little bit difficult because you're not used to it. And that's why we're exercising this muscle of neuroplasticity. So you're going to relate and talk for 5 minutes, and ideally you're talking to somebody else. And if you're done talking after 3 minutes, that person you're talking to would ask you questions to prompt more comprehension. Does that make sense? Yeah. And so, like, literally the best-case scenario is you're practicing this with somebody. Right. Connect even with somebody in the community and create our book club and you could read together and you could connect in our Facebook group, whatever. And then you become learning buddies. And we have so many relationships. We even had a couple get married in our community recently. This because we shared values, right? You're positive, you're growing together and you have similar values. You want to make a difference. But you want to find somebody you could relate to what you just read in whatever time you read in 5 minutes. And so the best case scenario, you're doing somebody with you. Otherwise, do it on Zoom with somebody or call somebody up and they call you and you're talking. You're saying, hey, before we talk about our plans this weekend, let me just tell you for 5 minutes about what I'm reading. And then just talk about it. That's relating. So the best thing is talk to a live person. Or if you can't, talk to your pets. That's second best. If not, talk to your plants. It's actually really good for your plants, right? We have certain plants in our home that cleans the air and everything else like that. But talking to your plants, the carbon dioxide, you know, from your exhale actually is what the plant plants, you know, really thrive on. Talk to your plants or Talk, talk to a water bottle. That would be the least, right? Um, 'cause talking to that water bottle, actually fundamentally, in my experience, is there's not a big difference in terms of this exercise, talking to a water bottle and talking to your best friend. And you're thinking like, oh, what, what is that saying about that person? But I mean, what's important is you're talking, you're not talking to who? Yourself. Because if you do it inside your own head, you're not really going to— unless— so think about reading. You take information, words into your eyes, you're processing it, right, with your brain, and then to put it out verbally, you have to know it better. And notice when you're talking about it, you're not going to use the author's words. You're going to use whose words? Your words. So it becomes very personal for you, right? So imagine input, eyes, brain, output, mouth, and something magical happens before you express something. You have to think about it. ponder it, understand it, remember it in order for you to put it out, especially if you're reading with the intention of talking to somebody, then you know you have to know the information. Okay, so talk to a person, either in person or over the phone or on Zoom. Talk to your pets, talk to your plant, talk to an inanimate object, which is almost as good as talking to some people. And then most importantly, don't talk to yourself as long as you're expressing, or even talk to your phone and record it. Right? Everybody— there's no excuse not to be able to do this. And then writing is taking notes about what you just read.