Reading Skills: Read Faster and Remember More

Okay, I'm quite excited about learning how to read faster because I'm— I've always honestly been a very slow reader. I saw the people around me, how fast they would read, and I am slow. So let me just come to a random page on Limitless. How would I read this faster?

Okay, so the key— we talked about how leaders are readers and reading is an exercise for your mind. And a lot of times people will read a page in a book and forget what they just read, and they'll go back and reread it and still forget what they just read, or they'll read it so slowly. So let me, let me just dispel a couple myths, and then I'll go give you a technique to go through this. So First of all, reading is a skill. It's just we haven't upgraded that skill in some time since we were 6 or 7 years old. Now, the challenge with reading is if people aren't good at it, they probably won't do it very often. And in psychology, they have something called the confidence-competence loop, that the more competent you get at something, the more confident you are. And then because you're more confident, you're gonna do it more often, which makes you more skilled and competent, and it's a positive loop, right? But with reading, most people don't read because they're just not, it puts 'em to sleep, it bores them. And so here are a couple myths. First of all, lack of focus is a big challenge for people that read, because their mind wanders. Now, I mentioned we have a lot of feedback from our students from every country, and we find, if I tell people up there to read faster, what do you think most people would say would happen to their comprehension?

It would go down.

It would go down. Now, in actuality, when we test people, it's actually higher. The faster readers tend to have better comprehension, and I'll tell you why, Erica, because they have better focus. So think about this. Your brain is this incredible supercomputer, but when we read, we feed the supercomputer one word at a time. Now, I can't even talk— I'm from New York, so I can't even talk that slowly. But if I was, if we were to talk that slowly during this conversation, what would people's minds naturally do? They would wander. They would fall asleep. They would doze off. They would think about other things. Now, aren't those the same things that happen when people read? They doze off, they think about other things, their mind wanders, they fall asleep because they're feeding their brain too slow. So let me say it in another way. It's kind of like driving a car. If you're going in your neighborhood slowly, right, you're not— have you ever like arrived and you don't even remember the trip there? Because you're not really focused on driving. Because if you're going slow, what can you be doing? Drinking your coffee, texting, which you know you shouldn't do because multitasking is really bad for you. You could be singing a song, you think about the dry cleaning, you could do 5 different things when you're going slow. But if you're racing cars, you know, you're in the F1, you're taking hairpin turns going as fast— are you thinking about the dry cleaning? Are you trying to text? No. What are you focused on? Just 2 things: what's in front of you and how you're driving. And that's because the speed commands focus, and the focus will give you the comprehension. Same thing with reading. If you go too slow, your mind is starving for more information, so it'll seek entertainment elsewhere in the form of distraction. But if you're reading more quickly, You're not thinking about anything else because you're satisfying your mind's need for that stimulus and that novelty. So it's not trying to think of other things. So inherently, not only are you going to get through it faster, but because you have greater focus, the focus is going to give you better understanding and better retention. All right? And then the third thing besides lack of— so the big obstacles to effective reading: lack of skill, right? Last time we took a class was 6 years old. Lack of focus, which we just addressed, that actually speed will give you focus. And then the third one is a big one called subvocalization. Now, this is a term— have you ever noticed when you read, you hear that inner voice inside your head reading along with you? You hear that voice? Hopefully it's your own voice. It's not like somebody else's voice in there. That's called subvocalization. Sub, like a submarine, under. Vocal, meaning speech. It's your inner speech. So how does that relate to reading? Most people, when they read, They're either saying out loud or inside the words, right? Because that's how we're taught. Now, the challenge becomes you can only read as fast as you could speak. That means your reading speed is limited to your talking speed, but not your thinking speed. A lot of people could listen to this show at 1.5 or 2x or audiobooks. They can understand it if they're trained to be able to do that. They just can't talk that fast, right? The question becomes, do you have to say all the words in order to understand what the words mean? And the truth is you don't, right? Just like the punctuation marks, you know, the, the exclamation mark, question mark, the semicolon, the period. You don't say those things. They're symbols that have a meaning. You don't have to pronounce it. It's like when you're driving, you see a stop sign. Nobody says the word stop. You understand what it means, right?

Yeah.

You don't say it to yourself. 95% of the words in that book are what they call sight words. They're words you've seen thousands of times, like a stop sign. And you don't have to pronounce it to understand it. So how it got there is when we were younger, you know, 5, 6, whatever, and you're learning how to read, and then the teachers said, read quietly to yourself, or read silently to yourself. And that's where you took that external voice and you internalize it. You said, for me to understand it, I have to hear it. If not out here, then in here inside your mind. So a big part of our training, you know, in these courses that we do is teach people how to reduce subvocalization. Because most of the words in there, the and, there, because of, like, you don't, like, you don't say New York City to understand what New York City is, right? They're sight words. And so that's the idea. Now, how do you overcome some of these obstacles? Because then the last obstacle is regression, backskipping. A lot of us have a bad habit when you're— have you found yourself reading something and you reread the line or something?

Yes.

Yeah, a good amount of time is spent unconsciously rereading words. Which doesn't help us to understand it better. We're just, just bad habit, right? So how to overcome that? If you want to read this book faster, right? And if you're watching this on YouTube, you could kind of see a visual demonstration. The first thing I'll do is test yourself. So what I would want everyone to do is put a mark in the margin where you left off, time yourself for 60 seconds, put a mark in the margin after 60 seconds, count the number of lines. Because in order to be able to manage it, you got to measure it, right? So how do you know if it's going to work if you don't have a baseline? So you have a number of how many lines you read in a minute. And then the second one you wanna do is you wanna read, pick up where you left off, but just underline the words. Now, I don't mean actually underlining with a marker or a highlighter, but just right above. If you're doing it on a screen, it could be your finger, or you're not touching the page or the screen, you're just going right above it, going left to right, not skipping anything. Traditional speed reading will have you go right down the page or make S-forms or Z-forms, but you miss big chunks, and that's why people get the gist of what they read, right? And a lot of my clients, they're medical doctors. You don't want your doctor to get the gist of what she reads, right? That would be the goal. Your attorney just to get the gist of what she's reading, right? So the idea is you don't skip anything, you just underline the words. And if you do that the second time, put a mark in the margin, count the number of lines, that number would be about 25-50% lift higher than the original number using what they call visual pacer. It could be a pen, a highlighter, it could be a mouse on a computer. And the reason why is your, your eyes are attracted to motion. Well, first of all, it's interesting because now we're teaching my son to read, right? And he naturally will use his finger to help him focus until later on teachers will say, don't do that, right? But actually, using a finger will help you to read faster and have better focus comprehension. Second, everyone listening, you use your finger too. Nobody was using their finger when I asked you to do the first 60 seconds. But when I asked you to count the number of lines you just read, everyone goes like this, use their finger to use it as a pacer, right?

Mm-hmm.

Because we know it helps us to focus. Third reason is our eyes are attracted to motion. So like if someone's watching this on video right now and someone ran by, you wouldn't focus on either one of us. You would focus on what moves, 'cause what moves, it's hardwired. It's like you're a hunter-gatherer. You're in a bush hunting lunch, like a rabbit or carrot, whatever your diet is, and a bush next to you moves. You have to look at what moves 'cause it's survival. Number one, that could be lunch, or number two, you could be lunch, right? So you have to look at what moves. When your finger's going across the page, Your attention is being pulled through the information as opposed to being pulled apart. And then the last reason is that people need to know reasons to do something. Just like even remembering names. If you want to remember names better, if you had a reason to remember their name and just checked in with that, like, why do I want to remember this person's name? Maybe to show the person respect, maybe get a referral, maybe to close a sale, maybe to practice these things I learned in this podcast, right? Without reasons, you won't get the results. So reasons reap results. So going back to the reasons, the last reason I'll say it's how your nervous system is set up. And it's kind of interesting, certain senses work very closely together. Like, have you ever tasted a great piece of fruit? Like, right, not from that's been something that's sprayed and waxed in the supermarket for 6 months, but like right off the vine or farmer's market, right? Yeah, very sneaky. Have you ever tasted like a great tasting peach before? So like, we can't actually taste what a peach tastes like, You're actually smelling the peach, but your sense of smell and your sense of taste are so closely linked that your mind can't tell the difference. It can tell the difference when you're sick. If your nose is congested, what does food taste like?

Bland.

Bland, right? And so your sense of smell, just as your sense of smell and taste are closely linked in your nervous system, that your mind kind of melds the two, so is your sense of sight and your sense of touch. Like, it's interesting, I'll go to my son with my keys and say, look at my keys, look at my keys. And in order for him to look at it, he needs to reach out and touch it, because the sense of sight and touch are closely linked, like your sense of smell and your sense of taste. So when people use their finger while they read, they literally will say to me all the time, saying, I feel more in touch with my reading. In fact, if somebody loses their sense of sight, how do they read? They use Braille, right?

Mm-hmm.

Their sense of touch. And so using your finger while you read will boost your reading speed 25, 50% across the board, almost with zero practice. But because of that, it'll help you focus 'cause you're not gonna regress and backskip, like what we were talking about before, rereading words. And because you have better focus, you're gonna have better comprehension and retention of the information. It's just something anybody could do. You could probably save 20 minutes on every hour doing that. And that reading takes time, right? The average person has to read about 4 hours a day. You think about like your emails, your social media, your research, your book, whatever you're reading, media, newspapers, 4 hours a day. If you could just double your reading speed and save 2 hours a day, 2 hours a day over the course of a year, even 1 hour a day over the course of a year is 365 hours divided by a 40-hour work week. That's like 9 work weeks you get back, 2 months of productivity you get back on something ubiquitous like reading. And if you employ people like 4 hours a day, that means half their day is spent reading. That means half of someone's salary is being paid to read. That's why we do like all this training at Google, Facebook, Nike, you know, SpaceX, all this kind of training, because, you know, learning takes so much time. And if you shorten that learning curve, we can make people more, more focused, more productive.