Speed Reading: the Ultimate Guide on Reading FASTER and BETTER | Jim Kwik

Welcome back, Kwik Student. Today's lesson is the basics of speed reading. Who does not want to be able to read more in less time? And so that's what we're gonna talk about. Now, how much reading do you have? Textbooks, how many books do you have on your shelf you haven't read yet? You're being buried in information in school. The challenge is how you're trying to read that information Is back to when you were like 7 years old. Because here's the thing, are you born with the ability to read? No, of course not. You weren't born and then just go out to the waiting room and start reading magazines, right? It's a skill, and like all skills, it can be improved. With what? With training. Exactly what you're doing right now. But when's the last time you took a class called reading? Not like a college literature class. How old were you last time you took a class entitled reading? Probably 6, 7 years old. So is it fair to say you're still reading like you did when you first learned it? Absolutely yes. And that's why you feel stressed, a sense of information overload, that the amount of information is doubling at dizzying speed, but how you read it is the same. And that growing gap creates that stress. It actually has negative side effects to you and your schoolwork and in your life. Higher blood pressure, a compression of fun leisure time, more sleeplessness. We're drowning information, but we're starving for the techniques to be able to absorb and read it all. So that's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna give you a preview in this lesson of our full course. Many of you know that we have a full 21 days, like This program, 21 Days to Triple Your Reading Speed, but not just your reading speed, your focus, your comprehension, your retention, and also your overall enjoyment. Because when you could do something well, you enjoy it more, right? So here I'm gonna give you one lesson of those 21 days. So if you want further information, you'd like to join that program, Go to kwikreading.com. K-W-I-K reading dot com. So let's get into it. What I want you to do right now is to grab a book. I want you to grab a book because I'm going to make this interactive. Pause this video and grab a book. The kind of book ideally— pick a book that's a little bit light reading because I'm going to teach you a brand new technique to help you boost your reading speed 25%. 25%. You may even boost it up to 50%. But in order to practice, get the easiest reading material you can just to start out, 'cause I'm gonna teach you a brand new technique, and I don't wanna throw you into the ocean to learn how to swim. I wanna take you first in the low, shallow waters. So find a book, pause it, and then come back. Great. Now that you have your book, What we're gonna do is a quick reading assessment because I'm gonna show you a technique that's gonna boost your reading speed, but how do you know it's gonna work unless you test it? So I wanna find out right now, we're gonna find out what we call your base rate, your base reading rate, your current reading rate. And how we're gonna do it is I want you to take your book and I want you to start wherever you are in this book If it's in the beginning, it's in the beginning. But if it's in the— somewhere in between the beginning and the end, take a little marker or a pen, a pencil, put a little mark in the margin so you know where you're starting. And I'm gonna time you to read for 2 minutes. 2 full minutes. And I want you to read how you would normally read for comprehension. Don't read any faster or slower than for full comprehension. Do you get it? So I'm gonna give you in a moment a 2-minute timer. I want you to get right now, open the book, Start wherever you're gonna start, put a little mark in the margin, and I want you to begin reading for full comprehension, how you normally read. Begin. Okay, and stop. Very good. What I want you to do right now is take that same pen and put a little mark in the margin where you finished. And your assignment right now is to count the number of lines you just read. How many lines did you just read in that 2 minutes? Now, I want you to approximate, so if there's only 2 words in that line, it does not count as a line. If you see 2 half lines, you could put them together and count them as one. Take a moment, pause this video, and count the number of lines you just read. Okay, welcome back. Now that you have this number, I want you to take this number in your notebook— you're writing it down— and I want you to divide this number by 2. Divide it by 2 because I had you read for 2 minutes. Count the number of lines, divide by 2 because I want to know how many lines did you read in 1 minute. Divide it by 2 now. You could round up, no problem. You don't need to pause this. We will do a session maybe on quick math also as well. You have a number now. That's the number of lines per minute you read. Now here's the thing. We measure reading speed the same as typing speed, in words per minute. So how do you determine your words per minute? Begin by counting the number of words in the average line. So as you're looking at your book right now, the book that you're currently reading, count the number of words in one line or average them out between 2 or 3 lines. And what you may find, most books, it's about 10 words per line. And when you know the average words per line, I want you to multiply that by your lines per minute. You start out by reading 50 lines in 2 minutes. You divide it by 2 to find out how many lines you read in 1 minute. That's 25 lines per minute. And then if you have approximately 10 words per line, then you're going to multiply those lines by 10 and you're going to get 250 words per minute, which also happens to be the average reading speed. The average reading speed tends to be about 200-250 words per minute. So take a moment and do that now. Okay, so now you have your words per minute. Now these words per minute, they fluctuate. If you're doing this with a friend of yours, you might see that the numbers are a little bit different, and that depends. It depends on how awake you are. It depends on what you're each reading. Somebody could be reading something more technical. It depends on your background information on that reading also as well. It depends on so many different factors— how distracted you are and how focused you are. But this gives you a baseline idea of where you are in terms of reading speed. Now let's say it's 200, 250, 300 words per minute. When we take students In our reading program, we take them from 200 or 300 words per minute and on average triple your reading speed with better focus, comprehension, and retention. Little by little, we do each day, 10, 15% every day, amasses to huge growth over the course of 3 weeks, 21 days. So let me give you an idea of how to do this. What I'm going to do is I'm going to share with you a few obstacles to effective reading. All right, we already talked about one of them: lack of education. You need to be trained because last time you took a reading class, you were in elementary school. So consider this like a little intro class. Number two: lack of focus. What keeps you from being what I call a quick reader—somebody who could quickly read, quickly comprehend, quickly recall, quickly focus, enjoy what you're reading—is lack of focus. Now there's a lie that you've been told, or a lie that you think, that if you read faster, if I. Ask you to read faster, what do you think will happen to your understanding, your comprehension? You feel like it would go down, right? Now, in our Kwik Reading Program that I'm telling you about right now, we have students in there from over 180 countries. So we have a lot of feedback and we know what works. And we find that the faster readers don't have less comprehension. For the most part, they actually have better comprehension. Why? Because they have better focus. Now I want that to sink in. Your brain is this incredible supercomputer, but most people when they read, they feed this supercomputer one word at a time. Metaphorically, you're starving your mind, and if you don't give your brain the stimulus it needs, it'll seek entertainment Elsewhere in the form of distraction, in the form of mind wandering. Does that make sense? It's kind of like driving a car real slow. If you're going slow in your neighborhood, are you really focused on the act of driving? No. What are you focused on? You're drinking your coffee, you're texting your friend, you're talking to your friends about the party that's going on. You're doing all these different things. You'd be doing 5 different things when you're going slow. But let's say you're racing cars on a track, right, well supervised, and you're licensed to do that. You're racing cars and you're taking hairpin turns. Does that person have more or less focus? A little bit or a lot? A lot more focus. They're focused on what? The act of driving and what's in front of them and what's coming up. That's a good reader. A good reader is focused on the act of reading on what's in front of them and what's coming up because the speed allows that. Now, I'm gonna give you a 3rd obstacle to effective reading. This is a big one. It's regression. Regression is backskipping. Have you ever noticed when you're reading something, you go back and reread words mostly by accident? You ever notice you'll reread a line unconsciously? So up to 25 or more percent of our time can be spent with a bad habit of rereading words. It's just a poor habit. A lot, as you've seen with this program, a lot of the accelerated learning is actually unlearning poor habits that keep you stuck. Habits of thought, habits of daily routine, habits of rote memory. We're trying to discard and unlearn those bad habits and replace them with upgraded quick-start habits. All right? So regression is a big obstacle. And really, you know what the biggest obstacle is? Is subvocalization. This is the invisible one that holds you back the most. And it is by far the biggest obstacle to effective reading. What is subvocalization? Have you ever noticed when you're reading something inside your head, you hear a voice reading along with you? Hopefully it's your own voice. It's not like somebody else's voice inside your head. Why is it a challenge? If you have to say all the words in order to understand them, either out loud or inside your mind, 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. And my question for you is this: Do you have to say all these words in order to understand what they mean? Even most of the words I'm saying to you—the and there—because they're filler words, right? Words like New York City—you don't have to pronounce New York City. Take the time to understand what New York City. Is the best trained readers read by sight, not by sound, because 90-95% of the words you read in your textbooks or in your journals, in your school material, most of those words are words you've seen thousands of times, and you don't have to pronounce them any more than you have to pronounce a punctuation mark. You don't read something and say period or question mark. You don't do that any more than when you're driving, you see signs and say stop. You don't say it, but you understand what it means. That's what most words are to you. So you learned a bad habit by pronouncing those words, and I can't fix subvocalization or reduce it in this session. I could help you with regression. In order to be able to reduce the subvocalization and claim your, your quick reading status where you could read 2 or 3 times faster, because you could certainly understand that fast. In fact, Here's a perfect example. How many people listen to a podcast or an audiobook and they put it at higher speeds? You can understand that fast, you just can't speak that fast. So if you want more information about how to take your reading to the next level, go to kwikreading.com and you could join. It's very similar to this program, but there's zero overlap. It's 100% focused on rapid reading And not just speed reading, smart reading for greater focus, comprehension, and understanding. But here's your quick tip on how to get over regression and that needless backskipping and rereading words. I want you to use a visual pointer. Use a visual pacer to help you to focus, meaning use your finger while you read. What does that mean? It means this: your eyes are attracted to motion. And it's a survival skill that if you're a hunter-gatherer in a bush and you're hunting lunch, maybe it's a rabbit, maybe it's a carrot, whatever your diet is. If the bush next to you moves, you have to look at what moves. It's a survival skill because number one, it could be lunch, or number two, you could be lunch. So either way, you have to look at what moves. So when you're underlining the words while you read, your eyes are pulled through the information as opposed to your attention being pulled apart. Does that make sense? I'm not talking about traditional speed reading. Traditional speed reading is taking your finger and going down the page or making fancy S or Z formations, but you miss big gaps, and that's why it's more scanning and skipping words and skimming than it is really reading. That's why traditional speed reading will yield the results of, oh, I just got the gist of what I read. But our students are top students. They're future business leaders. They are future scientists. You don't want your doctor just to get the gist of what she's reading, right? So you need to read for comprehension and retention. But by using your finger and not skipping any words, you'll boost your reading speed 25%, if not 50%. Let me give you an example right now. I want you to pick up where you left off, and I just want you to begin underlining the words. And I'm gonna have you read for the same 2 minutes as you did before. Now remember, you've never done this before. I just want you to underline the words, and your eyes are just following your finger. You underline the words. You've never even done that before, but you're likely to get a boost in your reading speed practicing it for zero amount of time. All right, so without any practice, let's jump into it. If you want to take practice before, Just pick up where you left off. You could pause it at your own accord and just underline words and get the feel for it. But when you're ready, I want you to pick up where you left off. I'm gonna put another timer on the screen for another 2 minutes, just like we did before. The only difference, read using your finger. Are you ready? Begin. Begin. Welcome back, Kwik student. How was it the second time? How was it the second time? Still, it felt a little weird, right? Because it's like tying your shoes, learning how to type, learning how to drive. It feels a little bit different at first because you're pushing yourself. But after a little while of practice, it becomes second nature, and I'm willing to bet you did better than you thought. Was there a boost in speed? Did you feel like you had a little bit more focus? Imagine practicing that a little bit more each day, and that's your homework assignment. I want you to practice each day. In fact, share in the comments your before and after of using the finger. Now, I'd prefer you actually, now that you're used to it after trying it for a couple minutes, it feels a little weird and that's okay. And if you did it right, it should feel uncomfortable because who's good at something the very first time they try it? But that's why I had you practicing the juggling and the different things to get used to doing something that's different. All right, pushing you out of your comfort zone. But just underline the words and notice if there was a boost in focus, speed, and if you had better focus, you probably had better comprehension as well. So again, leave in the comments your before and after without the finger and then with your finger in terms of speed. Count the number of lines, divide by 2. Multiply by 10 if there are 10 words per line. And your homework assignment: practice using your finger while you read. While you'll never get to double or triple your reading speed, likely because that's subvocalization, getting rid of the regression and the backskipping could help you claim back your 25, almost 50% of time. Remember this: leaders are readers. Leaders are readers. I want to thank you for going through this lesson with me. I'll see you in the next one.