3 Strategies To Read And Learn Faster | The Mindset Mentor Podcast

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob. Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so that you never miss another podcast episode. And if you love this podcast, you want some extra mindset tips and tricks, I can email them to you every single Monday. If you go to mondayemail.com it is absolutely free. And I send out tips and tricks every single Monday on how to improve your mindset. So, once again, Monday email.com and I'll start sending them straight to your inbox. Today, I'm gonna give you three different strategies to help you learn and read faster. And I'm gonna teach you strategies that I have used for reading faster, but also making sure that the information that I do read and do learn, I actually get better at retaining. I'll tell you this. I'll be honest with you. I hate reading, but I love learning. And so I think this is important. And this episode came about. I've shared this before in the past, a little bit about this in the past, but for some reason, so many people still don't know that this exists. And the other day I was reading and one of my friends was like, what the hell are you doing? And I was like, what do you mean? I was like, I'm reading. And they're like, all right, well, tell me about this, because this looks completely different than what I've seen. It wasn't like I was reading upside down or anything like that. But I have a way of reading so that I can learn faster and I can get more information in my head. And so the first thing I recommend is this, is to have a Kindle. Now. You can go out and buy a Kindle. You can use an iPad, you can use your iPhone. You can use all of those things and download the Kindle app. And when you buy something on Amazon. Now, let me pause real quick. Let me say this. Every time I give this example, most people are like, well, I like physical books. Yeah, I like physical books more, too. But I learned this when I actually went and traveled for six months. I couldn't bring a bunch of books to me, so I had to use my iPad that I had at the time. And I started getting used to using Kindle. And this, these tips I'm going to give you are going to help you out a ton. And so you have Kindle. And when you buy a book on Amazon, I would say probably 85 to 90% of the time, right under the button that says Buy now, there's a little checkbox. And it will say, add audible narration for like $7. Whatever it is. What's kind of crazy about it, when you add audible narration, you automatically get the audiobook. And a lot of times, I don't know why it is this way. The audiobook will be like $30, but the Kindle with audible narration ends up being like 20 bucks. So it ends up being cheaper for you to actually get the Kindle version and the audiobook version, which is called Audible Narration. And for a lot of these books, most of them, they have something called Whisper Sync. And Whisper Sync is this. And this is why I like using my iPads. Because my iPad has a iPad, actual speakers on it, and a lot of Kindles do not. What's cool about it is that you download onto your Kindle and then what you do is you actually download the audiobook onto the Kindle app as well. And when you push play to the audiobook inside of the Kindle app, it will actually read it out loud to you in the words that it is on. It will actually highlight. So you know exactly where you are. You know exactly where you are in the book. So if you happen to take your eyes away and you happen to notice, oh my gosh, I just wasn't paying attention for a few minutes, you literally can find out exactly where you are. Cause all you have to do is look down. And so what it'll do is it'll read the audiobook out loud to you while highlighting every single word as you go through. What I do is I will take it and I'll turn it on to 2 to 3x speed. So I'm learning 2 to 3 times faster. I'm reading through this 2 to 3 times faster. And it's a fact that humans can hear four times faster than they can read. And so if you can hear somebody say something to you faster, you're actually processing it quicker than if you actually just read the book on its own. And so you can start to plow through books this way. You also retain the information better. Here's the reason why. Because when you're reading, you're just looking, you're using your sight, which is just one of your five senses, to actually read that. But when you're using this, which is the Kindle book, you're reading it with your eyes, and you're also hearing somebody say it. You're using two of your senses, which is sight and sound, using two different parts of your brain to actually retain this information. And if you really want to like add extra learning on top of it. If you're walking around, it actually brings in the sense of feeling. And so they found that if you walk around and read, just pace back and forth on. I don't do this. But you can, if you'd like to, you can pace back and forth, and it actually helps you retain the information even better. So why is this good? Number one, you get to hear it. You get to see it. Number two, what's cool about it as well is it's cheaper a lot of times. Number three, you can also highlight different parts of the book. So for me, I'm the type of person where I sit down and read a book, I highlight it, I make notes, I write words, all of this stuff. You can go into a book and Kindle in the exact same way. I swear I should be sponsored by Kindle because I've told this so many times to so many people. I should be able to get some sort of, like, commission back for how many times I've pushed people over to doing this. But what's cool is on Kindle, you can highlight stuff. You can put notes, like, actually type notes in there as well. And then here's the cool thing about it. If I'm sitting in, like, that doctor's office or like the other day, I was over and I was getting my tires changed in my truck. I had to get 14 tires. Took like an hour and a half, right? Instead of sitting down and being on Instagram the entire time, what I did was I went back through all of these past books. I went actually through three different books that I had read in the past. And what I did was, instead of reading the entire book, all I did was read the highlighted sections. So I went back and there were these books, like, very complex books that I had read from, like, Alan Watts in the past. And if you've ever read an Alan Watts book, you have to read every page, like, three times. And so there's this one book that I had read. I think it was called the Wisdom of Insecurity, or something around Insecurity. I think it's the Wisdom of Insecurity is actually what it is. Incredible book. Really quite difficult to read and get all of it into your brain. But I went back the other day when I was getting my tires change and reread all of the highlights from that book, the parts that stood out to me the most. Imagine how much more you would learn if instead of sitting down and scrolling on Instagram for 30 minutes, is you sat down on your phone and you were able to actually look through all the heights of the book. What's cool about it is this. Because of the fact that it's on Kindle, all of my Kindles are all completely synced together. And so my iPad, if I go in and I highlight something in my iPad and then I go in my phone, it's going to be highlighted in my phone as well. And so no matter what platform I'm using, I'm able to carry it with me, which is the thing that I like about it. So do I love the physical copy of a book? I do. Do I love writing on a page and highlighting a page? I do. But what I do love is being able to learn this information and take it with me at my fingertips everywhere I go. And it's cool because I remember there was one time I was telling my friend about this, actually the same book, this wisdom insecurity book. And he's like, well, what did you get from it? I was like, well, let me just go ahead and pull it up. And I pulled it up my phone and I went through it and I actually saw it. The other thing that I like about using this technique as well is that I'll read in the morning sometimes and I'll be using the whisper sync and all that, and I'll be really into a book. But I've got a life I've gotta live. I've got things I gotta do. So then I'll go and I'll take a shower. And what's cool is because it's the audiobook, I can literally push play. And I can be reading the book in the morning. I could be listening to the audiobook while I'm in the shower. As I'm driving to go to the office, I can listen to the audiobook there. And so I can retain so much information, I can crank through books so much faster. Cause I can read them and. And then when I'm driving or when I'm in the shower or when I'm cooking or something like that, I can actually listen to the audiobooks as well. And so a physical copy of a book, yeah, sure, it's great. But if you want to actually start getting a lot more information into your brain, I just recommend that you use Kindle and use audible narration with it as well. It's just a little bit, you know, you just click that extra thing. It's like usually $7.49 extra. And it allows you to have the entire Kindle book, download it onto your phone, download it onto Your iPad, and then the entire audible narration. So the audiobook as well. I promise you use this technique, you will get through books so much faster than if you just sit down, you know, turn the light on and sit down on your couch and read a book. You'll get through so many more books so much faster. Okay, so that's the first time I'm give you do it. Just try it. Try it for one book and just let me know your thoughts. Okay, that's tip number one. Tip number two is to use the Pomodoro technique. That is 25 minutes on, five minutes off. There's actual actually like a whole lot of studies around the pomodoro technique and how well this works. It's actually going to be in my book and I'm going to explain everything that's in there as well. But to give you a quick summarization of the pomodoro technique and why it works so well, you do 25 minutes of reading or learning something and you take five minutes off, where you do absolutely nothing. Here's the reason why it's so magical to use a pomodoro technique. So it's 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off. 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off. 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off. And after three sessions, which is an hour and a half total, you take about 20 minutes off. And then you can go back into doing more pomodoro techniques. When you focus on one thing and one thing only, and you turn off all the notification notifications on your phone, you turn off all of the things, you just go, I'm going to do this one thing and one thing only. And you take five minutes off. Those five minutes off. Don't look at your phone, don't go do something else either. Close your eyes and just take a few deep breaths and just meditate for five minutes or go on a walk or go outside. And this allow your eyes, your peripheral vision just to come in. And so instead of being focused, focus, focus, and you're just looking down at your book all the time after those 25 minutes, you end up going outside and you allow your eyes to dilate. You allow yourself to see your peripheral vision. Here's the reason why Andrew Huberman calls it non sleep deep rest. So non sleep deep rest. So you're not sleeping, but you're putting your brain into like a recharge mode. When you fall asleep, that's when your brain takes all of the information that you learned from the day and stores it into your brain and a Lot of times it goes through something called your hippocampus, and it goes and actually circulates that information over 60 times faster than your brain did. So you can learn one thing, and then your brain's over and over and over and over and over again 60 times faster, replaying that to start to program it into your brain. When you do non sleep deep rest, your brain in these five minutes off will take the information that you just learned in those 25 minutes, and it will actually replay it about 20 to 30 times faster. And so in those 25 minutes you're learning in those of the pomodoro technique, there's 25 minutes you're learning those five minutes off of doing nothing, closing your eyes, breathing, just going for a walk, or just sitting outside and just allowing yourself just to exist for five minutes, your brain is actually starting to store that information into your brain. So it's kind of like when you have your phone, your phone has an update, you download the update, and then you've got to install the update right when you're reading the book, you are downloading all of the information. And then when you're resting for those five minutes, you are installing the information into your brain. And so use the pomodoro technique to allow yourself to be able to start to learn faster. And then the third thing is to take the information that you learn and actually teach it to somebody. And so teaching makes your brain go from learning to implementing. And new synaptic connections will be made in your brain by doing it. And if there's nobody around, like, what I always do is I'll usually read in the morning. I'll go up to Lauren and I'll be like, oh, this is what I learned today. And I will then explain it to her. This has become like a routine. She knows it's gonna happen. I'll explain it to her, and she will listen to me explain. And she's like, oh, that's really cool. That's awesome. But I know because when I'm learning, that's a passive way of learning. When I'm teaching, that has now become active learning. And you are 10 times more likely to remember something when you actively learn it versus passively learn it. And so that's why they always say the best way to learn something is to teach it is because you take passive learning and make it active learning. If there's nobody around you, like, you live by yourself and you're reading this book, best thing to do, take a pen and paper and write down what you learned and teach it out loud as if there was somebody there. And so if you really want to install the information into your brain, learn, you know, you do an hour and a half of learning or whatever it is. 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off. 25 minutes on, 5 minutes OFF. 25 minutes on, 5 minutes Off. That's one whole session, 90 minutes of Pomodoro Technique. You take a pen and paper and you actually start to journal out. Whether you want to do in pictures, whether you want to write sentences, whether you want to write bullet points, you write it down and you actually start to teach it as if there was somebody there with you. You're taking that passive learning and you're making it active learning. And that's how you actually start to learn these things and install them in, install the programs into your hardware of your brain much faster. Now some of you are sitting out there and you're like, well, Rob, I'm poor though. Like, I can't just go out and just keep buying books all the time. Go to the library. Go to the library and get a physical copy. If that's the case, you can do that or you can go. There's apps like overdrive where you can download audiobooks for free from your local library. And so like, if your local library happens to have how to win friends and influence people on audiobook, you can actually rent that from them for free for however long you need to rent it for. And you can listen to. And this isn't the only one, there's overdrive and there's a couple other ones. I can't remember the names of them. Where you can download audiobooks like quote unquote, rent them for free, cost nothing. Do you want to know another thing you could do to also learn faster? Almost every time I find a book that I want to read, I go into YouTube, I type that person's name in and, and I type the title of the book. Almost always the audiobook will come up for free. You can listen to the audiobook a lot of times absolutely free on YouTube. Now you can't use the Kindle with that and all that stuff, but you can usually find the audiobooks for free on YouTube. And a lot of times those people who write these entire books, they'll do like an hour long talk for Stanford or something like that. Like Stanford will hire them to come in and actually teach the book for an hour, an hour and a half to their students. And you can take that because it's YouTube. You can put on 2x speed and you could take an hour long lecture that teaches all of the core parts of somebody's book. You can put it on 2x speed and you could take an hour long speech and learn it in 30 minutes. And you can then write down all of the notes as the person's talking and when they're done, you then reteach that. So there's really no excuse, and if you're out there to not get knowledge, there's no excuse to not be reading. There's no excuse to not be consuming content all of the time. Anything that you, I mean, it's amazing that we live in this moment because anything you want to learn is currently at your fingertips. Like it's literally in your pocket. You can learn anything that you want to learn at any moment in time. And so there's no reason not to learn. There's no reason not to be way more intelligent a year from today than you are right now. And it's like that quote, a man who does not read has no advantage over a man who cannot read. So when you look at it, there was a statistic I saw the other day that said 80% of American families, households did not buy a book last year. 80% of American households did not buy a book last year. There's no reason why they can't go and get books. There's no reason why they can't listen to audio books. There's, there's no reason. We all have the time to do it. So if you want to continue to keep getting better, better and better and better and better, just keep learning. I remember one of my mentors, he was talking about the best piece of advice that he ever got from somebody that was his mentor. And his mentor pulled him aside and they were in a restaurant and he said, look at all these people in this restaurant right here. He goes, because my mentor, as his mentor, he goes, what's the best tip you give me? He goes, look at all these people right here in this restaurant. He goes, all of these people right here, they're probably not reading. He goes, if you just focus on reading and getting more knowledge and getting more knowledge and getting more knowledge, and you focus on that for the next five years, the next 10 years, you will be light years ahead of all of these people and the knowledge that they have. So right now, especially with all these tips, there's no reason why you can't go out there and learn as much as you possibly can. Make knowledge. And in downloading and installing this new knowledge into yourself, a part of your daily habit and you fast forward a few years from now, there's no one that's going to be able to compete with you. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please go ahead and share it on your Instagram stories and tag me Obdial Junior R O B D I A L J R. I've been resharing a lot of these ones that have been. I've been tagged in these stories. So wherever you are, if you're on a run, you know, you could just go ahead and screenshot if you want to. Or if you wanted to, you could also go ahead and make a quick video and talk about what you learned in it. I've been resharing a lot of them, so I'd love to see your faces and what you learned from them. So if you would do that, once again, it is Rob Dial JR R O B D I A L J R and I'm going to leave you the same way leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make someone else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.