Jim Kwik breaks down a three-step method to read a book weekly: schedule daily reading and underline as you go, discuss what you read with someone else to lock it in, and take keyword notes to organize ideas. Twenty minutes a day works, or forty-five if you want to move faster.
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The average person has to read about four hours a day. Emails and websites and blogs and all this information. You could double your reading speed, save two hours a day or even one hour a day. We equated one hour a day equals nine 40 hour work weeks over the course of a year, two months of productivity. So that's the gift you can give to yourself, to your family, to your body, the things that really, really matter. There's three keys to boosting your comprehension. I'm going to give you three quick tips. And this is like, this is fundamental and these are very foundational to it. And you could say they're common sense, but they're not common practice. And so remember three Rs. There's three Rs for reading comprehension, okay? The first R is you have to read, okay? So that's a no brainer. You can't comprehend something unless you actually read it first. The thing with the reading though, because we know readers are leaders. The key though is to use your left hand, is to underline the words and then also schedule it. Because if you don't schedule it, most people want to meditate, they want to journal, but if they don't put in their calendar, it doesn't get done. And when I write things down in my calendar, I treat it as time with a big client or time with an investor or time something you would never cancel with anybody, right? So you schedule it in your reading. The second R when it comes to comprehension is you want to relate. You want to relate. And here's really what it comes down to. I believe that questions are the answer. What I'm recommending people is people read exactly as Vishen does. 20 minutes a day. You read for 20 minutes. But when you're done, I'm gonna ask everybody who's watching this to step up and challenge yourself to do this book a week. Challenge, right? You read for 20 minutes a day, you know, every single. And then really you could finish a book in a week or two. 20 minutes a day. Even at normal reading speed, 45 minutes a day on average will get you through one book a week, which is amazing. So you read. And then the second thing is you get a partner and you relate and you talk about your book. So you're with somebody like, yeah, I can't wait to go out this Friday. Real quick. I'm practicing my reading. Let me tell you about this book I'm reading. And for two or three minutes you talk about what you just read. Because something magical happens when you consume information. But you don't just let it stay here, but you teach it to somebody else. You reflect on it, you organize it. Because in order for you to talk about what you just read, you, you're not using the author's word for word verbatim, right language. What you're doing is you're personalizing it using your own words. And in order to be able to express it out, something happens between when the information goes through your eyes, processed by your mind to be able to put out in your mouth. And that's where you understand information. The third R for comprehension is writing. And specifically what I do is I map this out for people and I take notes. Because the challenge is if you take notes and you have 30 pages of notes, something on page 27 could be more important than what's on page number one. But on one page view, using just keywords, you can see how everything is nested into nested and nested. So in order to be able to serve you as a better reader, because you're spending so much time reading, use the three Rs and it'll boost your comprehension. You'll get the speed and you'll get the smarts.
