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I'm quite excited about learning how to read faster because I've always honestly been a very slow reader. I saw the people around me and 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 is how leaders are readers, and reading is an exercise for your mind. A lot of times people 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 read it so slowly. So let me dispel a couple of myths, and then I'll give you a technique to go through this.
First of all, reading is a skill. We just haven't upgraded that skill in some time, since we were six or seven years old. Now, the challenge with reading is that if people aren't good at it, they probably won't do it very often. In psychology there is something called the confidence-competence loop: the more competent you get at something, the more confident you are, and because you're more confident, you're going to do it more often, which makes you more skilled and confident. It's a positive loop. But with reading, most people don't read because it puts them to sleep and bores them.
Here are a couple of myths. First, lack of focus is a big challenge for people who read, because their mind wanders. I mentioned we have a lot of feedback from our students from every country, and if I tell people they should read faster, what do you think most people would say happens to their comprehension? They think it would go down. In actuality, when we test people, it's higher. The faster readers tend to have better comprehension, and I'll tell you why. Because they have better focus.
Think about this: your brain is an incredible supercomputer, but when we read, we feed the supercomputer one word at a time. I'm from New York, so I can't even talk that slowly, but 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. 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 slowly.
Let me say it another way. It's kind of like driving a car. If you're going slowly in your neighborhood, have you ever arrived and not even remembered the trip there? You're not really focused on driving, because if you're going slow, what can you be doing? Drinking your coffee, texting, which you shouldn't do because multitasking is really bad for you. You could be singing a song, thinking about the dry cleaning. You can do five different things when you're going slow. But if you're racing cars, say you're in F1, taking hairpin turns as fast as you can, are you thinking about the dry cleaning? Are you trying to text? No. What do you focus on? Just two things: what's in front of you and how you're driving. That's because the speed commands focus, and the focus gives you the comprehension. Same with reading. If you go too slowly, your mind is starving for more information, so it will 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. 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.
The third thing, besides lack of focus, is a big one called subvocalization. The big obstacles to effective reading are lack of skill, lack of focus, which we just addressed, since speed actually gives you focus, and then the third one, subvocalization. Have you ever noticed when you read that you hear an inner voice inside your head reading along with you? Hopefully it's your own voice and not somebody else's. That's called subvocalization. "Sub" is like a submarine, under; "vocal" means speech. It's your inner speech.
How does that relate to reading? Most people, when they read, are either saying the words out loud or inside their head, because that's how we're taught. The challenge becomes that you can only read as fast as you can speak. Your reading speed is limited to your talking speed, not your thinking speed. A lot of people could listen to this show at 1.5 or 2x, or to audiobooks, and understand it if they're trained to. They just can't talk that fast. The question becomes: do you have to say all the words in order to understand what the words mean? The truth is you don't. Just like the punctuation marks, the exclamation mark, the question mark, the semicolon, and the period, you don't say those things. They're symbols that have a meaning, and you don't have to pronounce them. It's like when you're driving and you see a stop sign. Nobody says the word "stop." You understand what it means. You don't say it to yourself. Ninety-five percent of the words in that book are what they call sight words, words you've seen thousands of times, like a stop sign, and you don't have to pronounce them to understand them.
How it got there is that when we were younger, five or six, learning how to read, the teacher said, "Read quietly to yourself," or "read silently to yourself," and that's where you took that external voice and internalized it. You said, for me to understand it, I have to hear it, if not out loud then inside my mind. So a big part of the training in the courses we do is teaching people how to reduce subvocalization, because most of the words in there, and there, you don't need to say, just like you don't say "New York City" to understand what New York City is. There are sight words, and that's the idea.
Now, how do you overcome some of these obstacles? The last obstacle is regression, back-skipping. A lot of us have a bad habit: have you found yourself reading something and rereading the line? A good amount of time is spent unconsciously rereading words, which doesn't help us understand better. It's just a bad habit. So how do you overcome that if you want to read this book faster? If you're watching this on YouTube, you can see a visual demonstration.
The first thing I'll do is test yourself. What I'd want everyone to do is put a mark in the margin where you left off, time yourself for 60 seconds, then put another mark in the margin after 60 seconds and count the number of lines. In order to manage it, you have to measure it. How do you know if it's going to work if you don't have a baseline? So you have a number: how many lines you read in a minute.
The second thing you want to do is pick up where you left off, but just underline the words. I don't mean actually underlining with a marker or highlighter, but just right above the text. If you're doing it on a screen, it could be your finger, or you're not touching the page or screen; you're just going right above it, left to right, not skipping anything. Traditional speed reading has you go right down the page, or make S or Z forms, but you miss big chunks. That's why people get the gist of what they read. A lot of my clients are medical doctors. You don't want your doctor to get the gist of what she reads. Or your attorney, just the gist of what she's reading. The goal is that you don't skip anything. You just underline the words, and if you do that the second time with a mark in the margin and count the number of lines, that number would be about 25 to 50 percent higher than the original number. This is what they call visual pacing. It could be a pen, a highlighter, or a mouse on a computer.
The reason why is that your eyes are attracted to motion. It's interesting, because we're now teaching my son to read, and he naturally uses his finger to help him focus. Later on, teachers will say, "Don't do that." But actually, using a finger will help you read faster and have better focus and comprehension. Second, everyone listening uses their 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 and uses their finger as a pacer, because we know it helps us focus. Third, our eyes are attracted to motion. If someone ran by you while you were watching this video, you wouldn't focus on either one of us; you'd focus on what moves. It's hardwired. It's like being a hunter-gatherer in a bush hunting lunch, like a rabbit or a carrot, whatever your diet is, and a bush next to you moves. You have to look at what moves, because it's survival: number one, that could be lunch, or number two, you could be lunch. So when your finger is going across the page, your attention is pulled through the information rather than pulled apart.
The last reason, and people need reasons to do something, is like remembering names. If you want to remember names better, you need a reason to remember someone's name and check in with it: why do I remember this person's name? Maybe to show respect, maybe to get a referral, maybe to close the sale, maybe to practice what I learned on this podcast. Without reasons you won't get results. Reasons reap results.
The last reason I'll mention is how your nervous system is set up, which is kind of interesting. Certain senses work very closely together. Have you ever tasted a great piece of fruit, not something sprayed and waxed in the supermarket for six months, but right off the vine or from the farmers market? Have you ever tasted a great-tasting peach? 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 then? Bland. So smell and taste are closely linked in your nervous system, and your mind melds the two. Likewise, your sense of sight and your sense of touch are closely linked. It's interesting. I'll go to my son with my keys and say, "Look at my keys," and in order for him to look at them, he needs to reach out and touch them. Sight and touch are closely linked, just as smell and taste are.
So when people use their finger while they read, they literally tell me all the time that they feel more in touch with their reading. In fact, if somebody loses their sense of sight, how do they read? They use Braille, their sense of touch. Using your finger while you read will boost your reading speed by 20 to 50 percent across the board, almost with zero practice. Because it helps you focus, you're not going to regress and back-skip, rereading words, and because you have better focus, you'll have better comprehension and retention of the information. Anybody could do this. You could probably save 20 minutes every hour doing that.
Reading takes time. The average person has to read about four hours a day: emails, social media, research, your book, whatever you're reading, media, newspapers, four hours a day. If you just double your reading speed and save two hours a day, over the course of a year, even one hour a day over a year is 365 hours. Divided by a 40-hour work week, that's about nine work weeks, which gives you back two months of productivity on something as big as reading. If you employ people who read four hours a day, half their day is spent reading, which means half of someone's salary is being paid to read. That's why we do this training at Google, Facebook, Nike, SpaceX, and others, because learning takes so much time, and if you shorten that learning curve, we can make people more focused and more productive.