[Tim Ferriss] How to Speed Read

Greetings, folks. Tim Ferriss here, author of four hour workweek, tools of titans, etcetera. I think a lot about ingesting information and sounds so sexy, doesn't it? How do you speed up the consumption of, say, text if you want to read faster? How do you do that without succumbing to some pseudoscience nonsense about speed reading? There's a lot of garbage out there. But how can you improve your, your ability to absorb written information without sacrificing comprehension? There are some very straightforward ways to do it. I'm going to show you that right now, and I will use these two books to demonstrate. So these are fiction and nonfiction, respectively. How to get filthy rich in Rising Asia, one of my favorite recent fiction books, which I generally don't try to read super quickly, but these books are the same size. So I'll show you then.

Vagabonding, which is one of my faves, has been since 2004. All right, so let's take, just for the sake of simplicity, and I would recommend you do the same, a book that has fairly standardized formatting. In other words, there aren't a lot of bullet lists, there aren't a lot of graphs. It's mostly text. And since we can only manage what we can measure, step number one is figuring out roughly how many words per page are on this particular, say, spread. Right? And then throughout the book. So you're going to go through and you're going to count, say, on a page like this, the number of words in ten lines. Okay? So you come up with total, divide it by ten.

That's your average number of words per line. And then you can see here most books have a consistent number of lines per page. You multiply that, let's just say it's 30. Okay? You have an average of ten words per line. That's 300 words per page. Great. Easy enough. Alright.

What we want to do next is establish your baseline. So you're going to read for 1 minute. You're going to be focusing on reading at your normal speed. Of course, now you have an experimental or observer effect, so it might be slightly off, but that's all right. You're going to read for 1 minute, and then you're going to do the math, multiply it out and figure out how many words, roughly have I read? That is, your words per minute, rate your wpm, and what we do should help double or triple that without too much trouble. All right, now I'll do a demo before we go into how to mess with your book. If you look at say my nose. All right.

In this video, can you still see my finger? Of course you can. Can you still see my finger over here? Yes, you can. That is your peripheral vision, even if your fixation point, if your primary point of focus is right here. When we read, most of us, when we are taught to read, we read word by word. So we go from the furthermost left word to the furthermost right word, and so on. Seems logical. The problem with that is, is you're not using any of this space or the margins. And the way that you then remedy that is by drawing lines on some pages.

And I would suggest you indent one word from either side. Okay? And so what that might look like is something like this. So now you have lines going down either side of the page, and instead of starting all the way to the left, you're going to start at this line, and then you're going to end at that line. So much like a, say, typewriter with a return carriage going down, you're now going to be zigzagging, just as you would normally. But the parameters or the boundaries have been moved in by a word, you will not have any trouble reading, and you should still have full comprehension. And if you do this for, say, five to ten pages, then if you're not having any trouble whatsoever, you can indent by another word, and you can either use lines or you can spitball it, you can estimate it. And by doing this alone, just that, you can train yourself to get to the point where effectively, you are very much focusing on the middle third of the page, and you're just dotting down the page left to right. And that, in and of itself, could easily double your reading speed without sacrificing comprehension.

The next observation, just mechanically, that can be very helpful, is that the eye doesn't track in a clean, smooth line when you are, say, glancing from left to right. So if you want to do a test, close one eye, you put a finger on that eye and then slowly track across the wall on the opposite side. And what you'll notice is that the eye jumps. And these are, I believe I've never actually heard this said. I've only read it a million times. Cicadic movements. The eye will jump from fixation point to fixation point. And you can see this with retina scanning and eye tracking, which I've seen a fair amount of just in psychological studies.

I've been an experimenter and a subject, both at Princeton, where I did stuff, actually, in the lab of Danny Kahneman, who wrote thinking fast, and slow. Incredible, incredible scientist. But I was just clicking space bars, looking at stuff on the screen, and then it UCSF and other places. How do we utilize that? What that means is when you're looking at a given page, your eye isn't moving smoothly across each line. It's fixation, fixation, fixation. So the less that we can regress, meaning bounce back or bounce up, you want to stay on that reliable forward path. And the fewer fixation points we have, it's just a math problem. The less time we're going to spend reading each page.

So what does this mean? This means that thus far we've just been looking at the page and reading. What we're going to do now is use a pacer so you could use your finger. And now you are actually going to track with your finger trace underneath the line, like so. And try to think of two fixation points per line for your eye. But this will keep you from bouncing up to previously read material. We've all had the experience of being really sleepy, say, and feeling like you've read the same two lines five or six times. This is partially because your eyes are tired and you end up back skipping.

And jumping all over the place.

So then you use your marker, your pacer, to move down the page. And the last test I would have you run or experiment prior to remeasurement. So let's say you do that for ten minutes, and so you've moved in the boundaries, the edges of the page, so to speak, where you stop and go to the next line, and then you're minimizing the number of fixations, and you're preventing back skipping by using Pasteur. The next thing you're going to do is say for five minutes is to read slightly faster than your comprehension allows. So you want to get to the point where you're losing maybe 10%. And the effect that we're looking for is resetting your comfort set point in reading at full comprehension. In other words, if you're used to always driving at 30 miles an hour, and then you get to the point where you're on a highway, say, I was just in Texas and it was speed limit, 80 miles an hour. Oh, my God, does that feel fast? And suddenly you feel like you're operating at very high speed.

You then dial back. When you go into, say, a 55 zone, it feels like 30. You've adapted to the faster speed. So for five minutes, just practice reading with slight comprehension loss, a little bit faster than is comfortable. And then what I want you to do is retest your word per minute rate. So now you're going to use the bumping in from either side. You're going to use the pacer, and I want you to make sure that you have full comprehension. And in doing that, I would wager that the vast majority of you, probably close to 100%, if you followed all these instructions, will have at least improved your reading speed by 50%.

Some of you will double, triple, quadruple your reading speed without sacrificing comprehension. No voodoo, no magic involved. It's just understanding the mechanics of the eye a little bit about optical perception and then recognizing how you can optimize that for the printed page. And that's it. So congratulations. You've probably double or tripled your reading speed. And for poetry, for fiction, you can always read slower. But now that you have a Ferrari instead of a Yugo, you can choose from a wider range of speeds.

So there you have it. Have fun reading. I recommend both how to get filthy rich in rising Asia and vagabonding, among many, many others. There's a world out there to explore, so I'll let you get to it.

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