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.