Warren Buffett’s Best Kept Secret to Success: The Art of Reading, Remembering, and Retaining More Books
How fast do you read?
One of the obvious shortcuts to reading more is to read faster. That’s likely the first place a lot of us would look for a quick win in our reading routine.So how fast do you read?Staples (yes, the office supply chain) collected speed reading data as part of an advertising campaign for selling e-readers. The campaign also included a speed reading tool that is still available to try. Go ahead and take the test to see how fast you read.(My score was 337 words per minute. Yours?)The Staples speed reading test includes data on how other demographics stack up in words per minute. According to Staples, the average adult reads 300 words per minute.Is reading faster always the right solution to the goal of reading more? Not always. Comprehension still matters, and some reports say that speed reading or skimming leads to forgotten details and poor retention. Still, if you can bump up your words per minute marginally while still maintaining your reading comprehension, it can certainly pay dividends in your quest to read more.There’s another way to look at the question of “reading more,” too.
How much do you read?
There’s reading fast, and then there’s reading lots. A combination of the two is going to be the best way to supercharge your reading routine, but each is valuable on its own. In fact, for many people, it’s not about the time trial of going beginning-to-end with a book or a story but rather more about the story itself. Speed reading doesn’t really help when you’re reading for pleasure.In this sense, a desire to read more might simply mean having more time to read, and reading more content—books, magazines, articles, blog posts—in whole.Let’s start off with a reading baseline. How many books do you read a year?A 2012 study by the Pew Research Center found that adults read an average of 17 books each year.The key word here is “average.” There are huge extremes at either end, both those who read way more than 17 books per year and those who read way less—like zero. The same Pew Research study found 19 percent of Americans don’t read any books. A Huffington Post/YouGov poll from 2013 showed that number might be even higher: 28 percent of Americans haven’t read a book in the past year.Wanting to read more puts you in pretty elite company.
5 ways to read more books, blogs, and articles
1. Read for speed: Tim Ferriss’ guide to reading 300% fasterTim Ferriss, author of the 4-Hour Workweek and a handful of other bestsellers, is one of the leading voices in lifehacks, experiments, and getting things done. So it’s no wonder that he has a sp...
3 ways to remember what you read
1. Train your brain with impression, association, and repetitionA great place to start with book retention is with understanding some key ways our brain stores information. Here are three specific elements to consider:Let’s say you read Dale Carnegie’s How ...
Over to you
How many books do you read each year? What will be your goal for this year? What’s your best tip for reading more and remembering more? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.P.S. If you liked this post, you might also like The Two Brain Systems that Control Our Attention: The Science of Gaining Focus and 5 Unconventional Ways to Become a Better Writer (Hint: It’s About Being a Better Reader).Image credits: Patrick Gage via Compfight, eyetracking.me, OpenSpritz,
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