Quote: “Not All Readers are Leaders, but All Leaders are Readers” – Harry Truman
If you study top millionaires and billionaires from Larry Ellison to Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Ted Turner, Ross Perot, and the gamut, you’ll find they read EVERY DAY!
In fact, Warren Buffet may be the best investor of “all-time”…
If you invested $10,000 with him in 1965, today you would have $50 Million Dollars! That’s how good this guy is with money.
He spends most of his day reading. He says in an 8-hour workday, he spends an hour or two trying to get out to meetings and then the other 6 hours reading.
Bill Gates and Warren Buffett were asked, “if you could have 1 super-power, 1 magical power… what would it be?”
Guess what they said…
They both said it would be the ability to read faster than anyone in the world!
For you to be able to read faster with more comprehension, it will give you
A.) more knowledge faster, and
B.) a competitive edge over everyone else, right?
So let’s get to it…
Speed reading is an umbrella term for a variety of reading techniques that enable people to read entire texts much more quickly than the average reading speed of 250 words per minute.
There’s several ways to speed-read. Some of these include:
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- The Push Method
- The Pull Method
- Speed Skimming
But the most effective system I’ve come accross is called the Gold-Mining System.
The idea is to read through the book 3 times. Each time you read through it, focus on finding the gold nuggets, hence “gold-mining”.
Since most books only have a few gold nuggets, the publishers typically fill the rest with stories and “fluff”. Your objective is to skip the “fluff” and mine the golden nuggets.
Let’s base this example on a 230-page business book.
First pass through the book: (shouldn’t take more than 5-10 minutes)
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- Read the back cover
- Read the table of contents
- Read the introduction
- Flip through entire book and read maybe a page from each chapter that catches your eye
Try to use this phase as a very high-level reading to catch main ideas and grasp understanding about what the book is actually about.
Second pass through the book: (shouldn’t take more than 15-20 minutes)
-
- Read a couple pages from each chapter (it doesn’t have to be the first 1-2 pages because sometimes books start with stories or the fluff.)
- No rules, just skip around and read a couple pages from each chapter that provide you with the main point of each chapter.
Third and final pass: (should take about 30 minutes)
-
- Read the first sentence of each paragraph
- It’s okay to skip some paragraphs
Last secret: if someone were to quiz you on the book versus someone that read every single last word, it would be near impossible for the quizzer to tell the difference!
That’s it
**Some research has shown that speed reading gets better with practice, althout I need to mention that a lot of scientist are sceptical about this method.
If you're interested in trying this, I'd love to hear if this works for you.
