A few days ago I told you about the secret I use to get more learning done each week than most people do in a month: audio books.

Well today, I’m going to share the second secret I use to getting more learning done, and this one works well even if you aren’t an “audio learner”. If you learn best by actually seeing words on a page, instead of hearing someone speak, then this will work well for you.

The secret is: speed reading. Yes, it is real and it works. In fact, it’s not just speed reading, but speed comprehension too.

Before I learned this, I always had the assumption that speed reading was bogus, or that people were basically skimming the material without getting full comprehension.

Well, I’m here to tell you that it in fact is real, and it does work.

Here’s a simple explanation of how:

When you first started reading you had to look at each letter in a word and sound them out, right? “C” sounded like “cuh”, “A” sounded like “ah”, and “T” sounded like “tuh”. That spelled “cat”.

But eventually, as your reading improved, you didn’t have to look at each letter. You could just look at the whole word and your brain would instantly recognize “cat”.

Your brain did this on it’s own without any special training.

Well, in the same way that you don’t have to look at each letter to read a word, speed readers don’t have to look at each word to read a sentence. They can look at a phrase, or entire sentence, and just SEE it all at once. High speed cameras can be used to watch the eyes of speed readers and see that they only have one or two focal points per sentence or even paragraph!

This sounds difficult, like you would need some genius ability to accomplish it, but almost anyone can do it with practice. With a series of exercises you can slowly retrain how your brain reads.

Reportedly, John F. Kennedy was able to read at an incredible pace, and there have been a number of other famous speed readers throughout history. But one thing is for sure: the benefits are enormous.

If you could just double your reading rate (which is what I was able to do in one month), then you are now able to cover twice as much material in a given day. Either that, or you can do the same material you are doing now in half the time!

There are two ways you can learn to speed read. What I did was take a self taught course, using this book which I’d recommend on speed reading.

I did a series of exercises that took about a half hour per day, for one month. At the end of that time, my reading rate had doubled (with the same level of retention, which is tested as well). My reading rate continues to grow today.

To be honest, it was not easy to do those exercises. Some days it was boring, and I really didn’t want to do them. But I’m so glad that I did, because doing those for one month, gave me an incredible investment in myself that will repay itself MANY times over for the rest of my life!

Of course, if you don’t feel like you have the discipline to make yourself do all those exercises, you can always take a local speed reading course, which I highly recommend as well.

If you read for an average of one hour per day, then speed reading is like getting an extra hour of reading done every day. How would your life be different if you read for an extra 365 hours every year, for the rest of your life? What would you do with all that extra knowledge? All those extra books? I have no way of knowing, but it sure is exciting to think about. You owe it to yourself to learn to speed read, so get started today! This book is a good place if you have the dicipline, or you could sign up for a speed reading class.

Either way, if this sounds exciting, take some action RIGHT NOW to make it happen before you have a chance to forget.

In the next post in this series, I’ll share with you one final tip I use to get more learning done EVERY day, without spending any additional time.

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