How to Speed Read | Tim Ferriss

greetings folks Tim Ferris here author of 4-Hour Work Week tools of Titans Etc I think a lot about ingesting information and it sounds so sexy doesn't it learning 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 pseudo science nonsense about uh speed reading there's a lot of garbage out there but how can you improve 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 non-fiction respectively how to get filthy rich in rising Asia one of my favorite uh recent fiction books uh 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 uh 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 10 lines okay so you come up with a total divide it by 10 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 10 words per line that's 300 words per page great easy enough all right what we want to do next is establish your Baseline so you're going to read for one 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 one minute and uh 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 wpm and uh what we do should help double or triple that without too much trouble all right now uh 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 fur fmost 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 you will not have any trouble reading and you you should still have full comprehension and if you do this for say 5 to 10 pages then if you're not having

any trouble whatsoever you can inbt 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 thirdd 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 uh 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 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 right and these are I believe I've never actually heard this said I've only read it a million times cic movements uh the eye will jump from fixation point to fixation point and you can see this with Retina scanning and eye tracking which uh I've seen a fair amount of

just in psychological studies I've been an experimentor and a subject both at Princeton where I did stuff actually in the lab of Danny Conan who who wrote uh Thinking Fast and Slow incredible incredible scientist but I was just clicking space bars looking at stuff on the screen uh and then at 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 all right so then you use your 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 10 minutes and so you you've you've moved in the in the boundaries uh

the 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 Pacer 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 mph 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 mph 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 all right you've adapted to the faster speed so for 5 minutes just practice reading with slight comprehension loss so a little bit faster than it's 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 pter 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 uh 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 the uh 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 and r in Asia and vagabonding among many many others there's a world out there to explore so I'll let you get to it if you enjoyed this video I want

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