Weekly Success Tip

Last week I shared with you the wealth that's available in books. I told you how Siimon Reynolds, one of Australia’s successful entrepreneurs said, "If you would just read the top 5 books on marketing, you would know more than most people that have just spent 4 years studying marketing at university!"

We also discussed how you could become a world leader in any field, if you merely read the best books on your chosen subject for 1 hour a day. I also said I would share with you how to read those books faster than ever before, remember?

Well this success tip comes from… surprise, surprise, reading a book! ‘The 4-hour Work Week’ by Tim Ferris, to be exact. Check out these practical, easy to follow tips for learning how to read faster.

How to read 200% faster in 10 minutes!

1.    Two minutes: Use a pen or finger to ‘trace’ under each line as you read as fast as possible. Reading is a series of jumping snapshots (called saccades), and using a visual guide prevents regression.

2.    Three minutes: Begin each line focusing on the third word in from the first word, and end each line focusing on the third word in from the last word. This makes use of peripheral vision that is otherwise wasted on margins. For example, even when the highlighted words in the next line are your beginning and ending focal points, the entire sentence is ‘read’, just with less eye movement.

“Once upon a time, an information addict decided to detox”.  

Move in from both sides further and further as it gets easier.

3.    Two minutes: Once you're comfortable indenting three or four words from both sides, attempt to take only two snapshots – also known as fixations – per line, on the first and last indented words.

4.    Three minutes: Practice reading too fast for comprehension but with good technique (using the above three techniques) for five pages prior to reading at a comfortable speed. This will heighten your perception and reset your speed limit, much like how 80 km/hr normally feels fast but seems slow motion if you drop down from 100 km/hr on the freeway.

To calculate reading speed in words per minute (wpm) – and thus progress – in a given book, add up the number of words in 10 lines and divide by ten to get the average words per line. Multiply this by the number of lines per page and you have the average words per page.

Now it’s simple. If you initially read 1.25 pages in one minute at 330 average words per page, that’s 412.5 words per minute. If you then read 3.5 pages after training, it’s 1,155 words per minute and you’re reading in the top 1% of the world's fastest readers.

Remember, amongst all this financial doom and gloom you can create your own economic boom!

ACTION STEP:

Now complete Steps 1 to 4 above today!