5 Speed Reading Techniques to Read Faster and Retain More

Jim Kwik (0:00)

Welcome to Kwik Brain, bite-sized brain hacks for busy people who want to learn faster and achieve more. I'm your coach, Jim Kwik.

SPEAKER_2 (0:08)

Free your mind. Let's imagine if we could access 100% of our brain's capacity.

I wasn't high, wasn't wired, just clear. I knew what I needed to do and how to do it. I know kung fu.

Jim Kwik (0:27)

Did you know 33% of Americans didn't read a single book last year, and only 12% read one book all the way to the end? Probably just to forget everything they just read. Meanwhile, the most successful people in the world, they read religiously and actually apply what they read in their daily lives. Reading gives you a massive competitive edge. If somebody has decades of experience that they put into a book, and you can read that book in a few days, you could download decades into days. There's no bigger advantage. And today, I'm going to teach you how to double your reading speed and actually remember what you read so you can unlock the limitless possibilities in your mind and in your life. I've used these exact techniques to train actors, CEOs, students at Harvard University, and lifelong learners across the globe. By the end, you'll learn five proven speed reading strategies that you can start using in just 10 minutes. So let's dive in. We live in an era of information. There's never been more to read. Think about social media, emails, reports, messages, Google searches, AI, information overload is very real.

Most people waste hours and hours of their day just trying to catch up, never realizing how much time they are losing. Let's say you have four hours of reading a day, and you could just double your reading speed. You could save two hours a day. What's two hours a day across a year, right? Or even one hour a day is what, 365 hours. How many 40-hour work weeks is that? Over nine. So you get two months of productivity back just by improving your reading. How do you unlock and save more of that valuable time? First, you have to find out what your baseline is, your base rate. So what I want you to do, and let's make this interactive. Remember, learning is not a spectator sport, is I want you to set a timer on your phone for 60 seconds. And I want you to read naturally as you would normally would.

Then count how many lines you just read, and that's your base rate, that's your starting point. So pause this, grab a book, put a mark in the margin where you are starting, and then time yourself for 60 seconds. Put a mark in the margin where you left off, and then count the number of lines.

Okay, hopefully you just did that. Remember, don't learn this passively. Pause it and do it now to get the benefit, because in order to manage something, you have to measure it. So now that you know your base rate, your baseline, let's dive in to technique number one, meta-guiding. Most of us were taught to read out loud while we're in school.

And even when we stopped moving our lips, we kept doing it inside of our heads. You ever notice that when you're reading something, you hear that inner voice inside your head? Hopefully it's your own voice. It's not like somebody else's voice. That's called sub-vocalization.

And it slows you down because you can only read as fast as your inner voice, which is about 150, 200 words per minute.

Meta-guiding helps you to break that habit by using a visual pacer. It could be your finger, a pen, a highlighter, even a cursor on a computer to guide your eyes across the page. And here's how it works. Place your finger just under the line you're reading. Start moving it steadily left to right, just a bit faster than you normally read. Let your eyes follow that movement without trying to say the words inside your head. It might feel a little strange at first, especially if you were told not to use your finger while reading. But the truth is, your eyes naturally follow motion. And when you use a pacer like this, you retrain your brain to process words visually, not so much audibly.

This alone can significantly increase your reading speed, while also improving your reading focus and reduce backtracking or back skipping. They call it regression. Try it, and you'll see a difference almost immediately. Number two, the technique is called chunking.

Now, don't confuse chunking with skimming. They're very different. Skimming is about jumping through text, skipping words, and hoping to catch a few key phrases.