10 Days to Faster Reading summary

Chapter 1: Introduction and the Pressure of Reading

10 days to faster reading by Abby Marks Beale What's in it for me? Read faster and remember more of what you read. If you could have a personal genie grant three wishes, you might start by asking for a trillion dollars and the power to fly. But some people, especially people who love to read, but never have enough time to get through all the books they want to.

You might use one wish to gain the power to read with superhuman speed. There's no guarantee that this summary will give you superhuman reading skills, but you don't need a genie to become a faster and better reader. You just have to learn how to shed some bad habits and practice a few techniques. 10 days to faster reading explains that we can become faster readers in just 10 days.

This summary compiles the best of the book's methods, tips and examples. Start practicing them right away with your daily newspaper, or any non-fiction material you might have lying around, and you'll be on your way to becoming a faster reader while remembering more of what you read. In this summary, you'll learn why we think about reading in the wrong way. How to get 40% of a book's information without even reading it?

And what happens to your brain when it's not processing as much information as it could be? 1. People put too much pressure on themselves when they read. Too much to read.

Too little time. It's a problem we can all relate to. Every day you find more interesting reading material, and every day the pile of to read books grows taller and taller. But the problem isn't necessarily time, per se.

Rather, it's that you're not reading efficiently due to a few classic misconceptions about reading. First, you don't actually have to read everything in a book or newspaper to understand it. In fact, it's impossible to read everything that passes over your desk. Instead, you should get in the habit of selecting and prioritizing what's actually important.

We'll come back to that point later, but as you'll see, it's quite easy once you know how to preview the material and efficiently determine the parts that actually interest you. Second, you don't have to remember everything you read to get something from the material. We develop this misconception about reading in school, where we're under pressure to remember everything we read in our textbooks because we'll be tested on the material. However, memorized material is stored in your short-term memory and is forgotten after only a few days.

If you want to retain the information for the future, you'll need to create an easy retrieval system. Try writing down the crucial information electronically or on paper, or make highlights and notes in the margins. Then, simply file the materials away. This way, you can find the information easily, and it will also take away the pressure of memorizing everything.

Finally, people have the misconception that they shouldn't be reading during working hours. However, the opposite is true. Reading is actually part of your job description. Business people tend to think that they'll appear to be slacking off if they read on the job.

Relevant reading materials, however, can help you come up with new business ideas, stay up to date on the market and find ways to beat the competition.

Chapter 2: Kicking Bad Reading Habits

So never be as easy as kicking a few bad habits. If you do something enough times, you form a habit around it, and the same goes for reading. So what are some of the classic bad reading habits? And how do you fix them?

A common bad reading habit is passive daydreaming. While we read, we're thinking about a million other topics, none of which are related to what we're actually reading. Our goal should be to turn this inefficient noodling into active mind-wandering a type of thinking that connects the information we're reading to our own experience. This way, we bridge different types of knowledge.

What we already know and the new information will learn. Making the switch is as easy as steering your thoughts in the right direction. For example, imagine that you're reading an article about Italian art, allow your mind to wander to your trip to Italy last year. That connection works as a kind of brain glue to which you can easily stick new information.

Another inefficient habit is regression, that is, rereading what you've just read. To avoid regression, try covering the text you've just read with a business card, leaving just enough space for the line you're reading. Regression is often little more than wasted time, but if you really don't get the author's meaning or come across a word, you don't understand, it's indeed worth going back over the material. Finally, lots of people subvocalize as they read, mouthing along to the words they read or mentally whispering the text.

Normally, the brain can process up to 400 words per minute, but when we read at talking speed, we only read about 150 words per minute, so if you simply stop subvocalizing, you'll be able to process more than twice as many words per minute. When you want to read for speed and stop subvocalizing, focus on the keywords and skip over the rest. Another strategy is to mumble, hum or chew gum, while reading these noises rhythms will speed you up.