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May 1 - May 15, 2024
Macular vision is your primary focus.
When you look directly at something, you see with your macular vision.
The point is, your peripheral vision needs to improve to read faster and reduce eye fixations, so exercise your eyes to do this.
Research more into peripheral vision
The next step in reading faster is to understand how to strategically skim your material—after stopping subvocalizations and training your eyes.
Skimming information in our context is about saving time and being able to see through what’s in front of you.
Traditional skimming would be skipping about 75% of the content—here, we are only skipping 25% of the content.
First, start and stop reading three words from the margin of the pages.
But here’s the trick: you can start on the third word from the left and stop three words from the end, and your peripheral vision just might pick up the first two and last two words automatically.
Second, skip meaningless words.
Learning how to read faster is all about eliminating the small, unnecessary words that fill up a page.
we can often skip these words with no ill-effects: “if,” “is,” “to,” “the,” “and,” “was.”
Third, scan for important words.
As you read any given sentence, you will probably get 90% of the meaning from 50% of the words, and for the purposes of learning at a quick pace, the rest of the words are unnecessary filler.
skimming is learning how to parse information and only read what is needed to get the meaning and understanding.
Second, create a game. How fast can you read a page of text while still maintaining a high level of comprehension? Why not time yourself and try to beat your record one page at a time?
When we grew up, we forgot that we could turn anything into a game.
Games motivate us and engage parts of the brain tied to our need for entertainment and challenge.
All we have to do is change our perspective on the material and mimic the joy of reading something we are actually interested in.
All you need to do is have a stopwatch or watch, and you can attempt to see how much you can write, absorb, or read every five or 10 minutes. Rinse and repeat, and make it a game to compete with yourself.
50-minute chunks of time are ideal for focusing on a single task.
Do task in increments of 50 minutes
“How to Read a Book” Did you know that there are four levels of reading?
These are Adler’s four levels of reading, from simplest to most complex: elementary inspectional analytical syntopical
Elementary. You’re already past this level—this is, essentially, learning to read.
Anytime you come upon a new language, dialect, or lexicon, you’re doing elementary reading.
Inspectional. The next level up for readers is understanding the essence of a certain book—but not digesting the whole of it.
Inspectional reading actually has two mini-stages of its own: Systematic skimming.
Systematic skimming gives you enough information to know what the book is and how you would classify it:
Superficial reading. This stage is actually reading the book but in a very casual way.
Analytical. The third level of reading is the deepest level for consuming a single book or volume of work—it’s
You don’t just read the text; you highlight or underline key points and you make commentary or ask questions.
In a way, you can use the marginalia to simulate an ongoing conversation with the writer.
I like this idea
Analytical reading is hard work. But it’s the level at which the thrill of gaining new understanding is most profound and rewarding.
instead of just listening to what some person’s telling you, it’s more like you’re extracting the information yourself.
Syntopical. In the final level of reading, you work with multiple books or pieces of material covering the same subject.
At this stage, you’re trying to understand the entire breadth of the subject you’re studying, not just a single volume about it.
Think of it as an active effort, something one doesn’t normally associate with the relaxing act of reading a novel.
That’s what syntopical reading is like: it’s a concerted effort to find the answers and increase your expertise,
at some point in every expert’s life, they knew nothing about what they’ve become experts about.
make games to read faster, and eliminate distractions.
What reading games can I create for myself?
asking questions. It’s not as simple as asking for facts, and it is indeed something that must be cultivated like any other skill.
The first and probably more famous of Franklin’s forms is his “13 virtues” checklist, which he used to chart his efforts in bettering himself as a human being.
13 virtues checklist
First, Franklin devised a list of 13 qualities he felt he needed to develop in order to live a healthy and conscientious life
Temperance. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation. Silence. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation. Order. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time. Resolution. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve. Frugality. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing. Industry. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions. Sincerity. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak
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Each virtue was carefully scheduled so that one week’s virtue would help inform the next week’s—for example, he put “frugality” the week before “industry” because he thought the habit of saving money would inform his habit of working harder to obtain money.
This type of intentional development and improvement underlay his success and accomplishments.
Instead of focusing on a “Virtue of the Week” as Franklin did,
The key to this system’s success is knowing what aspects of your studies are the most important to maintain—the
Separate them out and organize a plan of attack toward them that ensures that all your bases are covered.
Your brain can only handle so many things at once, so plan yourself out of overwhelm and multitasking.
Any kind of study system is extremely dependent on how well you nurture positive habits, and this is exceptionally true with self-learning since you’re in charge of monitoring everything.
