The Only Skill that Matters: The Proven Methodology to Read Faster, Remember More, and Become a SuperLearner

by Jonathan A. Levi

“The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” —Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock

As a twenty-first century human, you need to know how to navigate social relationships, get along with technology, stay informed about politics, obey laws, balance your finances, make smart career decisions, choose a healthy diet, and about a million other little skills that help you thrive in today’s world. Of course, none of these skills actually matter if you aren’t able to learn them effectively.

You may be familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:

This is why many of us struggle through school and learning in general. We suffer excruciating boredom learning new material, waste endless time reviewing that material, and in the end, we forget it after the exam anyways. I mean, be honest: How much do you actually remember from high school trigonometry?

After graduating, I let my new SuperLearning skills run free. First, I tackled some of the issues I’d had as a young man. I devoured books on social psychology, body language, attraction, and charisma. I built upon the knowledge that Lev and Anna had taught me, diving deep into neuroscience, memory, and learning theory. I diagnosed and fixed my own health problems by reading books on kinesiology and sports therapy. I developed myself spiritually and emotionally with a wide range of books on life’s journey. I even read business books and took programming courses, attempting to launch a new software startup.

Behind it all, I credit my ability to learn as the reason I am where I am today. Learning has not only made me a happier, healthier, and wealthier person—it’s saved my life.

Put simply, it means that we should actively leverage our prior knowledge and experience when learning. We must compare and contrast the things that we’re learning to the information that we already know. How is it different? How is it the same? How can the information and experience we already have contribute to our understanding of this new and exciting topic?

Once again, this is a simple mindset shift, but one that produces noticeable results. By simply considering the ways in which you will apply a piece of information, you increase your ability both to focus on and to remember it. Later on in this book, when we learn the powerful skill of pre-reading, we will leverage this exact principle to great effect.

Adults learn best through active practice and participation. Design your learning experience accordingly! After all, there’s no better way to convince your brain that this stuff is immediately useful than by, you know, immediately using it! This is why piano lessons rarely start with boring music theory, and why the best computer programming courses start by building something useful.

Because adult learning is so much more pragmatic and practical, it’s logical that it should be centered around problem-solving. Adolescents tend to learn skills sequentially as they build up their body of knowledge. In adults, however, Knowles found that it’s best to start with a problem and work towards a solution.

The next time you find yourself stuck in a rigid learning environment, such as a normal online course or a highly structured corporate training, take a step back and think. How can you customize your path, make decisions, and reclaim some ownership over your experience?

If you want to build up the motivation to learn something, dive deep into your why. Why do you want to learn it? How will you use it? Why will your life be better once you have? Do this simple focusing exercise before and during your most challenging periods of learning. You’ll find that it’s a useful way to motivate yourself, even when no amount of coffee will.

The idea of preparing and structuring your learning in a logical way beforehand comes up a lot in accelerated learning circles. In his accelerated learning book disguised as a cookbook, The 4-Hour Chef, Tim Ferriss shares his framework for preparing to learn anything faster. It goes like this: Deconstruction: How small can I break things down into their basic units of learning, such as individual vocabulary words or grammatical rules? Selection: What are the 20 percent of those units that will give me 80 percent of the benefits (Pareto’s Principle)? Sequencing: What is the best order in which to learn these units? Stakes: How can I use psychology or social pressure to condense my timelines and push myself to learn faster? With this process (and the other techniques in the coming pages), Ferriss has become an accomplished author, a successful investor, a top podcaster, a skilled chef, a champion sumo wrestler, and a record-holding tango dancer. Whatever you’re learning, thinking ahead is key.

So ask yourself: To what level do you need to know the information you are learning? Do you need to be able to recite other people’s works word-for-word and challenge them for your PhD thesis? Or, do you simply need to know where to look something up the next time a patient presents those symptoms? The depth to which you need to know something dramatically changes the way you should approach learning it—and how much time you’ll spend on it!

As I learned when I tackled Russian, the order in which you learn things really matters. Remember: you can never reclaim time spent learning the wrong things.

As Lorayne wrote in one of his early books, “There is no learning without memory.” The problem is, memory has a bad rap. Even if they don’t always show it in the best of ways, educators today know what you now know—that learning must be experiential. It must be engaging. And it must draw upon the learner’s own experience and knowledge. Thus, in an effort to do away with rote memorization, educators and policymakers have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Except where unavoidable, they’ve done away with anything that even resembles memorization. But in doing so, they’ve completely neglected the foundational—and highly experiential—skill of memory mastery.

Your brain runs on about twenty watts of power—a little less than two of those eco-friendly CFL light bulbs. According to Stanford researcher Kwabena Boahen, a robot with similar processing power would consume at least ten megawatts.6 That’s ten million watts—or about as much as a small hydroelectric plant. It’s unfathomable, and yet, it’s true. Your brain has an insane amount of processing power, and it’s five hundred thousand times more efficient than the best microprocessors ever built. How exactly this is possible remains one of the great mysteries of the universe. But suffice it to say that forgetting useless information is a big part of it. Luckily, as you’re learning, there are ways to “trick” the hippocampi into storing more memories—and maintaining them long term.

But surely, the folks who succeed with these techniques have some type of genetic advantage. After all, the only reason that Michael Phelps has won so many gold medals is his freakishly long arms. It must be the same with competitive memory, right? Nope. In fact, a 2017 study by Radboud University sought to determine just that. For forty days, participants with average memory skills and no prior training spent thirty minutes a day practicing mnemonic techniques. At the end of the study, participants had, on average, doubled their memory capacity. What’s more, they were able to reproduce these results four months later—with no further training. Just to be sure, researchers compared the brains of five memory champions to “average” people using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In doing so, they expected to see notable differences in brain anatomy, similar to the differences between an athlete’s body and a nonathlete’s. What they found, however, really surprised them. The hardware was exactly the same. The memory athletes were just using their brains differently.

If you want to improve your memory tenfold, create novel visualizations, called “markers,” for everything you wish to remember. Yes, you read that right. The crux of the “big secret” behind tripling your memory boils down to imagining pictures in your head. Anticlimactic, I know. But that really is half the battle—or more. At first, this might be difficult. Coming up with these markers is a creative endeavor, and many of us haven’t trained our creativity muscles for years. Fortunately, we know from the research that creativity is NOT something you have or you don’t. It’s something you train, and something you can relearn very quickly. By simply practicing visualization over time, you will come up with more and more creative visualizations—and it’ll become both faster and easier to do so.

First, picture as much detail as possible. By creating a high level of detail, you ensure that you are adequately visualizing a vivid, memorable image in your mind’s eye. Fuzzy, nonspecific images are much easier to forget. Plus, remember that the average person’s working memory can only retain three to five individual items at once. This means that breaking information down into “chunks” of three to five items makes it inherently easier to remember. That’s why phone numbers and credit card numbers are formatted the way they are. As you’ll see in the upcoming examples, every detail that we insert into our markers can represent a new piece of information. In this way, we effectively “chunk” more information in there, condensing it into one easy-to-remember visualization instead of three to five.

Next, wherever possible, your visualizations should include absurd, bizarre, violent, or sexual imagery.

Wherever possible, you should make use of images, ideas, or memories you already have.

Finally, it’s important that as you create visualizations, you also create logical connections to what you’re trying to remember. Obviously, a visual marker is no good if you can’t remember what it stands for. For this reason, it’s important to choose markers that will clearly symbolize the information you’re trying to remember! As you’ll see in the following examples, each visualization you come up with should explain some element of what it is you’re trying to learn or remember.

Foreign language words are a constant source of frustration for most learners. Where do you begin? How do you remember things that are completely new and foreign to your ear? And most challenging of all, how do you turn something so auditory—like a word in a foreign language—into a visual marker? Simple: break it down until you can find visualizations. For example: instead of trying to memorize the word caber, or “to fit” in Spanish, we can come up with a visualization of a taxi cab trying to fit a bear inside.

In short, in the world of memory improvement, the memory palace is the undisputed champion. Of course, it’s not appropriate for everything. Would I use a memory palace to memorize a handful of names or the key points of a book? Probably not. That would be like scaring off a bully with a hydrogen bomb. It’ll definitely do the job, but you probably shouldn’t get carried away. For this reason, I often refer to the memory palace as “the mnemonic nuclear option.” There simply is no other technique that can even come close, whether in speed, ease of use, or reliability.

In other words, research has finally figured out why the memory palace works so well. It all boils down to neurochemical changes that occur when we activate the parts of our brains concerned with location. In 2014, another study from Dartmouth and the University of North Carolina focused on a little-studied part of the brain called the retrosplenial cortex. Their goal was to test out an even bolder hypothesis. They now believe that our memories may actually be inextricably linked to location in our brains. This makes perfect sense. Think back to any memorable event in your life, such as the JFK assassination or the 9/11 attacks. The question we ask one another is never “What news station were you watching,” but rather “Where were you when you heard?” Location is an immensely powerful anchoring point for creating new memories. This is precisely why I asked you to block the exit to your own memory palace with a large location pin. That marker, safely stored in the doorway, represents your brain’s ability to remember locations without even trying.

To build a memory palace, you first need a few things. Most important, of course, is a suitable location. In reality, any location will do: past homes, office buildings, even stores you’ve casually strolled through. With that said, I encourage you to remember what we learned in our chapter on preparation. Start by carefully thinking ahead and determining what information you need to know, in what order, and how you need to access it. This step alone can save you the hassle of memorizing something in the wrong way—and being stuck with it indefinitely. Ironically, the biggest “side effect” of the memory palace technique is how obnoxiously effective it is. If you memorize a speech, only to change the order of the points later on, you’re likely to deliver it as memorized—for better or worse.

If needed, you can create very dense memory palaces by using every anchor available. If you do, though, avoid placing multiple markers in the same exact location, such as on the same shelf or pinned up to the same wall. It’s far better to expand your memory palaces outwards than to overstuff them.

You see, in addition to all of the psychological effects we’ve learned so far, our brains are subject to quite a few more. The most important of these might be the spacing effect. It states that things become infinitely more memorable if we repeatedly encounter them. You should also meet its supportive cousin, the lag effect. It states that the spacing effect is compounded when encounters are spaced out for extended periods of time. What I’m trying to say is this: learning something once, no matter how well you do it, just isn’t enough.

SQ3R Before we dig into this skill, we first need to understand an important framework known as SQ3R. At first, this may sound like some sort of robot that spends its time hanging out with Luke Skywalker. But in fact, it’s a system developed by educational philosopher Francis P. Robinson in his 1945 book, Effective Study. Though you may have never heard of it, the truth is, SQ3R is actually used and taught in many US schools and universities. That’s probably why it was taught to me by two separate people during my university days. And about the funny name, it’s an acronym for: Survey Question Read Recall

Many students flock to our accelerated learning programs to 10X their memory or triple their reading speed. But the truth is, I often feel that pre-reading is one of the most valuable “Easter eggs” in the SuperLearner method. People rarely anticipate it making as big of a difference as it does, and best of all, it’s something you can implement today, with little to no practice.

But here’s the interesting and exciting part. The most exhaustive research “disproving” speed-reading does so by demonstrating that comprehension begins to drop off at 600 wpm, and declines steeply at 700 to 800 wpm.11 To put this into perspective, the average college-educated reader reads 200 to 250 wpm in English. When viewed in this light, it seems to me that “speed-reading” is very much possible—but only in the ranges of 600 to 800 wpm.

For as long as speed-reading has been around, experts have taught that one of the keys to reading faster is to eliminate subvocalization. In other words, get rid of that pesky “voice” in your head. After all, that voice can really only speak at a pace of about 400 to 450 wpm. Your brain, by contrast, can recognize complex images, symbols, and situations in as little as 0.013 seconds. Subvocalizing what we read is like trying to describe a photo to someone instead of just showing it to them. It takes high-fidelity visual information and degrades it to low-bandwidth auditory information. If we eliminate the voice, we eliminate the bottleneck, right?

Unfortunately, there’s not much we can do about saccadic blindness. What we can do is reduce the amount of time we spend in it. A normal reader is trained to make one fixation per word, resulting in about eight to ten fixations per line. That’s a lot of time spent in saccadic blindness. But if we can train ourselves only to make, say, one or two fixations per line, we spend much less time in saccadic blindness. In this way, we can absorb more information—faster.

Most readers center their fovea on the first letter of the first word and the last letter of the last word in a line. Doing so means that half of your focal range is wasted on blank, white paper. Of course, there’s very little information in the margins—until you write it in there. For this reason, the most advanced speed-readers center their fixations on the second and second to last words on a line, like so:

“Who is wise? He that learns from everyone.” —Jewish Proverb

What’s more, as Mattan notes, brute force learning teaches us that it’s okay not to understand something the first time we learn it. This itself has unforeseen benefits. As we already know, the more spaced repetition and overlearning we do, the more likely we are to remember the information long term. Brute force learning, then, is also a way to overlearn, without the monotony of rereading the same textbook or rewatching the same lecture. Overall, learning this way takes a lot of the pressure out of learning and prevents us from feeling “dumb” if we don’t get it immediately. I sure wish I knew about this little trick when I was in middle school! The next time you prepare to learn something, don’t confine yourself to learning monogamously! As you build your learning plan, make sure to include numerous sources, perspectives, and peripheral subjects. Go on tangents, and get lost in the weeds! This not only fulfills yet another requirement of Dr. Malcolm Knowles—self-concept. It will also result in better overall understanding—and a lot less boredom and frustration.

In reality, certain types of testing can be extremely powerful tools in your learning tool kit. Plenty of research has demonstrated that self-quizzing and collaborative group quizzes significantly improve learning.

If you’re hoping to learn a subject, another great way to “test” yourself is to write—and publish—a blog post about it. For that matter, there’s one form of self-testing that goes above and beyond the benefits of any other: teaching others.

You’ve probably heard the popular saying, “Once taught, twice learned.” The idea is simple: when we teach other people, we reinforce our own learning. But did you know that this idea is not only supported by neuroscience—it’s also the secret weapon behind some of history’s most gifted thinkers?

First and foremost is sleep. While you may realize the importance of sleep, you probably don’t give it nearly the respect or the priority it deserves. In the over 225 interviews I’ve done with some of the world’s foremost superhumans, sleep is one of the few things that comes up time and time again. In a recent monthly challenge for my private mastermind community, sport sleep coach Nick Littlehales shed light on how broken the average person’s sleep regimen really is.

Once you’ve covered these three bases, everything else is in the realm of nitty-gritty details—and is quite honestly outside the scope of this book. It’s the type of stuff we cover every single week on my podcast. Therefore, if you’d like to learn more about it, I suggest you visit us at http://superhumanacademy.com. Meditation, getting enough oxygen, and exposing yourself to bright, natural light during the day all help a great deal. Nootropics, ranging from green tea all the way up to modafinil are also quite useful and worth experimentation—with your doctor’s approval. But none of these can help you if you neglect the three foundations upon which brain health is built: sleep, exercise, and nutrition.