When you try to develop superlearning skills it is very important not to loose sight of your goals.
- Do I want to develop a super-skill? Super-skills set us apart from other human beings, help promote our reputation on Linkedin and draw our people to us in various ways we enjoy. However this comes with a price. While the word record in speedreading is above 10000 words per minute, I do not know anyone who actually needs to read THAT fast. I spent almost 10 years developing my learning skills, and I hold a modest 2000 words per minute position. Jonathan and most of my best students stop around 1000 words per minute: they just cannot afford to read hundreds of articles per week. If you really want to excel you need to spend at least 1-2 hours per day speedreading. Do you have enough curiosity, time and willingness to read that much?
- Do you want to read FAST? Reading at 1000 wpm is very fast. Often other people look at this in disbelief. You could read almost any article in minutes, forming a qualified opinion on almost any subject. This is a proper result of our superlearning course done right. Now the question is: how do you keep the speed from dropping? If you cannot read at least 15 min a day, if you change the language you use and do not retrain speedreading, or if you simply do not get enough sleep you will start to loose your speed. Therefore before you really get to 1000 wpm, ask yourself: what kind of material can I get that will keep me speed-reading at least 15 min a day?
- Do you want to pass exams? If you want to pass exams, the core value of this course is improving your retention and not your reading speed. Do spend more time on various ways to make markers and link them together, do spend more time on finding your personal style and on creating stories. The saccades and subvocalization suppression may be wrong for you right now, since they take weeks to master and even then they marginally reduce the retention quality.
- Do you want to master a field of knowledge? When you are trying to master a new field of knowledge, the ability to links ideas together is more important than the ability to read or remember a piece of information. You should investigate more complex ways of chunking and linking all pieces of data you have. You should also prioritize what to focus on, and what is “nice to have”. Most importantly every time you read something completely new, pause a bit to process the information: creating great links takes time and creative effort.
- Do you want it all? Eventually you may read this list and understand that you want it all. This means that you can revisit our course and our blog from time to time and adapt to the superlearning style that is best for you at the moment. Do ask questions at [email protected] and do not hesitate to suggest subjects for blog posts.
Dr Lev,
you mention the need to retrain yourself when you change your reading language – what do you mean? how would you do that? is there really that much of a difference between speedreading in different languages (when you know them very well?)
This is very simple: if you really use a language you read a lot in that language. If you feel you do not speedread, you need to start specific training. Like reading a lot using the speedreading techniques. There are differences related to using different parts of the brain, different letters and so on. There should be very little difference between English and French is you know them well. English, Russian and Hebrew are less related and need more specific training.
This has great points in it. I did not know sleep would affect my speed reading, although now that I think about it, it makes sense, you should be well rested and have the energy and focus for any task you do including speed reading. One more article that expanded my knowledge, Cant wait to continue with the super learner course :-).