It’s time for an epic reading assignment.
In the next week I will be reading one book each day. 7 days. 7 books.
You should too. Here’s how.
BUT WHY? PART 1.
Because everyone is dumb and getting dumber. The world is constantly changing and most people cannot keep up. Maybe the pace of machine learning is outpacing human learning. Who knows. The point is, you aren’t learning fast enough. It’s time you absorbed a ton of information, all at once.
WHY. PART 2.
There are whole fields of information and wisdom you know nothing about. Religion. Computer science. Business operations. Neuroscience. And guess what? You’re way fucking behind! I went too Foocamp a few weeks back alongside Tim O’Reilly, Hank Green, Kathy Sierra, and others, and guess what? I feel dumb. So I’m going to compensate.
WHY. PART 3.
Huge, impossible challenges are healthy. I literally have no clue if I will have the focus and dedication to do this, and you probably don’t either. Your self-esteem would be helped by stretching what you think is possible. That won’t happen unless you set yourself up for a massive goal. Consider this the book equivalent of running up Mount Kilimanjaro– or whatever works for you.
WHY. PART 4.
WHY. PART 5.
Are you serious? Dude, just do this. You’ll feel awesome after.
OK, BUT HOW!? PART 1.
Ok, I just finished the first book a minute ago: The E-Myth Revisited. Clocks in at 292 pages. So this isn’t a joke. You’re going to need some serious planning, some technique, and some serious straight up putting-in-the-work time.
HOW. PART 2.
Choose your books in advance. Basically you need to be organized enough to know immediately what you’re reading and not doubt it. If you can, choose books that stack on top of each other so that you learn successive, stacking topics.
Here are some of the books I will be completing over the next few days:
Religion For Atheists by Alain de Botton.
Quiet by Susan Cain.
The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander.
All these stack up in my head for a bunch of learning I need to be doing. Try for the same.
HOW. PART 3.
When I first started reading a lot I read very slowly. In this case, slow reading will not work. So your first technique will be to use a tracer, such as your finger or a pen, for all of your reading. Try this technique right now with the pic above. Use your finger to trace right under the words in the pic and you’ll see that you immediately stop subvocalizing. This should double your reading speed pretty much immediately.
Once you have stopped subvocalizing and are using your tracer, make an effort to stop going back for “missed material” and remember to take breaks in between.
In case you’re wondering, I learned these technique from Emerson Spartz, a home-schooled child genius (lol) that read a biography a day for a year.
HOW. PART 4.
Read for information and trust in your brain to absorb. So please, for the love of God, do not read War & Peace or Moby Dick. Choose books you will learn things from but know that they contain some filler, as all books do. How do I know this? I was once told one of my books needed to be a certain width because it needs to be wide enough to be seen on the bookshelf. Fact: the size of a book is based partially on marketing and not entirely on content.
By the way, since I started reading faster– I absorbed more.
Anyway, find something you want to learn and focus on that as you read. This was one of Marshall McLuhan’s techniques– to come to a book with a question– and he claims to have gotten more out of reading from it.
HOW. PART 5.
Ok, I believe I spent about 5 hours reading this book today, more or less. You can choose faster books! I have a free and quick one right here if you really want to get a head start. But the point is not to let anyone (including you) pass judgment on which books you should read. Choose what’s manageable. Don’t go crazy.
Don’t kid yourself though. This requires some serious time. So use every possible moment. I did this between sets while on the gym and read in bed in the evening. I read everywhere. But most importantly, I still made time for work and phone calls. Most of what I got rid of was my social media time!
Fact: you can easily cut into your Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook time and get this done.
FINAL NOTE!
This is probably not sustainable. But it is epic. So do it. You know you want to.
Please share this. Thanks.
Leave a Reply