I've always been convinced that reading more books on the topics that matter to me and becoming a more knowledgeable person is the key to success. I care about entrepreneurship, success, motivation, happiness, finances and financial freedom and those kinds of topics, and I want to get better at them all, so I'm always looking for books on the subject. Through advertising on Instagram, must read lists from Youtube, hunting through charity shops and way too often from books recommended in the book I'm reading (that's a rabbit hole not worth going down by the way, in these kind of topics you somehow always end back at Rich Dad, Poor Dad). I love getting new books and because of it I've built up a pretty nice collection.

I decided I wanted to learn about speed reading to see if there was a way I could speed up my reading process, get through more books in a shorter time and improve myself quicker during my entrepreneurship. In this article, I'll talk about my process doing just that, how speed reading may (or may not) be the answer and how you could apply it to your own journey.

Reader, Writer, Hoarder

So, if I love books so much, why am I talking about getting through them faster? Well I decided to try and learn speed reading for one simple reason.

This is the bookshelf of shame. Every single book on it has been bought in the last 6 months. I count just under 30 books.

These are the books I've never opened. I want to! I really do! But… I never find the time, of the nearly a hundred books I've bought so far in 2023, these are the ones I didn't even glance at. They went right on the shelf and that's where they stayed forever more. These books haven't been ignored because they're unimportant, or too difficult or because they're boring (I love boring books), these books have been ignored because they're 'eventually' books instead of 'Right now' books.

Right Now Books vs Eventually Books

In my heads, every book you buy in non-fiction falls into one of two categories. Right now and eventually. Right now books are the ones I'll always finish, because they're books intended to provide me with the information I need to solve a huge problem that I have right now. A new client needs help with an area of financial law I'm unfamiliar with? I buy a right now book.

But books on inner happiness? The theory of negotiating tactics? the language of cities? Those are eventually books. They're deeply fascinating and information I want to have, they might even make my life better long term, but they're something I'm not going to find the time to read any time soon because they don't solve a problem I have this very minute. They're a diet plan when I need a defibrillator.

And many could argue that the theory of delayed gratification means that the smartest thing I could do is start that diet plan now so I need less defibrillators down the road, I just need to find the time… well see, there's the issue. I'm not going to find it. As an entrepreneur, the truest thing you learn running your own business is that things aren't really going to get easier for a long time. Eventually sure, you'll either sell your company for a bucket load or hire enough people to replace you and you'll take all the books you want with you when you go for your early retirement, but right now? I know for the next few years, my workload is only going to get busier and busier. I either have to find a way to read them now, or come back to them in a decade.

And that's when I found speed reading.

The Speed Reading Promise

I've known of speed-reading for a long time, but I've always been suspicious of the concept. The promise and the root of it makes perfect sense, the idea behind speed reading is that Humans beings have the capacity to absorb text faster than we're trained to as adolescents, and that if we relearn the way we read, we can consume more text and more information in a much shorter timeframe.

The cracks in the foundation start to appear when you look at the 'best of the best' and what they claim to achieve. The average person reads at a speed between 150-250 Words Per Minute (WPM), varying depending on the person, the difficulty of the text, the quality of the printing and some other factors. That's a reasonable number and totally understandable.

Guinness world record holder Howard Berg set his record in 1990 at 25,000WPM. If his claims are to be believed, he could read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece 'The Great Gatsby' in just under two minutes and he could get through the entire King James bible in his half hour lunch break. It sounds ludicrous.

Except, here's a video of him doing it.

Now I'm not going to doubt the authenticity of what he's doing, if we just completely assume that there's no trickery involved and he 100% is doing what he claims and holds the record for, then the facts we have to derive from that is that at this point, what he's doing can no longer be considered 'reading' as we know it. He is no longer mentally reading individual words and forming sentences in his head as he does it, and strangely enough that's exactly what speed reading teaches you to do.

How It All Works

According to my research on speed reading, the 'experts' on the topic suggest that after a certain point of reading speed, you need to learn to stop mentally vocalising the words as you read them. They claim that the biggest block to developing reading speed is the very thing taught to us as children of sounding out the words as we read them. That our brain can absorb that information, but if we attempt to take that information through the part of us that vocalises, we'll be limited by the speed at which we can form words.

"do your best to avoid sub-vocalizing (saying what you read silently in you head) what you are reading. Eventually your reading speed will surpass your speaking speed so sub-vocalizing as a habit limits your reading speed to speaking speed." - Fozrok, Reddit User, R/IWantToLearn

The teachings on speed reading tell you that in an ideal world, you stop consuming pages word at a time, but instead begin to consume line by line, not limiting yourself to the speed of your eye movements but instead taking in all of the shapes in front of you for their pure factual information, keeping your eyes affixed on the centre of the page and moving downwards with your eyeline. No more left to right, just down.

Doubters of speed-reading say that speed reading, at a certain point is no longer reading, but is something closer to 'skimming', simply looking for highlights and facts in a page sequestered by opinions and filler words, and that you'll never get a true understanding of what your reading because of it.

"I took a course in speed reading, learning to read straight down the middle of the page, and I was able to go through War and Peace in 20 minutes. It's about Russia" - Woody Allen

Conversely, the claims by speed readers on what can be achieved with the reading method vary, from some saying that you can take in everything you just read with perfect recall, to others saying that you can train yourself to collect every fact from the page even if you couldn't quote it back, to those who agree with the fact that it's skimming but don't like the word, i.e. 'you'll get the highlights'. What's achievable is heavily debated, and I wanted to find out for myself.

Setting Reasonable Goals

My biggest problem reading and seeing Howard Berg's ability wasn't even a doubt that it was real, but a doubt that it's possible for a normal person. There are and always will be people who are genetically different from the masses, the geniuses, the exceptions to the rules, the one in a billions, and I think one of the most harmful things you can possibly do as a success driven person is set your goals by them. Most athletes won't be Michael Jordan, most CEOs won't be Bill Gates, most scientists won't be Nikola Tesla, and that's something we have to be okay with because if we determine success by reaching or surpassing the level of these giants, we are doomed to fail. Setting goals is good, but setting goals that you might not physically be able to reach? That's dangerous.

I decided to do some research, I found that in The World Championship Speed Reading Competition, the top contestants had reading speeds between 1000-2000WPM and a minimum comprehension percentage of 50%. I'm not looking to win any competitions and I place a higher value on comprehension, so I decided to aim for the bottom of the category, 1000WPM, with an ideal comprehension of 70% or more.

The goals were set, so, now, how do I do it?

Setting a Baseline

To get started, I needed to figure out where I was starting from. The recommendations I found told me to test for two things.

Testing Your Normal Speed

The first step was figuring out what my normal reading speed was. Without trying to be fast or optimising for anything, how many words could I read in a minute? This was important to know as many claim that active speed reading also increases your passive reading speed as well, which made sense to me and I believed was worth testing for.

I tested both using an app on my mobile and using an actual book from my collection. I tested three times with each method and then took my averages. My mobile average was slightly faster, but I think that's explainable by the more compact written format and the lowered amount of eye movement required to consume text on a mobile. These were my results.

Mobile: 294WPM

Book: 265WPM

Testing my 'Speed' Speed

It was time to kick it into gear. I used my mobile and a book again, generated averages from the three and went in, without any practice, to start reading as fast as I could. Results?

Mobile: 694WPM

Book 603WPM

I was Pleasantly surprised by the results, but also a bit unsure about the comprehension. I finished with a pretty high baseline on my speed reading, but I wasn't exactly confident I could remember a single thing I'd just read. I was sure I'd read it, but did I understand it yet? I'd have to start practicing to be sure.

Methods To Improve Your Reading Speed

I started doing some research. The core concepts seemed to state that if I wanted to improve my reading speed, I had to try a few things. There are a lot of methods involved in speed reading, and due to my lack of knowledge, I decided to look at and give them all a try. I believed a combination of techniques would be the key if I wanted to hit the bare minimum of a competition level for speed reading. I decided to go through practicing these techniques, regularly testing myself on speed and comprehension, and then only when I was satisfied with comprehension would I work on increasing speed.

Chunking

The chunking technique is based on the concept of grouping words together to try and minimise eye fixations. Instead of reading words one by one in a sentence and moving my eyesight to match each individual word, I should start trying to take them in multiple words at a time. On a line with 9 words on it, instead of moving my eyes nine times, I should take it three words at a time and only move my eyes three times.

This was a very effective method for me, but with a bit of limitation. I saw massive quick increases going from one to two words, and then two to three, but when attempting to increase further my comprehension dropped massively. It was a barrier I couldn't find a way to break through. I'm curious if with more practice I would be able to increase further to 4, 5 or onwards, but couldn't find a way to do this in the short time scale of my testing.

The Pointer Method

The pointer method states that you should use either your finger or a pen as the pointer to guide you along the page, pushing it to go faster than your eyes and brain are comfortable with to force you to adapt. Over time and practice, your brain will be able to catch up to your fingers, and as a result you'll then be able to continually increase your speed.

I struggled with this at first. It felt like the words were coming at me instead of me approaching them, and was a pretty stressful and difficult experience. I think I might have been able to avoid that feeling by starting at a comfortable pace and only increasing in increments, but I wanted to really push myself. I can definitely say this method did speed me up, and over time my comprehension grew, although never reaching the comprehension I had in normal reading. Maybe with dedicated long-term practice, I'd see more results from this.

Eliminating Subvocalisation

Eliminating subvocalisation is about getting rid of that voice in your head that says the word as you read them. This is believed to act as another step in the process of absorbing information and as a result slows down the retention of information and the entire act of reading. Turning off that voice is harder than you may think, so people recommend attempting to learn this by occupying the part of your brain that does this, either through humming or counting, so that you have no option but to stop vocalising.

I won't lie to you, I never quite pulled this off. I could grasp it in moments, but the actual ability to get through an entire page of a book without vocalising what I was reading was never a point I got to. I found myself vocalising less, more of grabbing individual words in the chunks I was reading from the chunking method, but whenever I attempted humming or counting I lost all comprehension in the process. Maybe other people can make this work, and maybe I could if I kept working at it, but I didn't get it this time.

The Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) Technique

The RSVP technique works by rapidly showing single words or phrases in a static place on a screen to force your brain to take in as much information as possible without accounting for eye movement. The thought process seems to be that by isolating out the eye movement component, you can focus entirely on speed and removal of subvocalisation. It's a hard concept to explain, so I've placed a great short video demonstrating the topic by youtuber MindfulThinks.

I'll be honest, my difficulty with this method came down to comfort and applicability. It's extremely effective, and I was able to rapidly increase my testing speed with it, but I wasn't sure how well this training applied for the books I was practicing for, even if it is meant to be a form of practice in insolation. I'll also say that mentally things started to get a bit other-worldly when you reach the highest speeds, and to be honest I've had acid trips that were less disconcerting.

Tools To Improve Your Reading Speed

So, how did I put these methods into practice?

Books

I didn't do anything very special with books, I simply chose to use pages and chapters from the books in my 'eventually' collection. They were the target audience of this new skill, so it made sense to refine it for that. I focused on chunking, the pointer method and attempting to eliminate subvocalisation.

Apps

There are a lot of apps on this subject. Apps that aim to improve your speed, apps that test your speed and apps that claim to do both. I tested a lot of apps but found two useful to my practice.

Speed Reader - (Play Store)

This is the primary app I used for the RSVP technique and was used in chunking. It allows you to copy in text or use a file stored on your phone, choose your desired WPM, choose how many words you want at once (the size of your chunk) and then press 'speed read' and it immediately begins. The app is free, with the ability to upgrade and remove ads (which aren't very intrusive anyway), is very good, very functional and I recommend highly.

ReaderPro - (Play Store)

ReaderPro provides pre-set training exercises for speed reading in 5, 10, 30 and 60 minute options. I used this app to focus on improving my comprehension more than my speed, and was very useful for chunking and subvocal detachment.

Results

So, is massively increasing your reading speed and learning potential through speed reading possible, and if so, how far can it go?

Starting out, I didn't know the truth and rather disappointingly, I still don't. I know what's true for me, but whether or not everyone can do this with the right training or what the limitations are per person? I don't know. I feel that the only thing we can know for certain is our own personal experience by trying it. After all some claim that the science doesn't support the ability to intake any information with real comprehension after 600WPM, but now? I'd argue with that from my experience.

Mobile: 1030WPM

Book: 901WPM

At the end of my experiments, I was able to reach a reading speed of over 1000WPM on mobile, and not far off in a book, and in my testing at the end almost always hit my internal goal of 85% comprehension, above my minimum requirements. It wasn't important to me that I could quote the last page back to the word (I can't do that at regular reading speeds) I just needed to know that I understood the information and concepts conveyed in it, could explain that information back to someone and be consistently mostly correct and would be equipped to use this for future books and reading endeavours.

The biggest flaw for me was that I was never able to hit that level of numerical comprehension that some people claim to have. If I read a page about John, 47 and his sons Jack, 22, James, 18, Jake 17 and Daughters Jill, 21 and Juliet, 15, then I was never going to be able to answer a quiz about which person was which age specifically. However, if someone asked me to summarise the page, I would have absolutely no issue telling them that it was about a father in his 40s with five children in their teens and early 20s who all have very similar names, and honestly? For my purpose, that is perfect.

Conclusion

I read to understand new opinions, new concepts and new ideas, and when I stumble across specific details I really want to remember? I grab out my pen and notebook and I take notes. Learning speed reading doesn't require that all of your reading is done in that way from now on, it simply gives you the option to get through pieces of texts quicker.

It is a tool that you can choose to use or not, and from now on, I plan to enter every book speed reading, then slow down and take notes when I come across things that I want to guarantee to remember. As long as I'm happy to keep my notepad close by and continue working? I can keep learning and improving as an entrepreneur, an artist, a writer, and as a human every single day, and speed reading can be something that helps me do it just a little bit faster.