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Transcript

SPEAKER A

Hello and welcome to Ivy League Prep Academy podcasts, where we explore ideas for living a better life and preparing for the university of your choice. We're your hosts, Nathaniel and Steve. So there are a few topics I would say that we can discuss that really can change a listener's life. But metacognitive skills, right, the learning how to learn stuff can be massively impactful. And today I'm really excited to discuss with Nathaniel speed reading. And this is a skill that I think Nathaniel has developed to a tremendous level. He's an expert speed reader. I feel like I'm grateful to know these skills and I use them inconsistently, but we'll talk about that perhaps a little bit later. But Nathaniel is proficient and has developed this skill and at every single Ivy League elite camp teaches speed reading to all of our participants. And I have watched participants increase their speed by on the low end 2020 8% ish, and at the high end, 70 plus percent, just massive, massive improvements after just a couple of classes. So, Nathaniel, I'm excited to have you again today and that we can share some of these secrets and some of these tips with our listeners.

SPEAKER B

Absolutely. One important note on that increase in their reading speed is the comprehension didn't change. So most people that hear about speed reading, there's even a comedian who talks about how his reading speed improved tremendously, but his comprehension just plummeted. And if that's the case, then you're doing it wrong. But the people that you're describing, the students that I've taught, their comprehension is staying the same or even improving a little bit. It's not plummeting when they read much faster.

SPEAKER A

Yeah, I was just going to push back from you and say no. I've talked to many of these students coming out of the workshop and they've talked about comprehension improving. So I'm glad you at least mentioned that. So what you're saying is we can increase the speed and then comprehension has to at least maintain and then for many students, it goes up.

SPEAKER B

Correct. Yeah. Comprehension is flexible. When you're reading, you can read as fast as you want to, but there's a certain speed at which your comprehension is high and your speed is high. And it's kind of the maximization point between comprehension and your reading speed. So you get the very most out of your time and out of whatever text you're reading.

SPEAKER A

All right, and I'm going to kind of steal some of what I've learned just by listening in on your workshop. I remember you talked about the reason why we can read just as fast as we want is because our eyes and brain can process the language very, very quickly and so much faster than we could speak it, we could vocalize it.

SPEAKER B

Right. So what happens is our brains are incredible machines. We are able to comprehend symbols and sounds and all of these messaging systems and analyze them and compute them and process them and understand much more than we push our brains to do. With speed reading, you're unlearning some bad habits, and you're learning and picking up some new habits that allow your brain to move much faster. There are some blocks that we place in our way as we read. And when we first start to read, they're okay because they're almost building blocks for us to read. But as we get older and as we get more experienced with reading, there is a certain point where you remove those stumbling blocks in your reading and push through those and just clear the path to understand and comprehend much more and much faster.

SPEAKER A

So exciting. So let's talk just a little bit about before we get into the juicy details, talk a little bit about the value of speed reading and why it's so important. Harvard's Human Engineering Lab worked together with Stevens Institute to really figure out what is it that makes executives successful? Why are these people the ones that rose all the way to the top? And shockingly, of all the things that they looked at, they tried to uncover the traits that successful people share. There was only one common trait that was consistent with all of these successful people they looked at, and that was that they all acquired a large vocabulary. So to really drive this home, think about this particular study that they did. They administered this vocabulary test to 100 professionals in line for top company executive positions. And five years later, without exception, all of those who passed the test in the upper 10% had achieved executive positions. And not a single one of that group scoring in the lower 25% had become an executive 100% across the board. Top 10%, you're in. Bottom 25, no chance. And it doesn't stop there. A different test, the Johnson O'Connor Institute study looked at 39 different companies and tested managers at all of these companies, and they administered vocabulary tests and then correlated a ranking to them, assigned points to them. All right, so across these 39 different companies, top executives had the highest average score of 236. Middle managers were in the middle range, 140 huge drop off. And lower managers were the lowest average scores 89. Your vocabulary dictates your ability to succeed, and they found the same thing happen with income potential. All right? The larger your vocabulary, the greater your future income. Your income potential increase becomes. So it's conclusive this is a very powerful, powerful tool. If you want to become more successful, why is it that increasing your vocabulary is so important? Well, just think about it. Communication skills are at the heart of most job requirements, especially leadership skills and IQ. EQ, emotional intelligence, critical thinking all of that begins with having the vocabulary to do the thinking right. If you have a better vocabulary, your brain changes. It becomes better at processing information. You begin to think faster. You can think smarter because you have words that are more accurate and more precise. Obviously you can improve your reading and writing, increase your confidence. All of those things happen as you're able to improve your vocabulary. And how do we improve our vocabulary? The best way to do it is read more, read more, read more, read more, and read works that challenge you. And so today, Nathaniel, I just can't say enough. This is so exciting that we can get into speed reading so that we can take the same amount of time that maybe we're committing to reading. Now, whether we're in school or we've finished school, we do a certain amount of reading right now. But what if we could make that reading time more efficient so that we could be more productive during that time, get more reading in and increase our vocabulary, increase our thinking ability, our critical thinking, our IQ, our EQ, and everything else to enable us to become more successful?

SPEAKER B

I agree. I think that in elementary schools and in middle schools and high schools, we should be teaching speed reading from a very early age and helping students build habits to be able to speed read so that a just as you say, their vocabulary improves. But reading also has some effects on your clarity of mind and your ability to sort of along your point, have a better perspective about things going on around you.

SPEAKER A

So let's stop delaying this, the excitement of the actual skill set. Teach us about speed reading, help us to be able to consume more of this so we can develop our thoughts, increase the speed of our synapses, deepen our emotional quotient, right, everything else. Let's get there. How can we become speed readers, Nathaniel?

SPEAKER B

Well, the first thing is to understand what's keeping us from reading quickly. When we first learn to read, we learn to look at each letter in a word and sound them out individually. And so, for instance, the word habit, you're going to look at the H, the A, the B, the I, the T, and your brain has been trained to look at those individually and sound them out. And you sound them out inside of your mind. This is something called subvocalization, and it's actually the enemy of speed reading. So subvocalization is the biggest obstacle for people in learning to read more quickly. You begin to read a book, you go left to right and you start sounding out the words inside of your head as you're trying to make it through from left to right. Your brain is actually capable of picking up symbols without sounding them out. And so when you try to sound them out in your head habit and you take the time to do that, you can only read as fast as you can sound it out, meaning you can only read about as fast as you can speak because you're sounding it out inside of your mind. So the first thing that you have to understand is subvocalization or vocalizing the words as you read them is keeping you from reading at a faster pace. Now there are some tools that we then can give you to force your brain to read much faster and forget about subvocalizing. First you have to start out in a focused environment. Speed reading is not the kind of thing that you can do when you're laying on your back and, you know, head propped up by a pillow in dim lighting and just kind of casually reading a book while holding trying to read yourself to sleep, right? That is not the environment to speed read. Now you can speed read in bed, don't get me wrong, you can sit up and you can make sure the lighting is high enough that you can see the text well. You can speed read in bed but you want the optimal environment to be as focused as possible. So that means typically you're sitting at a desk or sitting in a chair where you can sit up straight, where you have the light on, you have your glasses on. If you have some vision issues and you're mentally ready to read quickly.

SPEAKER B

Don't want to read casually if you're trying to speed read. Now there's nothing wrong with reading casually. Sometimes if you really want to simmer on something, you really want to think through what you're reading, then speed reading may not be what you want to do for that particular chapter or that book. But in cases where you want to grasp a ton of information as quickly as possible and you want to save as much time as possible by reading quickly. That focused environment will allow you to have the foundation to read quickly. The next thing that you have to do is something called metaguiting. And metaguiting is something you can do with your finger or with a pen or pencil or anything that points really anything that can capture your eye movement. And so what you do with metaguiting is you literally guide your eyes to move faster than you otherwise would. So this again is to keep the subvocalization from slowing you down. And the way to do that is to take your finger or take the pen or pencil, point it at the word at the top left of your text, and move from left to right with that finger or pen. Whatever you're pointing with in a steady, consistent rate of speed and move it from left to right and start pushing your brain to read faster. And it's not something that comes immediately but over time you will start to have this habitual process of reading faster when you train your mind to do so. To start out, what I typically have students do is I set a minute timer and ask them to read a passage and I have three passages that are approximately the same level of comprehension required, about the same number of words and about the same difficulty to read through. And I have them read the first passage so one of three in a minute and track how many words per minute they're able to read. Then when I teach just the metaguiting where they use their finger and try to push their mind a little bit, then most students have an average increase of about 40% if they just do the metaguiting.

SPEAKER A

So just that one tip. Even if you can't participate in a workshop, just start using metaguiting and you should start to see massive improvement.

SPEAKER B

Yeah, immediate improvement. It will not become habit right away. The habit takes time. But just with that first experience, using the metaguiting to lead your eyes, guide your eyes across the page, that will improve your speed. Now then, as you're creating this habit, the thing that you have to learn is there is a certain pace that is pushing yourself in a really healthy way. So what I typically draw out on the whiteboard is I have four speeds. So the first speed is kind of a lazy reading. And that's the kind of reading where you're just sort of reading through it because you have to you're not necessarily trying to comprehend. It's a required reading, so you're just lazily reading through it. The second speed is a comfortable speed. That's where you're reading, but you're not pushing yourself and you're not being lazy, so you're just comfortable. And then there's pushing yourself. That's where using metaguiting, you're pushing your mind to read as fast as you comfortably can while comprehending, but you are pushing yourself. And then the fourth speed is too fast where you're reading faster than you can comprehend. And what you want to do is be somewhere between pushing yourself and going too fast. You'll notice that there's a sweet spot in there where you're pushing your mind to see the symbols and comprehend the symbols that you're reading on the page, but not reading so fast that you can't comprehend them. And that's it. That's all there is to it. If you can create an environment to read fast and be focused, and you can use the metaguiting to train your eyes and your mind to move faster through the pages, and then you keep in mind that sweet spot between pushing yourself and going too fast so that your comprehension is still there, then you have successfully begun speed reading. And it just takes practice at that point to become proficient in it.

SPEAKER A

So if it's important enough to make it happen, the skills required are pretty simple. It's just a matter of continuing to repeat it until you develop the skill, correct?

SPEAKER B

Absolutely. Anyone can do this.

SPEAKER A

Amazing. And certainly I can vouch for this. I've watched Nathaniel teach hundreds, now hundreds of students in very effective 1 hour block, about 90 minutes blocks sometimes. But teach students and watch them with just an absolute excitement come out of the workshop and say, man, I can read twice as fast. I more than doubled the very top level. The top performers more than doubled their skill and improved their comprehension. So something that all of us can do. Super helpful and very valuable skill set. It's a matter of just getting started and practice until you got it.

SPEAKER B

Yeah. And one of the fun things that we do afterward or sometimes beforehand, is I ask the students how much time they think they spend reading in a week. And these are students with long textbooks and significant reading assignments, and I ask them how many hours per week they're spending on their reading, and the answers range between 5 hours and 30 hours a week of reading.

SPEAKER A

Right.

SPEAKER B

But imagine if you could cut that in half or cut that in thirds. Then suddenly you have all that time back and you have still the same comprehension of the text that you've been reading. That gives you a lot of your schedule back so that you can have a higher quality comprehension and then use whatever it is that you were reading for whatever assignments or to improve yourself.

SPEAKER A

Yeah. That time is so precious. Thank you so much for sharing these priceless tips. Metacognitive skills are the best kinds of skills, right? The stuff that helps you learn how to learn is going to improve your life the fastest. Thanks, Nathaniel for sharing. And good luck, everyone. Improving your reading speed.