| I will start this article with a confession, before January 2015 I have never read a book! Yes that’s right, reading books was one of my “new years resolutions”. I was more of a movie watcher; The first book I ever read was “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill, this book was so enlightening about every aspect of my life that it inspired me to embark on this journey.
But like most beginners, I was a slow reader. It took me almost twenty days to finish a book in the size of Susan Jeffers’s “Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway”, which was way bellow 300 pages. I remember putting Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” in the basket at Abebooks.com, and before checking out I wanted to make sure it was a paperback (as I usually travel a lot, It would be great to save some weight), my eyes went to page count and I saw it, 1168 pages! I canceled the order!
That wasn’t an option for me, it’s not that I didn’t enjoy reading these books, but spending too much time on them was out of question. While reading The 4-hour workweek by Tim Ferris, I came a cross a technique that involves putting the book flat on a table, and using a pencil, draw two vertical lines separating the first and the last two words of each line from the rest of the text. This technique involves using peripheral vision to read the separated words without looking at them (save around 0.10sec per line). I didn’t manage to pull it off, and I couldn’t understand what I was reading.
After making further research, I discovered that by reading a book while listening to the audio book with the speed increased to x2 (using VLC for example), I finished the first book using this technique in less that 4 hours! Of course some people would think that buying both the book and audio will cost extra money, but hey, I value my time and an extra $5 to $15 is way less expensive than the time I can save (almost 80% of reading time).
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