If You’re Trying To Do This Fast, You’re Doing It Wrong
Before we get into today’s piece…tomorrow I’m hosting a live Q&A session with everyone in the Read to Lead course over at Daily Stoic. Today is the last day to sign up and get your invitation—I hope to see you there!
Reading is a good thing.
Every book teaches us something, makes us a little smarter and wiser, right?
And not enough people read enough…
So learning how to read faster is the answer?
No, it’s not.
Speed reading is not only a scam. It’s missing the point.
I get this a lot. Because I talk about reading quite a bit, people assume I am a speed reader. I’m not. Across all the other great readers I’ve gotten to know and all the great readers throughout history I’ve studied, I can’t think of anyone who attributed how much they read to how fast they read. I can’t think of a single example of a “speed reader.”
I just spend a lot of time reading.
Because it’s important. Because I enjoy it.
I like food. I like music. I don’t rush through those either. Nobody tries to have sex faster, do they? Don’t most people try the opposite?
But here we are with people listening to audiobooks at 2x or 3x speed. Here we are with speed-reading courses that will teach you special techniques to blaze through books. Here we are with rapid-reading apps that flash words at you faster and faster to up your words-per-minute rate. Here we are with people hung up on how many books they read instead of how much they get out of the books they read.
Great readers take their time. Great readers read deliberately. Great readers read actively. I think of people like Joan Didion and Emerson, who filled hundreds of commonplace books with handwritten passages and quotes and ideas from the books they read. People like Montaigne and John Adams, who were lifelong producers of “marginalia,” covering the margins of their books with notes, comments, questions, disagreements, free-form musings, curiosities they wanted to investigate further. People like Major George Patton and Octavia Butler, who were dyslexic and had to struggle just to make sense of the words on the page and still were voracious readers.
People who read a lot of books spend a lot of time reading. There’s no way around this. “The best way to read quickly,” as Tyler Cowen has said, “is to read lots. And lots…Reading quickly is often, in a margin-relevant way, close to not reading much at all.”
In Wisdom Takes Work, I tell a story about a samurai warrior named Banzo, who sought an education so that he could impress his father. Told by a great teacher that mastery would take ten years, he was aghast.
“I can’t wait that long. What if I work extra hard?”
“OK,” the master said. “Thirty years.”
“But I will do whatever it takes to make it go faster,” Banzo pleaded.
“In that case,” the master said, “it shall take seventy years. A student in a hurry learns the slowest.”
The whole point of reading is that it’s hard, but that the hard is worth it. The whole point of a book is that there is a lot in there and it will take time to get it out. There is a payoff and that payoff is priceless wisdom. In one of the first passages in Meditations, Marcus Aurelius wrote that one of the most important lessons he learned in life was to invest in his education and to always regard “the resulting costs as money well-spent.”
That seems to be another thing great readers have in common: they regard all the time (and money) spent reading as well-spent. A big part of how I manage to read as much as I do has come down to identifying as a professional reader, and by that I don’t just mean I read as part of my job as a writer or a bookstore owner, but that I see reading as my job.
It makes me a better person. It makes me a better parent. It makes me a better husband. It makes me a better boss. It makes me better at everything I do. So I take it seriously. I invest in it.
That’s the idea behind Read to Lead: A Daily Stoic Reading Challenge—which we are re-launching right now. It was designed for people who want to take their reading more seriously. Not to read faster. Not to sound smarter. Not to impress people with how many books they’ve finished. But to actually get better. To accumulate a mass of true wisdom—that you can turn to and apply in your actual day-to-day life.
There are no shortcuts, no hacks, no way around it.
To be a great reader, you spend a lot of time doing it—slowly, patiently, attentively, without trying to make it go faster, without being in any hurry.
P.S. If you want to learn to get more out of every book you read, Read to Lead is for you!
It was painstakingly designed to distill everything I’ve learned about being a great reader to help you learn in a few weeks what took me nearly two decades to figure out.
Across 15 challenges (at a pace of one every three days), I’ll walk you through the best of what I’ve learned about reading: how I read, how I choose what to read, how I retain more of what I read, how I work my way through difficult books, and—most importantly—how I take what I read and put it to use in my actual life.
Along with the 15 challenges, you also get access to a private community where you can connect with fellow readers, an instant 20% discount at The Painted Porch Bookshop, and, of course, lots and lots of book recommendations.
