If you're like me you LOVE books. You love the excitement of buying new books as much as you love absorbing the knowledge they contain. In fact, you may have gotten into the habit of buying more books than you actually finish reading. Don't worry, I and many others are guilty of this. It's as if we'll never actually get to the reading part given how many books we have in queue.
I'm proud to announce that the other day I finished a book for the first time in probably a year. In fact, I read it from cover to cover in less than 24 hours. In this article I share with you how I did that and what I did differently from my typical reading rituals (which usually never get me to the last page). In fact, I'll give you 3 practical tips that helped me finish reading a 250+ page book in one day!
Disclaimer: This is what worked for me and my needs as a reader. I advise you to at least try this method out and see if it works for you. If not, tinker it to fit your needs!
Tip #1: Schedule Out A Day Where You Commit To Completing A Book
Not to get all high-school assignment on you, but it is necessary you actually schedule a day when you'll complete a book by. The awesome part is that you'll FINALLY give yourself the time and space to dive DEEP into a book you've been waiting to read. It acts both as a way to grow in knowledge and connect with yourself. Pretty sweet stuff.
Like with other areas of our life that we dedicate time for, like exercise, eating food, sleeping, and being with family, it helps to dedicate time to actually finish the book you want to read. Seems pretty obvious, right? Right.
Tip #2: Forget About Highlighting, Taking Notes, and Memorizing Key Concepts
At least in this approach, literally do your best to read fast as hell. There's no need to memorize concepts, highlight passages you don't want to forget, and take a billion notes in the margin. I'm not saying that's not helpful. I'm saying that slows us down. You don't need a day to digest page 1, paragraph 1, sentence 1. Just READ.
The goal here isn't to be able to take an exam on the book at the end and write a report. The goal is to read the book from cover to cover. What's funny is you'll get two things out of this (minimum):
1) you'll get the satisfaction of actually completing a book: something many of us fail to do
2) you'll retain info even without highlighting and taking notes
Often times authors repeat what they say throughout the book. So, you're going to hear the same messages, concepts, and all that repeatedly. Meaning, despite any lack of highlighting or note taking, you'll be beat down with the gist of the book you're reading over and over again (assuming it's a self help book and not a fiction story).
Tip #3: Read As Fast As Possible - Don't Get Caught Up In Having To Remember Anything
Especially in self development books, there's a lot of example giving and restating things over and over. Unless you REALLY don't understand something, don't get caught up in having to absorb each paragraph to the letter.
There's no rule that said you had to read every word of every sentence. If you get the point the author is sharing with you, you don't have to hold on to every word that repeats the same message over again.
Same goes with examples. If there are 10 examples, and you're crystal clear about things by example 3, then just skim the rest of the examples and move on.
The goal here is SPEED and FINISHING.
At the very least, by speed reading through it all, you'll have a pretty damn good idea of what the heck the book is about, and you can then process things over time. You're always free to reference the book and dive deeper into chapters that were of greater interest or value at the time.
Call To Action
Pick the one book that you've been DYING to read most. Doesn't matter if you've already started it, or are waiting to finish reading 6 other books before you get to the one you actually want to read the most. Pick the one that calls you most.
Schedule an entire day dedicated to JUST reading that whole book. That's your main agenda for the day. If you need help justifying this, just pretend that reading your book is just as important as whatever you already dedicate entire days toward.
If reading a book in one day brought you a day's worth of income, you'd have no problem doing it I bet you. So just make it such that reading your book and completing it is as important as making money to feed yourself and pay the bills.
Next, forget about being perfect and remembering every single thing. DO NOT take your sweet time. It's the taking our sweet time that has us never finish the books we buy. Same goes with note taking. We take too much time digesting and not enough time moving forward. The book itself is going nowhere. Meaning, you can reference it literally every day for the rest of your life.
Do yourself a favor and just READ. Get lost in it. Just GO. Treat it like it's a movie. You can't go back in the movie theater and see what happened. You just have to keep up. And guess what, just like the movies, you can GO WATCH IT AGAIN.
So just go. Read, FAST. And when you're finished you'll feel SO good. You finally did what you wanted to do.
YAY!!!
Much love,
GS
