How to read a book quickly and get the most out of it 7 indispensable tips

How to read a book quickly

Reading by reading can be more entertaining, per se, is little useful. Not bad interpreters, there is no doubt that reading regularly is a key piece in the training and development of anyone, but if it is done well.

Knowing how to read is so essential to your personal and professional progress that it's not something you should take lightly.

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Never underestimate the power of words and the power of the ideas they shape. Ideas awaken changes inside us and habits make them real outside. Here you will find both: ideas and habits.

Where are we going with this?

The Cost of Occasion of Reading a Book, reading a book is no joke. It requires an essential investment on our part. Perhaps not more money but more time, the most appreciated good we have. How long does it take you approximately to read a book? One, two weeks? Perhaps more?

That time you spend on that book will never come back, another book or other activity could have taken its place and added more value to your life. For this reason, you must be really selective in the books you read.

Reading a good short book a couple of times is good. Any book that exceeds 300 pages, considerably, must be more cautious with the larger ones.

You will easily identify them: they are big books of more than 600 pages, they are used to be part of a series of books and they are used to be everywhere, and they are used to carry the bestseller seal.

Note: as with any rule, there are also provisos. There are very long books in terms of the number of pages that are invaluable to the reader who knows how to appreciate them.

Now, as a rule, distrust the big books and think about it really well before you invest your valuable time in one of them.

The Repercussion of Books

People are constantly changing, we are constantly evolving. Your "I" today is not exactly the same as your "I" a few years ago, a few months ago or a few days ago.

Our brain continuously absorbs information from everything we do and perceive. It feeds on experiences and reading, for your brain, is a very real experience.

Consequently, which books you read (or stop reading) and how you read them will largely determine who you are in your life.

As Joseph Addison's famous prayer states, "reading is to the psyche what exercise is to the body.

Reading is good, and knowing how to read makes it even better, the more first things first.

Some books in which to invest our time

The best books of your specialty

Do you want to prosper as a professional and advance in your industry? Then he reads frequently and at his best. In all fields of knowledge there are authors and books that stand out for their quality and for their impact on the thinking of those who read them. They are benchmarks in their field, indispensable readings.

How to locate them? One of the many ways to locate them is by discovering which books have been read and which ones they advise, that it is referring to the specialty you are looking for.

Does everything look very complicated to you? Currently on the Internet you have an immense amount of information just a click away and, best of all, it is simple to find what you want.

You don't know English? You have a problem. Many of the materials you need to be a specialist in your field of expertise are not translated, or, if they are, may not be easily found.

Learning English today is simpler than ever. I did it without stepping on any academy. Here I don't mean to chat freely, but rather to understand what you read and hear. On the Internet there are many free courses where you can learn English.

Novels and poetry

Reasons to read these books:

• They strengthen your inventiveness.
• They increase your vocabulary and develop your social skills. Have you noticed that after reading a good book you express yourself better? This is the way it is in both chatting and writing.
• They help you to disconnect from your routine reality, which makes you forget, at least for a while, your inconveniences and obligations. Conclusion: reading relaxes.

Reading fiction also teaches valuable lessons that you can use in your life. Maybe you'll find a character with whom you feel identified and who will make you see your situation with other eyes. Sometimes from the inside it is quite difficult to distinguish things clearly. There's nothing like the reader's distance to gain perspective on things.

The best thing is that there are many literary genres to choose from. Find your favorite and explore the titles of the great authors of the genre.

Books by bloggers

Certain weblogs are better (by far) than many books. They are weblogs with personality, their contents have their own seal, features that make them unique and different from the rest.

If they showed you one of their articles without telling you who the creator is, you would guess, as you would guess a movie by Martin Scorsese, Alfred Hitchcock or David Lynch.

While weblogs are not substitutes for books, they are a good place to discover them without investing large amounts of time.

Weblogs let you communicate with their author and, in certain cases, receive a reply. Something unviable with a book, especially if the creator is no longer among us. In addition to this, you can participate in the discussion by sharing your opinion on the topic discussed.

A lot of these bloggers are selling their books. In these, they present their knowledge on a specific subject in an orderly manner and with the degree of depth that can be expected of a book, all conceived so that the reader gets the most out of his reading.

So, if you like the content he regularly shares on his weblog, if you like his way of explaining complex ideas in an easy way, and if you want to delve deeper into the knowledge of that subject he's dealing with, why not give his book a chance?

Biographies of people you admire

Few things inspire more than other people's example. To be able to have the whole life of other people for the delight and benefit of the reader is a privilege.

It learns from its failures to avoid them, it learns from its successes to emulate them.

In addition to this, reading biographies will awaken in you a powerful idea: "if you could, why not". This isn't fiction, it's reality. Everything that the biographed character achieved during his life is viable for you, if you think about it and fight for this reason.

This idea of "I can also", if it takes root in you, will serve as a stimulus to face new challenges in your life and as a motivation to overcome them. That's progress, that's personal development.

Books by people you admire

A book is like a son to its author. As such, it contains your genetic information in all the words that shape it.

Those who write habituate to leave personal stories, anecdotes and vital lessons distributed by their texts, in a special way their books, whatever the subject they are.

Personal development books

These books are not read in schools, nor are they read in institutes or universities, however, some of these texts have an invaluable value for the training of anyone.

They are books that inspire you, motivate you and challenge your frontiers of the possible. They have been created with only one objective: to assist you in achieving (or getting as close as possible to) your authentic potential as a person and, with this, to prosper in the different areas of your life: health, financial situation, love, family, personal relationships, business or career, spirituality, and so on.

However, not all personal development books are equal in terms of the value they bring to the lives of their readers.

How To Read A Book

Although the book is good, its pure reading is not enough. It is not a matter of reading too much or making it fast, but rather of doing it well. That is to say, from our reading we must achieve 3 things:

• Understand what we read.
• Highlight the essentials.
• Meditate, draw conclusions and specify their application to our lives. We need to write down on paper what specific job we intend to do with what we have learned.

As you can see, more than reading the book we prepare it, let's see how:

How To Prepare A Book

How to understand what you read

Turning pages is useless if you don't understand the message that the creator wanted to convey with his words. Here are some basic tips so that it doesn't happen to you:

Reads at a relaxed pace. He who reads too fast has no time to digest words. You may understand what you read in a superficial way, but you do not assimilate moderately complex concepts or ideas.

Concentrated on reading. To understand a book we must be concentrated. Have you finished a page or a paragraph and didn't understand it?

Read it again, until you understand it. With this, not only will you be able to understand what you are reading, but you will also be stimulating your brain to meditate. It's a challenge, a puzzle to solve. The more trained the brain, the more effective it is.

How to Highlight the Essentials

This is simple. Every time you read, do it with a pen in your hand. Wherever you are, if you read a book from which you wish to draw knowledge, always have a pencil with you to highlight the essential, what inspires you or suggests an idea. But don't just stand out, make notes in the margins to catch those ideas or thoughts suggested by the text.

Why are we doing this? For two reasons:

1. Underlining helps you to better retain the essential information in the book. By highlighting a text you send a signal to the brain that it deserves singular attention. In addition to this, most of the time, just because you have to highlight a text, you are going to be forcing yourself to read it at least a couple of times in a row: (1) the first pass in which you identify the text as important; and (2) the second pass in which you underline and continue with the reading.
2. In order to save time in future readings of the book, the good books, as if they were friends, you will want to visit them on more than one occasion. Some time after your completion of the book, you will want to refresh what you learned in your day, or you will want to return to feel what his words conveyed to you. The reasons for rereading a good book are many, the essential thing is that now, despite our previous underlining work, we can reread the essence of the book in just a few hours.

Learning is remembering what we already knew. Many of the things you're going to read you're going to know before or feet on the ground.

To see them again will help you to have them again present in your thoughts and to retain them better, in front of the forgetfulness of the passing thing.

Remember, wherever you go, if you're gonna read a book, take a pen. This step of underlining can be avoided in those books that you read for pure entertainment, like some novel from which you don't expect to learn anything essential.

You're going to agree that highlighting something you want to learn is essential, aren't you?

All the more reason if after a few months or a few years you find it interesting to return to the essence of the book or if you want to refresh paragraphs or loose leaves. Everything is going to be simpler and faster, if you've underlined it.

Plasma on paper the essence of the book

If you want to get the most out of your readings you should go one step further there.

Put on paper a summary of the most essential ideas of the book, add your meditations and conclusions about those ideas and also include new ideas that these suggest to you. Ideas produce new ideas. This is how the brain works.

It's key to put all this information on paper. 2 reasons: (1) writing those ideas on paper is going to make you assimilate them better; and (two), you're going to have a condensed version of the book (in a few pages) that you're going to be able to read whenever you want in just a few minutes.

At what point do you take this step, during the reading or afterwards?

I'd rather do it later. Finished the book, if I consider that it contains lessons of great value, I re-read what was underlined in my first reading (see point two), I extract what I consider essential and I capture it in an orderly and visual way on paper.

It takes time, it's worth it.

We are not going to do this with everyone and with the books we read, only with those we consider to be of enormous value.

Specifies an action plan

This would be the last step. Put on paper an action plan to incorporate what you have learned into your life.

It is common to read something and then move on to something else without even meditating exactly on what uses we will make of what we have learned. That's a flaw, since knowledge is worthless if it's not applied.

Since we have invested time (and money) in reading that material, we are going to make a tangible profit for ourselves. Let's specify an action plan or specific uses of what we have learned and put it into practice.

Your Wisdom File

These leaves, in which you condemn the essence of those books that you consider indispensable for you and in which you specify the ways of action to take advantage of them, must be safe.

Keep in one place all the sheets of those books that you have prepared. Detail the title of the book they belong to and order them by subject.

This will be your wisdom file to assist when you need to refresh ideas or produce new ones based on them.

You know what: learning is remembering.

Not all the books you read will deserve a complete preparation (the four phases explained here), but only those that are indispensable for you, that is, those that bring great value to your personal situation.

The rest of the books are enough for you to understand them and highlight them as you read them. This way, in case you have to go back to them, you will be able to refresh their ideas in a few hours.

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