Greetings, Steemians and Steemettes

I have made an experiment two weeks ago where I tried out reading a book and posting about the contents I read on a daily basis, chapter by chapter. I really liked the idea, but ended up not liking the execution for a couple of reasons.

1. I made a poor choice for a book.
2. Reading it day by day ended up adding pressure to my time schedule that ended up being bad in the grand scheme of things.

I think I have found a better system to make these posts happen and also chose more interesting books for the first time of me trying this again. The book for this series is one that some of you may recognize from one of my earlier posts around here.

It's this one right here, "Speed Reading" written by Tony Buzan. This book holds a special place to me for a couple reasons.

1. I like the idea of being able to do things better than I thought I could.
2. It is the topic of one of my earliest posts on steemit.
3. It is the first topic I wrote about that I received a @curie upvote for.

After a couple of rough days and weeks of me not really being all that satisfied with my current work, taking a step back to times where life seemed good is a sensible idea.

Thus, I go back to these old times and give it a new spin. I hope you will enjoy reading this with me just as I have writing it.

Makes sense, doesn't it?

Preface

It is not the author of this book, Tony Buzan, who greets us in the preamble. Instead, the first person we get input from is a woman called Anne Jones. The Book claims that she is a six times world champion and a record holder when it comes to speed reading. You should look her up and tell me what you find about her.

Over the two pages dedicated to her that she dedicates to telling us her story, we learn that she read previous editions of this book back in 1996. She shares that she did not think that know much about speed reading and doubted her own abilities to do so.

Shortly after, she tells us about how she ended up winning contests and managed to reach a constant 1000 words per minute within a year of practice. In 2007, she managed to establish her own personal record of reading the seventh Harry Potter Book with a speed of 4251 words per minute, apparently with good reading comprehension as well.

Keeping aside whether you believe all of this or not, it does make you wonder if there is something to this controversial topic. And thus, you keep on reading.

Important points to take away here are that Anne Jones stresses that reading, speed reading or pretty much any kind of ability is much easier to learn and use if you do it while having fun with what you do.

She also points out that learning to visualize thoughts in your mind and focusing on the task of reading 100% are crucial abilities as well, but the book will get a bit deeper on this as well. It will also suggest some other works of Tony Buzan to go with this book, too. We live in a world of advertisement after all.

Preamble

After saying thanks to a bunch of people who are of no major importance for us, we finally get to the meat of the book. Our author boasts that using the skill of speed reading will allow anyone to drastically reduce the amount of time needed to read something. To go with his example here, Buzan claims that reading a 250 page strong book would take as little as one hour applying the skillset he is going to teach us whereas most people would need more than ten.

After this bold claim, he talks a bit about the way most of us have learned to read. According to him, many things that we have been tought are flawed or uncomplete. Some of these he will go into detail about in later chapters and explains why they are slowing down your performance.

Before he does, he also gives us a piece of his own reading history. Because masters are not born as masters, Tony Buzan himself wasn't a speed reader initially. The first time he did a speed reading test back when he was 14 years old, he ended up hitting a 213 words per minute score. He felt proud about himself. Not for long, of course. After finding out that 213 is below average and that other teammates were faster than him, he felt bummed out. Against what other people told him, he started to do some research into the topic. Research which ended up being fruitful because Tony Buzan was able to increase his reading speeds to 400 at first and then over a 1000.

Of course, this research material had to come from somewhere.

He spends some time talking about the history of speed reading. One would make a whole lot of assumption when and how the idea of speed reading took root first.

And chances are that one would be wrong because the first to indulge were the people of the Royal Air Force.

I will keep this part short. Pilots back in WW1 apparently had a rough time distinguishing air fighters from one another from a distance. Not being something you want people fighting for their countries to suffer from. They came up with a solution and used a device called "Tachistoscope". A tachistoscope is a device that projects pictures in set intervalls. These intervalls can be shortened and customized, as can the size of the projection. Training with this device ended up being useful because the pilots were actually able to increase their vision to the point where they were able to recognize and distinguish between planes, even if they were only projected for a very short time on a small scale.

This is of course testament to how much our eyes and brains can manage to do. And clearly, people thought that this should apply to reading in some ways too. In fact, many speed reading apps that are out there actually use this basic idea to help people learn to read faster.

According to Buzan, people learning to read faster with this method do not tend to get outstanding or lasting results. For many people, speed reading is a rather questionable topic, partly because of this. Still, these tests were the basis of speed reading and people went on further from there.

With the history of speed reading out of the way, we finally get to do things ourselves!

At first, we are being explained how to work with the book. There is no rush to reading it, everyone should do it in their own tempo. Which makes sense because everyone learns differently after all. Also, not everyone starts from the same point.

There are a couple of tasks that will help people utilize their eyes more efficiently and effectively. Also a couple of tests that are useful for measuring your progress.

The preamble ends with a small quiz of 20 questions. This quiz is less about your actual skill or ability. Instead, it questions your believe and good will towards the topic of speed reading. They are also asked in a way that will make you question your current level of education about the topic. All questions are yes or no questions, so it is rather easy to finish it.

Needless to say that the quiz is a trap. There is exactly one question that should be answered with "yes" according to Buzan. Other questions, most people would answer with "yes" as well unless they have already read these first few pages of the speed reading book.

I ended up answering 6 wrong questions with "Yes", so I clearly fell for it. You probably would too, but don't worry. We all start as novices when it comes to these things.

Thanks for reading this with me and I will see you tomorrow for the next chapter!

All pictures in this post are taken or created by yours truly.