- These are all the books that I read in 2010, 10 years ago.
That's 14 books, not too bad.
But these are the books I read in 2020.
(books bang)
Shit.
(books bang)
That's 81 books.
Watch this video and get five tips
on how to read more books each year
and how to remember what the fuck you read.
(upbeat music)
What's up, everybody, Mark Manson here.
You know, Harry S. Truman once said
that "Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders read."
There's a reason that reading has been around
for 5,000 years.
It fucking works.
It makes you smarter, makes you more empathetic,
makes you more self-aware, entertains the shit out of you.
I mean, what else could you want?
Reading is one of those things
that everybody seems to wish they did more.
If you don't read any books, you wish you read a few.
If you read a few books, you wish you read a lot.
And if you read a lot,
then you're really aware of all the cool stuff
that you don't have time to read.
Since my job is to just read stuff all day
and then regurgitate it to people with poop jokes
and F bombs, I figured that I would sit down
and go through some of the biggest things
that have helped me become a better reader over the years
and help you read more books and read better books.
And at the end of the video,
I'm gonna talk about how you can remember
more of what you read and you'll be surprised
it has nothing to do with a highlighter or taking notes.
All right, so tip number one, cut the inner monologue.
This is probably something you don't even realize
that you do.
Most people don't, but when you read
there's that little voice inside your head,
talking out each and every word to you.
For instance, you might read, the man turned
and deceptively smiled,
acknowledging the expectations upon him,
even though he had no intention of fulfilling them.
The reason you read these words aloud to yourself
in your own head is because that's how you learned to read.
When we were little snot nose kids,
we're taught to sound out each and every syllable
in each and every word.
And so we developed this mental habit
of enunciating every single sound in our minds as we read.
Now, there's a problem with this.
It's fucking slow and you don't need to do it.
I don't need to sound out deceptively
to know what deceptively means.
I'm fucking 36 years old, I know what deceptively means.
What's incredible is that you can quickly train yourself
to turn off your inner monologue.
Try it, try reading something without sounding out
the words in your head.
You'll find that your eyes can actually move much quicker
than the little voice in your head can move.
Now, this is weird at first,
then of course it takes practice,
but as you get better at it,
you will naturally find your reading ability to speed up.
Tip number two, read with your finger.
Now this one sounds weird
and you're gonna feel like a doofus
sitting there with your computer screen,
moving your finger back and forth,
but it's surprising how much it helps.
Now, the reason for this is that
our eyes are actually not completely stable.
Now, when we read texts that's in front of us,
our eyes kind of naturally jump around
and it takes mental effort
to keep our eyes focused on each line.
This is why a lot of times when you're reading,
you lose your spot.
You forget which line you're on.
You read the same line twice.
Sometimes you read a line
and your brain will insert the word from below
into the sentence that you're reading.
It's because our eyes do not move perfectly horizontally.
But if you put your finger below the words as you read,
it gives your eyes something to focus on and move with
and it stabilizes them.
And surprisingly, this makes you read quicker.
In fact, a lot of people just by using their finger
to scan the texts,
can improve their reading speed by up to, I don't know,
20, 30%.
I just made that number up, but it's a lot.
You'll notice when you try it.
Using your finger to scan as you read,
it works for everything.
You can use it with a book.
You can use it on an iPad.
You can use it on a computer screen.
Yeah, it feels weird, but it helps.
All right, tip number three.
And this one's just a little bit more meta and practical.
Stop reading shit you don't like.
It's amazing to me, I run across this all the time,
but people have this idea with books
that if you start a book,
you have to finish every single page
or else you're a fucking loser, an idiot and a failure.
I don't understand why people have this attitude.
You don't keep watching movies you don't like.
You don't keep watching TV shows you don't like.
You skip YouTube videos that are boring.
Why do you force yourself to read a book that's not good.
It makes no sense.
Again, I think some of this comes back to our schooling.
In school, you were graded
based on how much of the book you read.
To get a good grade, you have to read all the book.
Life does not work that way.
Take it from a non-fiction author,
most non-fiction books are full of crap.
The average non-fiction book has two,
maybe three useful chapters in it.
Most non-fiction books are glorified blog posts,
repeated over and over and over for 200 pages.
If I'm reading chapter one and I get the idea,
and then I get the chapter two,
and the author is basically just restating
the idea from chapter one in a different way,
I fucking skip chapter two, I go to chapter three.
And then if chapter three
is repeating the same idea in another way,
I skipped that one too.
In fact, most books, if I realized
that they aren't dense with valuable information,
I just go straight to the table of contents,
and I asked myself, which chapters look interesting?
Oh, chapter one, three, seven, and 14.
Okay, I'll read those.
I know that if I read those and they're great,
maybe I'll go back and look at another chapter
or find something else to read, but if not, that's fine.
I'd say half of the books that I end up reading,
I probably read half of the text in them, maybe less.
And you shouldn't feel bad about this.
The point of reading is to serve you,
not for you to serve the book.
Similarly, if a book is just bad, fucking put it down.
Move on to the next one.
I have a personal rule.
I always read at least 10% of a book before I decide
whether to put it down or not.
If it's a 200 page book, I give it 20 pages.
But if I hit 20 pages and I'm not into it,
I look at the table of contents, nothing looks interesting.
I put it away.
I'd take for every two books that I buy and I read,
there's one book that I buy and I ended up not reading
'cause I just don't really like it.
And I don't feel guilty about that.
Finally, what you'll find
when you start reading more and more,
is that a lot of non-fiction stuff repeats itself.
So at this point,
I've probably read like a hundred psychology books.
And what you discover is that there are maybe half a dozen
seminal studies in the field of psychology.
Major, major breakthroughs in the field
that get repeated all the time.
If I have to read about the fucking marshmallow test
one more time, done by Walter Mischel in 1972,
I'll fucking gag.
So when I'm reading a book and I come across,
oh, it's the marshmallow test,
skip five pages, go onto the next thing.
You'll find all the time that authors use similar anecdotes,
they use similar examples, they use similar stories,
and when you keep running into these things
over and over again, just skip them.
You already know what's in them, so why read it again?
For some reason out of these five tips that I always give
this one is the most surprising
and most difficult for people.
I don't understand
why people have so much emotional attachment or judgment
based on how many words in a book that they read.
For non-fiction, if you're reading every single word
of every single book, you're doing it wrong.
Now for fiction, it's a completely different story.
No pun intended.
If a fiction book's good, you read every word.
If a fiction book's bad, you fucking stop and put it away.
All right, tip number four.
Schedule your reading time.
Now, everybody I talked to who wants to read more,
they all say the same thing,
"But Mark, I'm so busy, I don't have enough time.
"You should see my schedule."
It's no excuse.
Reading is the easiest, most transportable hobby
or interest or activity that is there ever.
It's so fucking easy.
You can read on your commutes in the morning
or listen to an audio book.
You can read on your lunch breaks.
I always have an article or a book to read
while I'm eating lunch.
I often take a book to the gym and read in between sets
or even during sets.
Hell, if the books you're reading are big enough,
you can do sets with the books.
Hell, sometimes I keep a book in the bathroom
so I can read while I take a shit.
I play a little game with myself.
I try to read more pages than I have flushes.
I call it poop for pages.
(chuckles)
That might be the stupidest thing I've ever said on camera.
And this doesn't even get into scheduling time in your day.
Even without scheduling anything,
I can easily find at least 30 minutes a day to read.
And then if you schedule time on top of that,
it's an easy 60 minutes at least.
And this is what people don't understand.
Like people see that I read all these books
and they think I'm like superhuman or something.
I'm not superhuman.
My reading speed isn't that much
above the average reading speed.
The trick is consistency.
The average person can read a page
in roughly about two minutes.
So if you read 60 minutes per day,
that's 30 pages a day.
And if you figure the average book is about 300 pages
well, now you're reading a book every 10 days
or 37 books per year.
But if you're being smart
and you're putting away shitty books
and you're skipping shitty chapters,
then you're gonna end up reading way more than that.
You're gonna end up reading like 40 or 50 books a year.
And that's just by dedicating an hour a day.
All right, and tip number five,
read more than one book at a time.
This is another one that people have
a lot of weird beliefs about.
Like the idea that reading two books at the same time
is twice as mentally challenging
as reading one book at a time.
It's not, actually, it's easier than reading only one book.
Why?
Because when you get sick of that first book,
you just move to the second one
and it feels exciting and new again.
And then when you get sick of the second one,
you go back to the first one.
I actually find it much easier to sustain my attention
and excitement for both books
if I'm able to jump back and forth between them.
I generally try to read three books at any given time.
And I divide them up into three categories in my head.
I have kind of the philosophically
and technically challenging book.
I have just a general non-fiction educational book.
Then I have like a light fiction or a biography
or something like that.
I see it as like my fun book.
Sometimes if the philosophical book is very challenging
and requires a lot of mental effort,
I'll schedule time in my day to actually sit down
and read that philosophical book.
If I'm reading a novel and it's really fucking good,
sometimes I'll just screw the whole morning
and read my novel.
Sometimes I just get sick of one of my books
and I set it down for a week or two.
Then I come back when I'm more mentally refreshed.
All right, so we've got some basic tips
on how to read quicker and more efficiently.
We've got tips on how to be ruthless in your book selection,
and also how to be more practical in terms of finding time
during the day to read.
Now, let's talk about remembering what you read,
because one of the most common questions I get from people
is what is your note-taking system?
How do you remember all this stuff?
How do you know where you saw what study?
People like to assume that I've got this
like massive database of notes with like a super computer
linking like 800 different concepts
and ideas with sources and citations.
No.
No, I don't use any of that stuff.
In fact, I use almost nothing.
This actually, let's call this the harsh truth of the day.
(dramatic music)
The harsh truth of the day is that
highlighting and note-taking is basically worthless.
This upsets a lot of people.
And again, I don't fucking know why.
Why would you wanna highlight a book?
Like that's just, that sounds really annoying.
Again, this comes from school.
In school, the reason you thought highlighting is important
or note-taking is important
is because you were tested on what you read.
People mistake the highlighting for memory.
Studies have consistently shown highlighting, underlining,
notes in the margin, this has no effect in your retention.
The only point of doing it was so that when you went back
and studied for the test, you knew what to look at.
Now, some people say,
"Well, you can do the same thing with books
"you read for fun.
"You can highlight all the cool parts.
"And then a month later you go back
"and you check all the parts you highlighted.
"So you can remember."
(giggles)
Well, that sounds fucking awful,
'cause now you're just doing school in like real life.
Why would you do that?
Here's the thing about human memory.
We remember things that we use.
If I read a book on nutrition,
the way I'm gonna remember what I read
is by actually changing what I eat
and paying attention to what I eat.
If I just highlight the whole nutrition book
and then I eat the same garbage I always eat,
I'm not gonna remember anything.
Basically, we remember what's useful.
If you don't find ways to implement
the ideas you read into your life in some way,
you're not gonna remember them.
And you're gonna have this feeling of like,
"Wow, I read all these books
"and I have no idea what's in them."
Yeah, 'cause you didn't fucking do anything.
(upbeat music)
Ultimately, the only reason to read non-fiction
is to change your life in some way,
is to become smarter in some way,
to improve yourself in some way.
Now here's the thing, a lot of books,
it's kind of hard to use what you read.
I mean even in my own books,
it's about concepts and principles.
You know, it's not like,
"Oh, go out and do X, Y, Z,
"and then you'll make a million dollars."
Like there's none of that stuff in it.
So this idea of like using stuff that you read,
it's actually kind of a nebulous abstract thing.
I can read a principle and my using it
can simply be having a different perspective
on an area of my life than I had before.
For example, when I read Kant's moral philosophy,
I found his ethical principles to be very profound.
And I was able to see how they apply to a lot of my beliefs
about people and relationships and ethics in general.
And so a lot of times using something we've read,
it just happens in our mind,
but still we have to make that mental effort.
We have to go through that process of saying,
"Okay, I read this, how does this apply to my own life?"
(upbeat music)
Now, if you are really dead set on like having a hack
to remember the stuff you read,
there are ways to kind of trick your brain into thinking
that you were using the stuff you read
so that you remember it better.
One of them is to simply talk about the ideas
to somebody else.
So you read a really cool book about neuroscience,
go find a friend or somebody else
who's willing to be bored to tears,
and describe to them what you just read.
The human mind remembers what's useful,
and generally humans tend to see social interactions
as the most useful and important things
that happen in our lives.
So when you tell somebody else about an idea,
your brain is subconsciously saying,
"Oh, this must be really important."
Now the last thing I'm gonna say about remembering stuff
is that you don't have to remember every idea
from every book you've read.
You only have to remember what ideas are in every book
that you've read.
So speaking of neuroscience,
there's this famous neuroscientist named Antonio Damasio.
I've read two of his books.
I couldn't explain off the top of my head
exactly what's in his books.
I'm not a neuroscientist, it's not my area of expertise,
it's not a piece of knowledge I use frequently,
but I remember the arguments in those books.
And so I know where to look,
if I need to find those neuroscience arguments again.
So the importance is not necessarily remembering
everything you read,
it's remembering where you read it,
because when you need something,
you can just go grab the book off the shelf and find it.
Takes two minutes, I do it all the time.
90% of the stuff in my articles and books,
it's 'cause I grabbed shit off the shelf
and I went looking for it.
I'm like, "Oh yeah, there is that thing.
"There's that experiment.
"Lemme write about that."
The only reason to try to obsessively remember
every single thing you read
is if you wanna impress people at parties.
And let's be honest,
who the fuck wants to impress people at parties?
All right, that's a wrap.
Be sure to like this video, subscribe to the channel,
I'm gonna have a lot more practical life tips coming out.
And you know, if you're really ballsy, post in the comments,
how many books you have read this year
and how many you wish you could read?
I think you'd actually be surprised
how easy it is to bridge that gap.
Until next time, Manson out.
(upbeat music)