How do you manage to read so much? Well a lot of that's good fortune, you know like
I seem to have a knack for reading. It's not, it was a gift you know, like when I
was a kid if I look at a word once I can always spell it, like I have it instantly
and I've been like that ever since I was little and so I seem to have a facility
for a very rapid verbal comprehension and then my father taught me to read
when I was very young and I think it was the combination of those two things that
enabled that for me you know I had the natural proclivity a verbal ability, you
know I my graduate supervisor, very smart guy Robert Peel, guy I really like
he had trouble with spelling, you know I don't know why exactly that is, people
have different talents and I had a talent for immediate recognition and memory
of words and and and I'm also very verbally fluent, so I think mostly it's
an innate talent, you know now I also do know that the more you read generally
speaking the faster you get. My wife is really like she always read but she's
really started to read a lot since she got a Kindle, she turns out she really likes her
Kindle. She reads a lot more in her reading speed has increased a lot. A lot
of it's practice. You can try to speed up your reading by reading a little faster
than you're comfortable with. It I don't know the research literature indicating
the utility of that, but practice is always useful. The other thing is is that
you want to make it part of habit, you both conceptually and practically a lot
of people don't read because they're afraid of books. The books aren't their
friend so you might want to get a few books and kind of make them your friend
You can start with simpler books you know like fiction
There's lots of good fiction writ written for adolescents and children
It's pretty straightforward you could start there if you're interested in
Philosophy there's lots of simple guides like the idiots guide to different
topics or a beginner's guide I read those things all the time when I'm first
investigating a new topic you know, I start with the introductory material and
I make time for reading like and it was it that was encouraged in my family like
always read before I went to sleep I read and I still do that somewhat less
so because I've become so distracted by social media, but you set aside a bit of
time every day to read it for me it was always just before I went to bed I go to
bed turn the light read for when I was a kid for hours but and if you do
something every day you do a lot of it and so I would say well if you want to
read if you want to make yourself educated just put aside 20 minutes a day
to read or ten, you know some small amount of time that you could actually
steal not two hours because good luck man, it's very unlikely you'll manage
that but twenty minutes a day you know that's two hours a week that's 700 hours
a year, you know that's even if you're a slow reader
that's a good number of books and so you make it a habitual part of your
life and you decide that it's going to be something that you value you
investigate carefully what resistances you might have to that idea because you
might think well that's pseudo intellectual or there's something more
productive I can be doing or I'm intimidated by books or I hate books
because I wasn't good at reading when I was a kid and I was humiliated because
of it or you know you've got something against intellectuals or God there might
all sorts of resistances to picking up a book then you can listen to audiobooks
that's a good way around that, by hook or by crook man so you value it you make it
a regular part of your life you practice doing it and and you you need a higher
goal too it's like well why should you read
well so that you're more informed and you can think better why should you be
more informed and think better because you won't walk blindly into so many pits
you know you'll be able negotiate better in your life because you'll be more
informed and more verbally fluent and you'll have a better sense of how the
world works and they'll hold your own in conversations and that'll make you more
confident those are all unbelievably good reasons this to be highly literate
is it's an incredibly massive massive advantage, practical advantage you know
and it shouldn't be underestimated