 If you're somebody who's just sitting there and you're spending your time on Netflix and you're spending your time on Instagram, if you fast forward 10 years, the world's gonna be real, real different. The people who are the most knowledgeable, who can solve the most problems, who are the most intelligent, are always going to win. Today, I'm gonna be giving you three tips to read and learn anything faster. And I'm gonna teach you my strategies for the way that I've learned to read faster and also be able to retain much more information by doing it this way. I'll tell you this and I'll be honest with you. Most people who are in the personal development space wouldn't be honest and tell you this. I'm not a fan of reading. I'm just not really a fan. I'd rather go onto YouTube and have somebody tell me about a book than actually sit down and read a book. And so what I've learned though, if I want to actually read books and get a lot of information, how can I actually speed that time up, get it done way quicker, but make my retention of that information even better? And so today I'm gonna give you a secret that few people know about. I don't know why a few people know about it. But it'll really help you out in learning and retaining your information much, much faster. So the first tip that I'm gonna give you is to start using Kindle. Now I know, I get it guys, I'm one of the people who loves holding on to a physical book as well. I do, and this is what everybody tells me when I tell them I need to get a Kindle. What I do though is I use my iPhone and I also use my iPad and I use Kindle on it. Why? Because I do a lot of traveling. I'd rather not have to travel with a bunch of different books. I'd rather just have my books on my Kindle. But there's a secret that Kindle has and Audible has as well. When you go and you buy a Kindle book and you just have the Kindle app, it's free on your iPhone or your iPad. When you buy them, I would say it's probably 90% of books on Kindle and you're about to buy, the cool thing is that you can click a little button and it says add Audible narration for, it's usually like $7.49. It's cheaper to buy the actual, than buying the physical book itself. It's cheaper to buy a Kindle and get the Audible narration with it as well. And what's cool about it is it's also cheaper, even though you get the audio book, it's cheaper than getting the audio book by itself. So you get the physical book on your Kindle and you get the audio book as well. Here's the reason why this is so great because you can use this thing called Whisper Sync and Whisper Sync will actually, as it's reading the actual book to you, it will highlight the words that it's saying to you at that point in time. And so it can double, if not triple your reading speed because you're actually reading and hearing it at the same time. Now this is what's beautiful about it. When you're just reading a book, you're just reading a book. But when you're reading and listening to a book, it's using instead of one sense, which is just your sight, it's using your sight and it's also using your hearing. It's using both of those at the same time, which means you're more likely to retain that information because of the fact that you can actually use multiple senses at one time. And here's the interesting thing about it too. Humans can hear four times faster than they can read. And so if you really want to speed up the process of getting books read, I've taken books that have taken me literally, I don't know about you guys, but it'll take me a month to read a book sometimes. By using this exact strategy, it'll turn it into like four to five days. And I can get through an entire book much quicker, much less effort and much better retention than if I were to just read a physical book by itself. And the beautiful thing about it is this, is when you use Kindle, I'm not sponsored by Kindle, they should sponsor me for how many freaking people I tell this to, I should be able to make some commission off of this, but I'm not. The beautiful thing about it as well, is that I like to go back and read books. So when I go back and read a book, everything that I highlight, because I'm a big highlighter and note taker, you can highlight and take notes inside of Kindle as well. But what's cool is if I want to go back and read, you know, the power of now by Eckhart Tolle, I can go back and just read the parts that I've highlighted. So you can literally hit the highlight section and go back and read all of the parts that you've highlighted and all of the notes that you've taken as well. And so other than holding a physical book, in my opinion, there is no other benefit to buying a physical copy of a book, even though you like the smell of it, you like the feeling of it, all of that stuff. What I'm really worried about is how can I retain this information as much as possible and get it done as quick as possible because I like efficiency. And like I said, the beautiful thing is that you can highlight it, you can highlight different colors. And so whenever I have something that I'm reading and I'm just doing a normal highlight, it's just yellow. If I'm highlighting something and I'm looking at turning this into a potential episode, I'll highlight it in red so that I can go back and look at all of my notes and then turn those notes into a podcast episode. It's freaking amazing. And I can put my notes in, I can literally type my notes in and each one of different ideas for episodes, all of that stuff. So I recommend, try it out. If you have an iPhone, download it. It's just Kindle. And then go and download a Kindle book and add audible narration next time that you do it. So that is tip number one. Use Kindle to read faster and use audible narration to help you with that as well. Tip number two, you've heard me say this so many damn times, it's crazy. Use the Pomodoro technique. The Pomodoro technique, I literally use it every single day, almost all day long. It is, you work for 25 minutes and you take five minutes off. You work for 25 minutes, you take five minutes off. For 25 minutes, the only thing that you do is one task. If planning a podcast episode is my task, I will take my phone, I will put my phone in the other room, I'll put my headphones on and I will put on, I'll have a cup of coffee or a cup of tea and I will literally just sit there and I will only do one thing, create an episode for 25 minutes. The average person usually has one spike of really high productivity in that time and then it continues to drop for the rest of the time that you're doing it. So if you sit there and you're like, I'm gonna plan and work for the next hour and a half, instead of working for an hour and a half straight, it is scientifically proven through brain activity that you will get more done if instead of doing an hour and a half, you do three, 25 minute on, five minute off, 25 minute off, five minute off, 25 minute off, five minutes off, you will get way more productivity done in that exact same amount of time. So I recommend if you're reading a book and you're trying to retain the information, if you're trying to read faster and you're trying to retain the information much, much better, the best thing that you can do is use a palmodar technique. Okay, I wanna read for the next hour. Well then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take 25 minutes and I'm gonna read and I'm gonna get myself as focused as I possibly can. I'm gonna take my phone, I'm gonna put it in the other room. The only thing that I have in front of me is my book or my Kindle. And for the next 25 minutes, this is the only thing I'm gonna focus on. After 25 minutes, my alarm on my iPad goes off, says, hey, you've got five minutes. For five minutes I go and I walk outside, I get some sun on my skin, play with my dogs. And then after those five minutes, I go back into learning and reading, knowing the way that my brain works that I will actually retain more information and work better if I use a palmodar technique. So if you want to learn, much better and read faster, these two tips together will help you immensely. So that is number two. And then the third thing, which might be the most important of all of this, is to teach somebody, teach anybody, teach your dog, teach your cat, teach somebody. The best way to learn something is to teach it as soon as you get done learning it. Because when you teach something, right after you learn it, your brain is making new neurosynaptic connections. And once your brain makes a new connection, that connection will never go away. And so if you've ever thought to yourself, for instance, if you're in college right now, and you go to a lecture, and you go to the lecture and the teacher's speaking for an hour, an hour and a half, whatever it is, and you're taking a whole bunch of notes and stuff, and then later on that evening, someone's like, hey, what did you learn in class today? You're like, I don't even remember. Even though I was fully there, even though I was listening, even though I was taking notes, I don't really remember what was being taught in that class. Why don't you remember it? Well, usually because you're learning passively. Passively means you're just listening. You want to learn actively. If you learn actively, you are 10 times more likely to remember whatever it is that you just learned. So how do you take passive learning, sitting there and listening to somebody on audible narration or reading it, or listening to someone speak on a stage? How do you take it and make it from passive learning into active learning? Is to actively go and teach it. That will make new neurosynaptic connections to your brain, which means that you are 10 times more likely to be able to recall that information. The best way to do it is to, if you are in a relationship, after you get done with your hour of learning, or you get done with your hour of reading or whatever it is, go and tell your boyfriend or girlfriend or spouse what it is that you just learned. If you live by yourself and you're completely single, take out a pen and paper. It's better if you can use a pen and paper as well. Take out a pen and paper and speak out loud as if there was somebody next to you that wanted you to teach them what you just learned. Because if you write it down and you teach it, you're literally requiring your brain to actually start making those new connections and actually hard wire that information that you just learned into your brain. If you really wanna learn faster, this is the absolute best way to do it. Whether it's a YouTube video you're watching, whether it's my podcast that you're listening to and you're taking notes on, or a lecture that you're at school, when you get back to your house, when you get back to your dorm, when you get back around other people or even if you do it by yourself, take out a pen and paper and write down everything that you just learned so that therefore you can make it hardwired into your brain. This is something that I do all of the time. Anytime I learn something new and I watch somebody who's, I watch some pretty complex sometimes, neurologists and biologists and early childhood psychologists talking about things that are really freaking deep and sometimes makes my head wanna explode. I'll take notes on my iPad of all of the stuff that they're saying and then what I'll do is I'll go back and I will reteach that to usually my fiance or if she's not around, I will reteach it to myself and I will hear myself say it because then I'm writing it down, I'm saying it and I'm hearing myself say it all at the same time. The beautiful thing about it is you can do all of these things and it doesn't cost you a whole lot of money. There is no excuse at this point in time to not be extremely knowledgeable in anything that you wanna be knowledgeable in. And let's say that, cause some people are like, well, that sounds nice to have a Kindle, it sounds nice to be able to go and buy books, it sounds nice to be able to do that, but I'm broke as hell right now, okay? Cool, let's say that you're really poor, okay? You're really poor and you can't afford books right now. There's apps that are on your phone that you can download like Overdrive and there's a few other ones as well, where literally if you walk into your local library and you have a library card, you can go into Overdrive and Overdrive will allow you to hook up your library card to your phone and you can start listening to audiobooks absolutely free, cost you nothing. So you can listen to the audiobook, you can go into the library and get a physical copy, you can go on to YouTube. YouTube has so many lessons that you could watch and learn from certain people. You can be watching this on YouTube right now, if you're listening to your phone, go on YouTube and type in Rob Dahl, you'll see hundreds of videos that I've put up there as well, absolutely free. If you go onto YouTube and you're like, hey, there's a book I really wanna get the audiobook for but I can't find it on my local library and I don't have any money to go and buy the actual audiobook or Kindle version. Cool, go ahead and type in the power of now audiobook or think and grow rich audiobook. Type in all of those books, 99% of the time, those books are already on YouTube. So you literally have no excuse to not be reading and not consuming content as much as possible. Anything that you want to learn in this world is absolutely at your fingertips. There's no reason why you can't be learning. It's like the quote says the man who does not read has no advantage over the man that cannot read and so if you're out there and you're not reading and you're not learning and you're not trying to constantly get better, you're going to be left in the dust. I'm telling you, it's very easy to see that this world and technology and everything is moving extremely fast. If you're somebody who's just sitting there and you're spending your time on Netflix and you're spending your time on Instagram and you're not actively putting time into your schedule to learn, to read, to get better, if you fast forward 10 years, the world's gonna be real, real different. I don't know what's gonna be happening in the real world in 10 years, but I do know this, the people who are the most knowledgeable, who can solve the most problems, who are the most intelligent, are always going to win and so the easiest thing, there has never been more knowledge at your fingertips than there is right now. Use your schedule, figure out time that you can schedule it in. If you're listening to this podcast, you're probably already a time a person wants to learn in Gronius, which is a beautiful thing, but then start asking yourself, how can I be learning all day long? How can I constantly be learning? Like for me, when you come over to my house, those of you guys that are watching on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, there's a big old TV that's right behind me, that TV is almost always playing something on YouTube and so when I'm in my office, which is not in the same room, it's still playing something on YouTube. Whatever it is, it's gonna be something motivational, inspirational, it's a speech from someone that I look up to. It continues to keep playing on autoply, all of these different videos, so that if I come out of a meeting and I walk into my kitchen to go get some tea, I might catch three minutes of somebody talking. I'm constantly trying to learn, I'm constantly trying to grow. Whenever I get into my car, sure I play music a lot of times as well, but probably about 40% of the time I'm playing the music, probably about 60% of the time I'm trying to listen to something that's going to make me better. There's so many opportunities that we have to learn and grow and get better. All we have to do is just figure out how to put those into our day. When you're in the shower, are you just, you know, is it quiet? Or can you put on a podcast? Can you put on something that you can listen to? Can you put on a YouTube? Can you put on an audio book of something that you've been wanting to listen to for a long time? We have no excuse to not be extremely intelligent. It's amazing. It's a freaking blessing. And so if you use these three tips, you will be able to learn and read faster and you'll be able to comprehend and store information into your brain as long as you're using the tips to be able to teach it as well. Hey, thanks so much for watching this video. If you wanna learn even more about mastering your mind, click right here and watch this video as well. We have mastered the art of distraction. So why is it hard to focus? Because you're a freaking professional of distraction to yourself.