One of my favourites movies of all time is, The Matrix, and one scene, in particular, stands out for me—the scene where Neo fights Morpheus in a Test Program.  In the scene before that epic fight, Neo gets plugged in with a wire, and one of the Techies onboard of the Nebuchadnezzar uploads kung fu data into Neo's brain.  Seconds later, the upload is completed, and Neo opens his eyes and is a master in kung fu and says, "I know Kung Fu".

After watching that scene for the first time, I thought how badass and useful it would be if you could learn any skill that fasts.  Too bad that it is impossible in real life.  But is it really?  What if we could 10 x or 100 x our reading speed?  What would happen to our life if we could accelerate our learning exponentially?  Is not the life that we are living right now a direct reflection of the things that we have learned up to this point.

I always enjoyed learning.  What I did not enjoy, were the hours you had to put in to learn something complex.

Sometimes, reading a book took me forever.  Being the lazy bastard that I am, I always look for shortcuts.  Shortly after, I found myself fascinated with accelerated learning and speed reading in particular.  If you have read my other articles then, you know that I have the superpower to fail spectacularly.  I got kicked out of multiple schools, and I failed so many exams that at a certain point, I began to question my very self.  Maybe school just was not for me.  Maybe I was not smart enough.  Luckily for me, I started studying psychology.  I began to study the ways of how our brain processes information, how we store memory, and how we learn.  I also learned that our school system was founded like 100 years ago, and during that time, we knew very little about how humans learn, and that the entire system sucks.

This, to me, was a revelation and the lifting of a burden.  It was not that my brain was not capable enough; I was not too stupid; it was a combination of bad habits and a system that did not understand, really, how our brain learns.  We get taught basically that intelligence is a fixed entity.  When I learned how our brain really works, I also learned that I did not have to stay stupid.  That I can get smart, and that I can get smarter fast.

In the following article, I describe an easy hack that allowed me to up my book total from 1-2 books a year to 200 plus.  In my past, I had tons of learning disabilities and problems in general with my education.  Eventually, I became tired of fucking up and really started to research what learning is about.  I studied memory champions, speed readers, and read tons of books about accelerated learning.  Have you ever started a book and it took you forever to finish it?  Then this article might be something for you.

The Px Project —How To Improve Your Reading Speed By 300%

What is the Px Project?

The Px Project is a cognitive speed reading experiment.  It is based on the human visual system and works with mechanisms that eliminate eye movement inefficiencies that we have while reading.  The improvement rate of this experiment is bananas.  In a 3- hour cognitive experiment, the average increase in reading speed was 386%.  I tried the method for myself, and within 20 minutes, I doubled my reading speed.  A 20-minute investment and you read 100% faster for the rest of your life?  Fuck Bitcoins, now this is what I call a return!  Tim wrote an amazing article on the topic, and I highly recommend that you check his blog out.  Click here.

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Who is Tim Ferris

Tim Ferris is a bestselling American author, entrepreneur, and self-proclaimed "human guinea pig".  He is most famous for his self-help books.  You might have heard of his book, "The 4- Hour Workweek.  But, what he is most famous for is his Podcast, The Tim Ferris Show, which has over 80 million downloads.  In his podcast, Tim interviews world experts and masters of any field imaginable.  Guests like Peter Diamandis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Fox, Dave Asprey, and other incredible high achievers.

How Do We Read?

We read in saccadic movements.  That means, we read in jumps.  I always thought for example, that we read in a straight line, but what is wrong is our eye jumps to a certain point and stays there for a millisecond.  Imagine your eye like a camera rather than a video recorder.  Your eye camera takes different, separated pictures, and your brains binds them together in a holistic picture.

So What Are The 3 Bullet Points Of Speed Reading?

We must minimise the number of jumps and the duration of the fixations per line.

1. We do not read in a straight line.
2. We must eliminate jumping in the wrong direction.
3. If we increase our vision (think of it as getting a better and wider camera objective), we can increase the number of words in our focus.

So, speed reading is not about skipping content; it is about implementing information of how our visual system actually works.  Think of your eyes as your car, and the word lines in a book as your streets.  So far, you always took the long route.  Implementing knowledge about how our eyes move is basically taking a shortcut or the most efficient way to your goal.

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