Warren Buffett’s Best Kept Secret to Success: The Art of Reading, Remembering, and Retaining More Books

Warren Buffett advises everyone to read more, and that’s certainly a goal we can all get behind. So how do we do it? And what are we to do with all that information once we have it? Reading more and remembering it all is a discussion with a lot of different layers and interesting possibilities.

How fast do you read?

Comprehension still matters, and some reports say that speed reading or skimming leads to forgotten details and poor retention.

• If you can bump up your words per minute marginally while still maintaining your reading comprehension, it can certainly pay dividends in your quest to read more.

Buy an e-reader

The average reader of e-books reads 24 books in a year.

• Read more by not reading at all
• How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read
• Pierre Bayard suggests that we view the act of reading on a spectrum and that we consider more categories for books besides simply “have or haven’t read.”
• In Bayard’s system, he essentially is counting books he’s skimmed, heard about, or forgotten as books that he’s read.

Three ways to remember what you read

Train your brain with impression, association, and repetition

• Impression: Be impressed with the text
• Association: Link the text to something you already know
• Repetition: The more you read, the more you remember
• Focus on the four levels of reading
• Elementary Inspectional, Analytical, Syntopical
• Keep the book close (or at least your notes on the book)
• Take good notes
• Bookmark your favorite passages
• Use your Kindle Highlights extensively
• And when you’ve done these things, return to your notes periodically to review and refresh

How much do you read?

A 2012 study by the Pew Research Center found that adults read an average of 17 books a year.

• Wanting to read more might simply mean having more time to read and reading more content-books, magazines, articles, blog posts-in whole.

Over to you

How many books do you read each year?

5 ways to read more books, blogs, and articles

Read for speed: Tim Ferriss’ guide to reading 300% faster

• Perceptual Expansion: train your peripheral vision to be more effective by picking up words that you don’t track directly with your eye
• Try a brand new way of reading: Spritz and Blinkist
• Spritz shows one word of an article or book at a time inside a box.
• Blinkist is a reimagining of the way we consume books
• Breaking down chapters into bite-sized parts to make them easier to digest

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