Wanting To Know the Secret To Read More Books? Learn To Master Book Skimming
An effective technique but too little used.
Knowledge is what will enable you to change your life and achieve your most ambitious goals. This is my deepest belief in life. I read a lot of books because I consider books to be an extraordinary place to gain new knowledge and skills. Of course, I am not alone in thinking that reading is the key to success.
All of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time constantly promote reading. Bill Gates even maintains a dedicated blog in which he details the reading notes of every book he reads.
A reporter once asked Elon Musk, “How did you learn to build success?”. Do you know what Elon Musk replied?
Elon Musk answered naturally:
“I learned to build rockets by reading books.”
From an early age, Elon Musk was aware of the power of books. He learned to program in BASIC when he was 12 years old in the early 1980s. While the book offered a course lasting several months, Elon Musk managed to create his first video game in a few days. He then sold it for $500 to a computer magazine.
These entrepreneurs often explain that they read several dozen books every month. Nonfiction books with several hundred pages. Even though you spend time reading every day, you still wonder how they manage to read so many books. On your side, you are stuck at 3 or 4 at the most.
That's where an intelligent reading technique comes in, highlighted by Mortimer Adler in the book “How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading”. This book was originally published in the 1940s, but strangely enough, too few people know about it and have therefore failed to master the intelligent reading technique that I am about to reveal to you.
This technique has a name: skimming.
The 5-step process for skimming a book correctly
Knowing how to skim a nonfiction book correctly is essential. Even if you plan to read the whole book later, skimming will help you get more out of it by preparing you to take in everything it has to offer. This is the technique practiced by all those entrepreneurs who claim to read up to 60 books every month...
There are 5 steps to skimming a book:
You start by reading the preface of the book. Read it quickly to learn what the book is about and to relate it to other books you may have read on the same subject. This will help prepare your mind to integrate the essential information on the subject.
Reading the table of contents is the second step. This can be compared to opening a road map when you are visualizing your path on a journey. You will have a complete overview of the path the author of the book wants you to take to get to the goal of the book.
Read the book index. The book's index will allow you to discover all the keywords used in the book. You will be able to make connections with your previous readings. If none of the key topics in the book seem familiar to you, you will likely need more time to integrate the book's content. When you find words that seem more important, you should go and read the associated passage in the book. You will already be absorbing the central points of the book.
Read the key chapters. After reading the table of contents, you should have identified the key chapters of the book. Your job is to identify them so you can read them. These are the chapters where the author's main point is made.
Read the ending. The author's conclusion and final thoughts are a must-read. It will help you get the full picture of the author's arguments. Indeed, very few authors resist the temptation to summarize what they think in the last pages of their book. You should take advantage of this, as it saves you a lot of time.
This whole process takes between 1 and 2 hours. This will allow you to “read” more books than ever before and still get the essential substance. In case some books seem more interesting than others during the skimming process, you may decide to take more time to read them in detail.
You will then get more out of it since you will already have in your mind the essential points you want to dig into in the book. Finally, it will also allow you to eliminate books from your reading list and thus spend your time on things that are more important to you.
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