Speed Reading is Bullshit — at least for me
The first time I learned about reading speed was from Quantum Learning. I read the book when I was in seventh grade. Part of the book talked about reading fast — using your peripheral vision to improve your reading speed.
I tried, and I never understood how. I believed that I was too stupid to be able to speed-read. I mean, I didn’t understand the pages that I read speedily. It was just random words roaming in my head.
My first and second languages are not English, and as you may know, non-fiction books in my national language (Indonesian) are not as abundant as those in English. Of course, what I mean is that books in English are plentiful. But again, I needed to understand this foreign language.
I forced myself to read articles, and here I am — I am now able to understand most English books. But again, I found a new book (new for me, but actually an ancient one) that talks entirely about speed reading. Once again, I never really learned it. I tried to read it and implement the techniques again.
But speed reading in English is even harder than in my own language. Luckily, now I have a mentor. His name is ChatGPT. I asked him:
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“Why can I never read speedily?”
He said, “Speed reading is not about understanding all the passages, but about understanding the words that you see. You try to see all the words, not read them, and let your brain take the essence.”
Well, I tried. But you know what? It’s better to use AI to extract the essence if all I want is to understand the core ideas of a book, right?
But books are not only about short main ideas or mind maps. They contain arguments, stories, and the author’s thoughts.
I mean, it’s available everywhere if you just want to know what Atomic Habits is about. But reading a book fully makes me feel connected with the writer — the story, the nuances, the tone, the way they convey messages that cannot be fully captured by AI.
Moreover, now some authors even use AI and ask it to write in certain tones. But we know — it’s not human.
So instead of speed reading, I will just use AI to help me speed up my understanding of a book’s concepts. Then I can skip the boring parts and directly find the sections that interest me.
And some books, I will read at a normal speed — or even slowly — because I look up meanings in the dictionary, search the concepts, research the people mentioned, explore the books referenced, dig into the history or stories involved, take notes, and practice what the book tells me to do.
