Speed up the Input

A few years back I set a goal that I wanted to read over 100 books a year. As of this writing I have not accomplished that feat, but I did read over 50 books last year. The reason to read this many books is to quench my thirst for knowledge and ideas. I learned late in life that books have an enormous amount of life lessons and ideas that may have taken the author years if not decades to learn and master. A book is your shortcut to their knowledge and a good map to avoid the pitfalls that they experienced.

I wanted to find other ways to feed my brain. One was watching YouTube and learning how these creators created their art. Another way was to download and buy audio books.

So I started to listen to audio books, at first I listened to books that I have already read, this was a great way to get a refresher and to also pick up something that I may have missed in the book.

One day I accidentally hit the settings button and found a speed tab, not sure what it was I played around with it. I had the option to increase the speed by 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%, and 100%. I went straight to 100%, double the speed. The first book I was listening too, the reader spoke pretty fast on normal, at twice as fast, I could not understand what they were saying. I settled on 70%.

I maintained this speed for about 4 months. I then wanted to see if I could go to max speed, twice as fast. So I did, by this time I was used to the 1.7X speed that the extra 30% was not the difficult to comprehend. My mind and my ears adjusted to the higher speeds.

I then wanted to see what normal sounded like. This was an eye opener, because normal seemed really slow. The reader seemed as if he was dragging on every syllable, and really drawing out every word. But it was not the reader, it was my mind. I was so use to everything going twice as fast that normal seemed really slow. Similar to when you are in a vehicle and going say 70 MPH on the expressway then get off and go on a city street at 35MPH, it almost appears as if you are barely moving.

So with this new found ability to listen to the books faster I will be able to get through them faster as well.

The amazing thing, as I learned, is that we can train other parts of our bodies, or senses to gather data faster. If you are willing to practice you can read faster, type faster, write faster, so same they can sleep faster as well. I am sure there will be some physical limitations at some point, but if you are not satisfied with the speed in which you are receiving data and you have the ability to do so, crank up the speed a notch. Then after a few weeks crank it up another notch.

Don’t stop learning!