An average CEO read a book every week. This is how you can do it according to experts.
What do they have in common? An average CEO reads voraciously! Although, people may say that nobody takes pleasure in reading anymore, that honestly isn't true.
If you are to ask an executive or a CEO their secret in leadership, they would tell you that reading does help. They read an average of 4-5 books per month. We are talking here about leaders who are game-changers, innovators, the ones that rebuild industries and provides innumerable job opportunities. This alone speaks volumes on how significant reading does to an aspiring individual.
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The popular brain coach, Jim Kwik, stated that to manage reading more books lies in the speed-reading technique. As a founder of Kwik Learning, this brain fitness coach has been tutoring people to develop their speed-reading skills.
Aside from Kwik’s tip, here are other tips to read more books than the average.
1. Stop subvocalizing
This is your inner monologue and most readers do this as well. Subvocalization is a process where you speak in your head when you read. Reading while you read is a technique our teachers taught us. "Read in your head, as I read it out loud", is what they often instruct us to do. Our habit of subvocalization originated from this. However, since we are now proficient, we have to stop doing it.
The reason subvocalization slows you down is that reading speed is the same as the average talking speed. You only increase your reading speed once you have eliminated your inner monologue.
2. Word-chunking
In continuation to the abovementioned tip, word-chunking is a gesture of reading many words all at once. Of course, the tips you are about to discover in this article are helpful. However, word-chunking, in all likelihood, is an effective tool to help increase your reading speed.
At the moment, you can focus first on reading three words in one glance. Then, take note of the progress you've made after reading a couple of pages and applied this technique
3. Refrain from re-reading words
If you had observed a person's eye when they read, you could see that they don't smoothly flow as they should. Like everyone else, we do tend to glance back to words that we have just have encountered. Most likely, this habit becomes our mannerism in reading.
To refrain from re-reading words, the best way to solve this is to use a bookmark or your finger to guide you as you read.
4. Peripheral Vision
You've reached the essential step that ties all the tips together. Way to go! How do you use your peripheral vision? Try looking at the center of a sentence and make use of your peripheral vision to read the rest of it. Scan a few pages in this fashion and ensure that you also have understood the thought of the book.
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To take delight in investing in personal and professional development works greatly to you. Leaders have innate traits where they thirst for knowledge, seek new skills, and hone more of their existing capabilities. All of these are obtained from good old-fashioned activity— reading. Your preferences in books reflect who you are. That may sound cliché, but it truly is. To simply put, a business has no future if the leader isn't learning. How do you grow a company if you don't invest in self-development?
Throughout history, leaders relentlessly emphasized how the pursuit of knowledge change the way they play the field. If a person is too busy or too important then not only you have failed yourself but your organization as well. Moreover, the day you stop reading, is the day you stop learning.