Ryan Holiday

That's not the promise of speed reading.

The promise of speed reading is you can read this thousand page book in 30 minutes, right?

We all read at different speeds.

That's I would say I'm a moderate to average person at the speed that I read.

I just read a lot.

I'm just saying this idea that that you can whip through long, difficult texts without much effort is a scam.

Right.

It's not only not real.

I would say that when I'm reading, what I'm actively doing is trying to slow down.

I'm working on a project now.

They sent me this PDF of stuff and I'm like, okay, now I have to print out this PDF.

I have to get a pen and I have to sit here and go through it extremely slowly so I understand every word of it.

Most of the time, you're trying to do the opposite of get it done quickly if what you're trying to do is learn and extract value from it.

If you're reading a novel and you're just trying to be entertained or enter another world, crank up the audio speed however you want, right?

That defeats the purpose.

Yeah, skip the middle.

It's not that good.

Yeah, it's not just that it's valuable stuff you're skipping over.

I just, this is a very stoic idea, but it's like, what are you fast forwarding towards?

It's death.