Imagine if you could finish a book in one day, instead of being like everyone else, spending months reading the same book and never making any progress.

I’m Salim. I'm a med student, and I’ve had to read hundreds of books in med school, my undergrad, and my masters, and I never wanted to spend hours reading every day like most people did, because I wanted to spend time doing things I actually cared about.

So over the years, I found the three best strategies you need to massively increase your reading speed, and I call it the triforce method.

So the first strategy of this method is to improve your baseline reading speed, and the first part to this is removing your internal monologue, and I used the free website, Spreeder (NOT SPONSORED), to help me do this.

Because the idea is, your internal monologue, that voice in your head when you read, limits you to read one word at a time, and that obviously caps how fast you can actually go.

So to read faster, you need to just see the words instead of hear them in your head, and you might think, how?

But you already do this, like when you’re at a stop sign, you don’t read or mouth ‘STOP’, you just visually process it.

So websites like Spreeder let you change how many words come up per minute, or let you group words together, so that you don’t even give time for that voice in your head or time for you to read out loud, but because your eyes are fast, so you’ll still process and understand what you read.

And it might feel a bit weird, but I can guarantee you it’ll feel normal after a day and you’ll read at least 50% faster. Like, I started at 250 words per minute and I can do over 500 now pretty easily even without Spreeder and straight from a book.

Now, the last part of this first strategy might sound stupid, But what you need is a visual tracker, and I'll help you see why it's good.

So first, look straight at the screen, keeping your head still, and move your eyes across it as smoothly as you possibly can.

You'll see that it's a bit jittery and not smooth. Now, put your finger or a pen in front of you, and track that.

There you go, it's better just like that, because when you just read with your eyes, it's not that smooth because there's these micro-adjustments, so you end up double-backing on sentences.

And if you're trying to read at 600 words per minute, that time obviously adds up.

But a tracker keeps your eyes moving at a consistent rate where you don't let yourself go back. So over time, increase the speed that you use the tracker, and you'll see your reading easily go up by another 100 words per minute.

And now, the second strategy of the Triforce method is making sure to have a reading strategy, because knowing when or how to use the techniques is just as important as the techniques themselves.

And 80% of this strategy is understanding the 80/20 rule, where 80% of the knowledge comes from 20% of the book.

And this is what saved me a lot of time for non-fiction books.

So I'll explain with an example how this works. So a non-fiction book like Atomic Habits has a lot of examples for a relatively small bit of useful advice.

So when I went through the book, I applied the 80/20 rule. I sped through most of the pages by getting rid of my internal monologue and by having that visual tracker.

And when I noticed that small golden nugget of advice, I slowed down the visual tracker to let myself think and absorb that key information better, because obviously reading at over 700 words per minute is going to give me lower comprehension than if I slowed down to read at 500.

So adapting the techniques depending on what you’re reading is a big part of actually reading what’s relevant instead of trying to absorb details that just don't matter - because that’s effectively the same as highlighting every single sentence - it’s not going to help you in any way.

Okay so now your reading speed’s up, and you have an idea of when to use those techniques, but none of this actually matters if you don’t remember what you read - like let’s see - the last chapter you’ve read from a book, can you summarise that to me in a sentence or two?

because I know so many people that say yeah I read a book last week, but they haven’t actually learnt anything from it - and if you feel attacked by me saying this, then that means what I’m saying is true but you’re here coz you wanna improve, and that’s good - so, you need to work on this third and final strategy of the triforce method, and that’s about summarising, and consolidating and the idea is, there’s no point reading a lot if you don’t understand what you’re reading - like you should have a good level of comprehension.

So, at the end of every page, summarise it to one or two lines, and even if nothing important was said, ‘nothing important’ counts as a summary - and as you do this your brain’s gonna naturally engage more with the text and you’ll retain information a lot better.

Like this is what I did back for when I applied to medical school and did my admissions exam - I had to get quick at getting relevant information from paragraphs of text - and coz I did these things I scored in the top 1%.

And on top of summarising, I said you have to consolidate - and it’s more for non fiction books, where you should take some sort of action - like when I read Atomic Habits, it mentioned keeping track of every habit you have, so naturally, it only makes sense that I actually do that and not just forget about it a day later - and I’d actually just stop reading until I’ve taken action for at least a whole day.

because the point to this is, learning something is about changing your behavior after you've been exposed to something. So if you don't change anything, you haven't actually learned anything.

And yeah, I do get the difference between reading for a need of learning something versus reading purely for the enjoyment of it, like reading poetry or fiction books.

But one thing where you'd always want to use techniques to be faster and better is for typing. And in this video here, I talk about how you can triple your typing speed in only 7 days. So click this video and actually consolidate what you learn from my advice by taking action after.

How to Absorb Books 3x Faster in 7 Days (from a Med Student)

Scripts