Speed read

President Harry Truman once said, "Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers."  Retired U.S. Marine Corp General James Mattis added, “If you haven't read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren't broad enough to sustain you.”  There is no question that reading is an important part of any leader's ongoing professional development.  To this end, every branch of the United States military publishes a professional reading list every year.

However, I would like to mention one important caveat.  Professional reading should emphasize quality over quantity.  The ancient Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote in On the Tranquility of the Mind, "What's the point of having countless books and libraries, whose titles could hardly be read through in a lifetime.  The learner is not taught, but burdened by the sheer volume, and it's better to plant the seeds of a few authors than to be scattered about by many."

I recently came across an article by Drs. Paula Schwanenflugel and Nancy Flanagan Knapp in Psychology Today entitled, "So Much to Read, So Little Time!"  It's an interesting article that is directly relevant to the current discussion.  They estimated that 1.9 million new books were published last year alone, so there is just no way for the average human, who reads about 200-400 words per minute, to be able to everything that is directly relevant to his or her profession.  But what if we could somehow increase the amount of words that our brains can process in each minute?

Enter Evelyn Wood, an American educator and entrepreneur who developed a "speed reading" technique that could increase the amount of words read per minute by a factor of 3-10, while at the same time preserving the same level of reading comprehension.  One of Wood's students once claimed that she could read the entire novel (about 690 pages) Gone with the Wind in less than an hour!  If that sounds too good to be true, it's because it is too good to be true.  The available research (reviewed in an article referenced by Drs. Schwanenflugel and Knapp) generally supports the idea that readers can read much faster after being trained in these speed reading techniques, but they do so at the sacrifice of reading comprehension.

I am sure that "speed readers" would argue with me that their comprehension doesn't suffer.  I would argue back, "Why does it matter?"  Are you reading these books quickly because you want to brag about how many books you have read, or do you actually enjoy reading them and digesting them slowly so that you can fully understand and comprehend what the authors of the books you read are trying to say?  Quality clearly is better than quantity here.  

Are you a slow reader?  Don't worry about it.  The important thing is that you are reading to grow and develop as a leader.