I’m trying to learn how to speed read. Why? There’s so much to learn and so little time! He says, yawning into his tea at 6am. I had never figured myself a fast or even slow reader, but during reading one of Tony Robbins books, he talks of going on a speed reading course to maximise his time. This is fascinating: not only because I’d never thought of such a simplistic approach, but also it’s a microcosm of our entire lives. Slow down what you’re doing now to adjust a technique currently, so that it’ll pay dividends in the future. Worth a shot, right?

​Sparing no expense, in this instance I’ve jumped onto Lynda.com and whacked in my credit card for a free 30-day trial. This enables to you to access as many courses as you like for the period. There are a few things I do constantly which will help me immensely – namely reading and writing.
I can type quickly but generally with only 60% of my fingers. I write this blog, another blog, write motorcycle articles and have started assembling material for my next book. My every day job that pays me money (unlike the other things!) involves writing emails and presentation packs often, so it’s a skill that if I improve upon it, will help immensely.
Secondly reading. I read every day, whether news articles or a book or my own articles, editing them before sending on to the site owner or publisher. In all of these cases, I need research. Taking no one by surprise, I don’t possess the abundance of knowledge I need to publish the article in the first place. If I did, that would be incredible, but alas!

So here are the chief reading tips so far from the Speed Reading Course, run by a lovely chap called Paul Novak who takes his time to explain the complexities so that even I can understand it:

• Practice. I know, right! HOLD. THE. PHONE!  But the first step in the course is about pushing yourself to read faster. They give a passage of text for you to read with markings on the side so you can time yourself of how many words per minute you can muster. I’m at about 250-260. Now they’re suggestion is to read a passage at normal speed for 20 minutes. Then re-read the same passage but for only 10 minutes, essentially pushing the dialogue passed your face as quickly as possible. Then, when you next read for 20 minutes, it’ll seem much slower as you’ve just been reading at twice that speed. I suppose it’s like interval training when running. When I ran of course, not now when I interval train between the couch and the kitchen.
• A suggestion they have is to follow your finger across the page like when you’re learning to read, but this time it concentrates the mind. If on an iPad, use a pen to guide your eye for example.
• Another suggestion is to group words into chunks, splitting them to 2-3 words rather than reading one. This works by creating two or three fixation points on the line so you’re trying to group words rather than read each word – apparently this is great for iPads/Tablets or Kindles.  The example they give here is ‘New York City’. Here they suggest that most people don’t split those words down, but instead read them as one. If you can do that in your normal ever-day reading, you’ve just trebled your speed. Theoretically. Or you’ve just missed out 2 out of 3 words.
• Make deadlines. This may take away the pleasure from reading, but here goes. Read a page and set a time to read that page. Then try and beat it. Gradually you’ll decrease. Seems very simple. Essentially so far this entire ‘speed reading’ course can be explained in a similar way to someone going running for the first time or going to the gym.

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 - I want to be leaner
 - Have you gone to the gym at all?
 - Yes!
 - Have you gone to the gym at all and done anything other than read your phone?
 - ….ermm…say what? Isn’t just going enough?

​Admittedly when I tried this, I was only reading one pagers, but by reading through at normal pace and then reading through and pushing myself, I managed to decrease a page of text from 58 seconds to 44 seconds after several tries, roughly a 25% increase, meaning my 250 words per minute was already becoming 300. My time may have been quicker I hadn’t stopped every couple of sentences to admire a salient point or quotation I needed to note down for later!

I'm not expert, but apparently reading is easier with your eyes open. But remembering what you've read sometimes does get difficult, so here are some is some helping guidelines:

• Preview/Overview/Read (Multiple Reading Process) – Within Preview, read the Introduction and Conclusion or Summary. Next there’s the Overview, where you scan through an article for the main paragraph headings, sub-headings or bolded words to understand what it’s about. If there are main bullet points, bolded text, graphs or charts with labels underneath them, read these – not so much the charts but just the key text to get a feel of what is coming up. Both the Preview/Overview are based on the concepts that if you’re familiar with the text, then you’ll read faster and by repetition will remember the key points. Which is the same basic principle with anything really - if you’ve done it before, you’ll be more efficient at it, and by repeating it you’ll remember it.
• Read & Recall Method – take a note of what the paragraph was about every time you finish it. You don’t have to do this all the time, just for 15-20 per day for 2 weeks. This way you make an effort to remember it because you feel that you’ll be tested on it.
• Slow down at the first sentence of the paragraph to ensure you capture that first point – usually the main point of the paragraph is within that first sentence.

• Memory Types – Sensory, Short Term, Long Term. Sensory (5 senses) is short term memory effectively, but lots of people (my girlfriend included) retain sensory memory for years about which restaurant served what at a particular juncture in time. If you need to remember something, remember the smell and sounds of the environment, look at the layout of the page. Short Term has an expiration date, sometimes a few seconds. To move from Short term to Long Term, then you need to repeat it. By using the Preview/Overview/Read method, in combination with taking notes, you’re getting multiple exposures to text that others who are reading it for the first time often aren’t getting.
• Tips & Tricks for Memory - Regurgitation – read what you’ve said to others, your own version obviously to help nail the idea. Visualise what you’re reading, do it at the end of end of a paragraph for example (could be a better way of creating the note is to store it in your head but picture it written down?). Exaggeration for example could help visual that, such as if you’re talking about a lot of money, imagine it piled up and being thrown out of buildings. Association helps too, especially if it’s something we’ve already read or something we already know. Chunking the reading into parts can help.
• Similar Sound Technique – effectively this is a twist on homophones, and is quite simply a genius of an idea, and one that I will try to use, much in the same way that I now know Belonephobia is a fear of sharp objects. Belone sounds a bit like balloon, and if I picture a balloon being scared of a pin, sweating and being anxious at the sight of a sharp object coming towards it, then it’s now tied to belonephobia. See? Brilliant. . . Belonephobia, fear of baloney. I mean, God damn it!

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Other tips for improving the speed of your reading whilst not actually bothering to read most of the written text is simply skipping over the subtext and going straight for the headlines:

• 80/20 Principle – If in a rush, read the introduction and conclusion of each chapter, skipping through the contents to give an overview. This only really works with non-fiction books of course. In this principle, you’re using 20% of the time to gain 80% of the salient information points. If you are really hooked on it after that time, then read the whole book thoroughly, but it will give you an idea of what the entire book is about in a very short period. If I told this to my Dad we’d be sitting down and having stern conversations about apostasy.
• Newspapers – read the first few paragraphs of an article to get about 80% of the information. If it interests you after the first three paragraphs, then circle it and come back to it. Sometimes you can even read just the headline. Be ruthless with your time of what you save for later. News articles usually have the main points in the first paragraphs. I think these days this is generally how people are as they flick through news
• Articles in Magazines – Set a time limit to scan through articles you find interesting, circling the ones that you want to review later. By doing this for 10 to 15 minutes throughout magazine, you’ll then have narrowed down what you’ll want to concentrate on later.

​​Try it and let me know how you go! As with everything, if you want to get good at something, you have to practice! I am seeing the irony that the speed reading post is probably one of the longest reads I've created....hmm...

Mesmerising isn’t a skill to be gloating about casually, especially if you may end up being tasked to charm a cobra from a basket as testament to your abilities.  And yet here I find myself absolutely transfixed, hypnotised by wonder. In particular, a woman of wonder.
I really enjoy most of the comic adaptions and although openly confess utter ignorance in terms of accurate portrayals to the hallowed magazines, I usually sit there on my fat ass and scoff as much salty popcorn and teeth ache juice into my fat face as is physically possible within a 2-hour filming window without passing out.
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It’s not often I’m drawn to a character on screen; they must possess some fairly sturdy acting chops to muster that kind of attention. An actor of Olivier or Burton proportions must be equalled or eclipsed for me trace their every movement on screen, with maw agape and popcorn tumbling out. Or the complete opposite of course, being so horrendously bad that you watch them hoping to befall some kind of film-ending injury. In the case of Gal Gadot though, you are simply mesmerised by her sheer beauty. The universe stands back and says “you thought auroras were special? Look at this!”
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Why? Because of the way the movie was shot. Oh, and also because she is stunningly beautiful with a bewitching countenance that stops time. She is almost as striking as my girlfriend (bases = covered). But mostly this was, I think, because of the way the film was created: every other character seems slightly drab, slightly less colourful. It’s partly set in Second World War Britain, so everyone is a lot less tanned with some yellow teeth popping into the picture at opportune moments reminding us that the next time we see the beautiful Wonder Gal, her teeth seem sculpted from the finest marble by Michelangelo himself. Then there’s the smile that would charm a hurricane, and hair that calmly bounces and bouffs to their own slow-motion Enya soundtrack despite the ferocity of the scene. I entirely expect the hair to have a film of its own in a year or two.

The movie itself is fairly average, with guessable plot-lines and acting within everyone’s limits, apart from the poor sods that have to appear in the same scene as that woman. There is though a clear triumph hidden underneath, and one which I think deserves serious merit.

This is the first time I’ve seen a superhero film led by a heroin that I genuinely enjoyed because she’s such a strong character. There were no gratuitous cleavage shots or scenes where Miss Gadot is casually walked in-on whilst climbing into her lingerie. In fact, we see more of Chris Pine’s body than we do of Wonder Woman’s, which is fantastic! I mean fantastic for the film, not me necessarily, although Chris Pine fans will certainly not be leaving disappointed and the man does have a good body – credit where credit is due! I cannot remember a single pithy or corny line by Wonder Woman at all in fact (ok, there were a few average remarks). The script writers clearly made efforts to play it as straight as possible, and the film certainly reaps the rewards of that. Yes, there are some lines by the men that pin-point her bewitching beauty, but at the end it’s certainly the men and humankind in general that appear weak, not the new light of my life. It makes a change that the evil villain, Dr Poison, is also a woman and almost gets seduced by Chris Pine’s sexiness.
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Finally, a Hollywood Superhero movie worthy of feminism. Well done one and all! Alien’s Ripley would be proud! Well, perhaps if my Gal were wearing overalls she may be proud, then again, even Ripley appeared in her tiny-whities. Which come to think about it, weren’t all that mesmerising.

• Don’t take yourself to seriously or even the creative process too seriously. The results of your creative process, in terms of art at least, often don’t actually matter
• Some people will hate your work, others might like it, but enjoy what you’re doing
• Life is too short, embrace your passions, do them every chance you get
• Don’t give up

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And that’s probably the summation of a few hundred pages. So is this book a waste of time? Absolutely not. It’s whimsical, amusing, endearing, and like an old friend, gently prods you into submission. Or rather, like a mother, gently nags you into it.  There are wonderful titbits in there from Elizabeth such as interviews with Tom Waits around creating jewellery for other people’s minds (‘baubles for the mind’ is another common phrase) but I love the admission that I myself came to: stop being so serious, what you love probably doesn’t really matter.
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To clarify that, if you work as a nurse or a doctor or a teacher or in the police force, you shape people’s lives. It genuinely matters when you don’t come to work. The world doesn’t end because they didn’t see a Rembrandt or didn’t like Don Quixote, and the world doesn’t end because you couldn’t finish a sentence, write a song or couldn’t get the shadows right on a cathedral painting.
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To quote WC Fields, as Elizabeth does, “It ain’t what they call you; it’s what you answer to.” Now I’m not quite brave enough to give up my life and become a ‘writer’ full-time, but that doesn’t mean I stop writing. It means I just go about it a different way than others do. But does that not make me a writer? I don’t think so.

I have written a book and had articles published in magazines along with my photography. I write  in two blogs and a monthly motorcycle website, yet none of this makes me a writer in my eyes. If I sing, and I do, badly, the only note I can hold is a post-it. This does not make me a singer. For me it’s as simple as this: I write; I take photographs; I travel. None of this makes me a traveller, a photographer or a writer, but a person that enjoys pursuits to please himself. I write. I take photographs. I travel.

It’s what YOU want to be considered. I write for myself because I enjoy the writing process. If you write for others and one person hates it, what do you do then? Give up and never touch the keyboard? No, you keep writing. Some feedback will be valid, some will not, but it’s the creative process that is makes you do what you do.

​P.S. I'll probably end up reading Eat Pray Love!
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