Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I envy your reading abilities




A couple of says ago there was an excellent comment here on Hacker News about that you shouldn't read only in bed but allocate proper not tired time for reading. Otherwise you learn to associate reading with sleeping and drowse off after a few pages.

Yeah, I read non-fiction in the morning prior to work and then fiction in the evening. Works great!

FWIW, I’m mildly dyslexic and likely read slower than most. This year I’ve made it a goal to un-do many of the coping strategies I’d developed over the years to keep pace, and instead really focus on stopping and looking up phonetics for words I couldn’t easily sight (kindle is clutch here). On the plus, it also means I’ve had to become rather deliberate about what I read and when I read it — HN, newspapers, and Reddit all took back seat this year (and I couldn't be happier).

Here’s the trick about reading, folks.

Firstly, reading is actually a bit boring and unpleasurable at first. Only once you’ve gotten up to speed does it start rewarding you. A bit like working out at the gym.

The other surprise is that once you start reading, you get really quick. Like, surprisingly fast. After a while you notice the words are going by faster. So the effort compounds.

When you start you think “my god that took 5 hours of boring reading time to get though” and by book 10 you think “that was 2.5 hours and I learnt a lot and my brain is happy.”




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: