The Mirrors are Everywhere

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What should every person be knowledgeable about or be proficient in by the age of 20?

Ben Mordecai, Living Intentionally

6.1k upvotes by Helen Luu, Julio Soriano, Salsabil Hamza, (more)

How to cook 10 good meals
How to dress like an adult and not a teenager
How to get enough sleep on a daily basis
How to manage your tasks, projects, and calendars so that you never miss a date or forget anything important.
How to read 100 pages in a day with the same comprehension you would experience if they were spoken to you. (See Ben Mordecai's answer to Reading: How can I learn to read 100 pages in a day with the same comprehension as if it were spoken?)
How to relate to the opposite sex without objectifying them or being afraid of them.
How to break arbitrary addictions: soda, Facebook, TV, video games, tobacco
How to pay bills on time and not spend more than you can afford
How to be comfortable in your own skin, without constant need of affirmation, showing off, sounding smart, whatever.

BEN'S ANSWERVIEW 9 OTHER ANSWERS

Ben Mordecai, Engineering Graduate

567 upvotes by Helen Luu, Eric Edward-Selvaraj, Alice Pham, (more)

The answer is pretty simple. If you can read about a page a minute, read for 100 minutes. Or if you can only read 20 pages an hour, read for 5 hours.

In my experience, the most difficult part of reading is paying attention. If you really are a slow reader, but you are making forward motion and really understanding what you are reading, then it's simply a matter of putting in the time. If you can't pay attention, then your attention span is the problem, not your reading speed.

So, first things first, you need to address your attention span. You may be the type of person who works best with music. I am. But not reading. Turn off the music. Turn off the TV. Put your phone on silent, and put away from you anything capable of generating a notification. Go somewhere people will not talk to you. Close your eyes for 15 seconds. Did that feel really, really good? You're not getting enough sleep, so fix that problem and get more sleep. Do you start reading and immediately think of all the stuff you need to do, buy, fix, clean, remember, plan, and schedule? You need to take a few minutes and offload everything on your mind onto a piece of paper and set it aside to handle later. Still having trouble focusing? Reduce the amount of sugar and starch in your diet. Still having trouble? Drink a cup of coffee.

Ok! So, we've addressed the focus issue. Now lets talk about reading. On a ridiculous level, you could read 100 pages of childrens books pretty quickly, while it might take you a whole semester to read 100 pages of math textbook. But the reality is that the skill of reading is still basically the same. You're still translating symbols into sentences. You're still engaging in extended periods of imagination from the visual stimuli of text on a page. You're still training your eyes to move from the left of the page to the right, then drop down a line and continue seamlessly without losing your place. In other words, if you are having trouble with reading comprehension in general, don't make the problem worse by reading dense books while you're working on perfecting the skills.

So to work on the skills, first start with easy books. The only rule is non-illustrated books. Remember, we want to build the skill of driving the imagination from the visual stimuli. Pictures eliminate the need to imagine. I recommend action-oriented, unpretentious fiction. Harry Potter. Forgotten Realms. Any young-adult oriented fiction. Get these books from a public library if you have access to one. Not only are the books free, but the due dates impose a commitment device: you have two weeks until it needs to be returned, so you need to be working on it, and you need to not bounce from book to book and stick with one from start to finish.

Don't track your reading speed or even think about your reading speed. Just establish some time every day where you read. The goal is to achieve a state of flow, where you forget that you reading at all and you are basically in a state of extended hallucination, watching a movie in your head. Once "flow" is achieved, do this for 3 or 4 more books, until the effect can be summoned on command. Once that is the case, you have already acquired the essential skill.

Easy fiction, however, requires less abstract thinking, attention to detail, and memory than other more difficult reading. So keep the easy, unpretentious fiction as pleasure reading (or even guilty-pleasure reading), but move on to include more abstract, detailed, and diverse books. History, biographies, popular science, theology, finance, business, classics.

Your reading speed will fluctuate from session to session and from topic to topic, but you will find that certain types of reading, you could probably read at or above a conversation pace with full comprehension. Think about the typical time of an audiobook in reference to the number of pages in the print book. I have a 10 hour audiobook that has about 275 pages (with about 38 lines of text per page, so moderately small print). Thats 27.5 pages per hour. If you think about the pacing of an audiobook, they're much slower than a typical conversation, which is between 1.5-2x as fast. So conservatively, that's 41.25 pages an hour. So in 2.5 hours, you've read 100 pages. Can you find 2.5 hours in your day? That's two episodes of the Walking Dead and 30 minutes of reading in bed.

You now have the skill if you have the time! Of course, most people won't read 2.5 hours per day. Nor do they need to. This is now a skill that you can keep in your back pocket and unleash when you need it. It may sound inane to throw brute-force time at the problem, but this is actually a huge part of the problem. Many people could throw 5, 8, or 10 hours at the problem and still not make much forward motion. You have to get to the point where time-inputs produce comprehended-pages of output first, then you work at making this more efficient.

Finally, the reason so many people are eager to learn this skill. They want to be able to read their textbooks, technical readings, books for class, scientific papers, legal documents, and manuals at superhuman rates. Of course, this is ambitious simply by nature of the material, so a certain amount of realism is required. The text is usually compressed, highly technical, and stuff you wouldn't grasp any easier if someone was speaking it to you. To this I say:Resist the urge to speed read and rush it. Technical reading requires extreme attention to detail. Missing tiny details will be devastating to comprehension. Be patient. Focus deeply, and have no other goal than forward motion with perfect comprehension. If you perfectly comprehend 10 pages an hour, then you've converted an impossible task into a brute-force task, and one that you will get better at.

Its been a whole year and my New Year's Resolution, well the only one I remember, was to stop looking up tabloids. And yet here I am looking at pictures and articles of Trisha Yearwood and hell I went through 97 pictures of Who Wore It Best otherwise known as who the fuck cares!
Yikes, this year has been one hell of a crazy year! Not in a good way because I keep being not present and reminiscent of the past, of those days where I didn't look back (ie freshman year).

I am a third year in college now and I still don't have it figured out....yikes I think back now (look I'm doing it again) to junior year in high school and I was doing swell. I excelled at math, HISTORY, and was making and hanging out with friends, and giving a damn in the present. And me now I spend more time thinking about what could be and what had been than now.

I guess for this new year my resolution will be to be MINDFUL. Not only with the daily meditation, but everything I do, recognize ok Helen you are on Youtube or you are flipping through old photos and disengage and do something else with your time.
Eat with friends (do boogie museum dates cuz I love museums, and hang with the sis (not just as a last resort like do something cool), go to aerial classes, go work out (haha) or stretch, think about what you are eating (like your freshman year) and stop walling your self off, and most importantly keep up with EMAILS. That is so important and I learned that freshman year when Melly helped me to keep it up.
Be accountable for MY time.
No more excuses, no more avoiding situations.
That will make you smarter and wiser.

This year can change and see I can't quite remember 2014 because I wasn't present.....
I have to worry about my self and not worry about how others' lives are or how I'm not integrating with them or whatever that means.

Be a better me for me.
Peace.

EDIT: and to write, to myself about anything to not only get better at typing but to focus my thoughts