These days I m trying hard to get rid of my poor vocabulary and slow reading. Sometimes, I find it very hard to pen my ideas thoughtfully and often I find myself searching for better words. In the reading front, I just read few pages and sleep in my bed only to find that I forget whole a lot of ideas and thoughts. The metaphor that I would like to use is that of a deck of cards. As soon as I read the next page, what I read in previous page vanishes off like the deck of cards. My reading comprehension is very poor. In order to bail me out (rather badly), I bought two books by Norman Lewis - Word Power Made Easy and How to Read Better & Faster.
I m currently reading "How to Read Better & Faster" and working out exercises. I feel that the first technique, "creating a sense of urgency" improves reading speed and comprehension. I quite experience the fact that by slow reading not only leads to waste of time but also leads to reduced comprehension. Between sentences, I have time to travel to moon or think about something that happened during my childhood. By creating the sense of urgency alone, I m able to bring my entire focus and purpose on single thing - to read and understand the text before me. It works. I m able to increase my speed by 10% and comprehension by 5%. Most importantly, I live in the present and enjoy the moment.
I feel that this sense of urgency can help in our life too. Rather than approaching work/life so causally (and ultimately losing focus), the sense of urgency will create a focus that breeds natural interest on the tasks we do (of course, you will be able to move things off your plate that is not of interest to you). This sense of urgency isn't doing things in a hurry. The sense of urgency is about fixing a time limit during which you will challenge yourself. It is small steps to make yourself a better person than your current state. Like small drops make ocean, these tiny improvements created by authentic self-challenge increase the personal effectiveness.
It also gives a sense of accomplishment as any work done in short time with lot of focus will be an invaluable experience and creates a wow moment in life. We always see ourselves growing and improving than the past. There is gradual progression and evolution - from monkey to mankind or from mankind to god or man of no realization to man of self-realization. Our usual days are filled with wow moments and these wows make life very interesting, really very interesting, satisfying and enriching.
