Speed ​​reading success requires that you understand and accept certain qualities of your mind if you want to be successful. Due to the radically different approach and new behaviors required, an unprepared student can easily give up. Rather than succumbing to this premature emotional reaction, successful speed reading requires that we appreciate our mind’s natural reaction to new and different ways of behaving, and do something about it.

Our human mind has a strong tendency to resist most changes, especially if it requires some additional conscious effort. Conscious effort requires extra energy that our unconscious mind wants to avoid.

The way this plays out for someone just learning to speed read goes something like this: We start out excited about the prospect of achieving our result of easily reading at several times our usual speed. We started to learn some techniques. The techniques are radically different from the many years of reading experience we have had. We get frustrated. We can even try the exercises again, but we still have difficulties. Then our mind concludes, “I can’t do this.” Alternatively, we might think, “This doesn’t work.”

There may be other negative internal experiences of self-talk. The point is that we are giving in to that part of our mind that is resistant to change. So we stop our practice.

In the end, nothing changes.

Don’t let this happen to you. Know that disciplining your mind’s reaction to the change process can change the outcome for you.

Marvin Minsky, in his book “Society of Mind”, talks about the “anti-joy of learning”. He states that, “in the early stages of acquiring any really new skill, a person must adopt, at least in part, an anti-pleasure attitude.” For example, when initially feeling frustrated and less than successful, he might say to himself, “Well, this is a chance to experience discomfort and new kinds of mistakes!”

Think about the last sentence. Do you like to experience clumsiness and mistakes? Most people try to avoid that. However, apprentice champions embrace mistakes and discomfort because they know it is the path to ultimate mastery. Some parts of the mind find it horrible, while other parts enjoy forcing those earlier parts to work for them. Anyone who has achieved significant growth knows and appreciates this anti-joy. Any skill worth its salt generally requires this mindset.

And you? Can you embrace the anti-joy of the learning process to master speed reading? Without it, you will not be successful and will most likely be left buried with the information you need to digest for your future success.