I just finished photoreading my third book, a 300 pager on the life of Michael Faraday. He’s the guy who invented the electric motor. My previous two books related to topics I am very familiar with; health and fitness. For this one, I was clueless going in.

It took me 15 minutes to Photoread and pre-activate (i.e. skim and look for keywords). I then drew out a mind map. It was pretty amazing how much I remembered. I do not remember many specific details, but I did remember many key themes. Some dates, images and names also stuck out in my mind in a super clear way.

Tomorrow morning I’ll activate the material. That will be the real test to see if I am getting the hang of this technique!

As for my previous two books, I have already activated them. I am still lacking full recall of details (dates and names) but I feel like I do know a lot of the material. In fact, one book I photoread was Arnold’s Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding (a 700+ page monster if a book).

During my workout yesterday I found myself doing some slightly different exercises than normal, and doing supersets (where you trade off sets on 2 separate exercises) instead of consectutive sets of the same exercise. Sometimes I do supersets, but it is not the norm. Checking Arnold’s book, I noticed a section on supersets…apparently arnold prefers this method of training. Looks like I pulled away at least one good tip from the Photoreading!

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