I’m 41 now and finally learning to read.

Getting through novels is something I’ve always found extremely difficult. As much as I enjoy a good story, most of them seemed to take forever get to the straightaway – the point in the book where I no longer had to effort my way through the pages.

A few rare books would grip me from the beginning, and I’d finish them a couple of days, with no difficulty whatsoever. Perhaps a tenth of the time, I’d hit the straightaway after a hundred pages of dutiful slogging. The other ninety percent I would ultimately abandon. Almost everything in my bookcase has a bookmark sticking out of the top somewhere near the front cover.

There are few things I’ve wanted more than to be able to pick up a big book and read it in two weeks, like an average reader. Most of the “how to read better/faster” advice really just tells you to spend more time reading – carry a book at all times, read on the bus, read in the shower.

That seems to be the usual advice for getting better at anything, really: do more of it. People who are more skilled have simply done more of that thing. No amount of volume seemed to address my problem though. I “plugged away,” as advised, for 30 years, and the problem remained.

I now know why I’ve struggled so much. One of the side effects of long-undiagnosed ADHD is that you end up learning to do common tasks in very inefficient ways. That’s because you’re trying to emulate people who don’t have the same limitations, yet you don’t know it, so you make assumptions about how the activity works that nobody else would make. In my effort to finish books within the usual timeframe, I unwittingly formed the worst possible habit in the reading of fiction – moving on to the next sentence without making sure I’d registered the previous one.

Everyone has to reread a sentence or a paragraph now and then, if they get tired or distracted. In my case, I lost the flow of meaning almost every sentence, sometimes several times. Meticulously rereading each semi-understood sentence would take forever, and I was already so slow, so that couldn’t be the solution. There was no way people could read those thick Stephen King books in two weeks if they were stopping to reorient themselves each time they got distracted. So I plowed on to the next line, as I assumed we all did.

In hindsight, I was probably making several story-breaking oversights on each page. (Just imagine trying to follow a movie with a third of the shots surreptitiously edited out.) Inevitably, by page 50 of a novel, I would have no sense of the stakes or character motivations. So I would put the book down, convinced that this novel, like so many others, took forever to develop stakes or character motivations. I was always baffled why writers did this, and why other readers put up with it.

Anyway — I could go on in infinite detail about the inner mechanics of effective reading, but the point is that reading, like most exclusively-human activities, is actually very complicated. Any skill, when you examine it closely, is an intricate network of inner and outer cause and effect – many actions, reflexes, concepts, cues, and responses, all combining to produce a result. A slow reader and a fast reader aren’t simply doing the same thing at different skill levels. They can be doing two entirely different things.

Growth means different, not more

What all this means is that when you want to get better at something, “Keep plugging away / get the hours under your belt” is generally poor advice, unless you’re already using a relatively effective approach, which is unlikely if you’re struggling. Plugging away will only make you more experienced at doing the thing in the same ineffective way.

Much better is to rebuild the skill entirely with a different approach, one that directly addresses your perennial snags. Instead of slowly getting better at your familiar, limited way, you embrace the awkwardness of learning an unfamiliar but stronger method, as though you’ve never done the thing before at all.

I’m now learning to read the way I should have from the start. Instead of trying to go faster to make up for my sluggish pace, I go even slower, monitoring myself to make sure I’ve registered each sentence before moving on, even if that entails repeated rereading. I hold an index card against the page, moving it down line by line, to rein in any drifting of the eyeballs or mind.

Compared to what I’m used to, it’s painstaking. I’ve sometimes spent ten minutes getting a single page properly read. But it’s working. Comprehension is way up, and I don’t lose interest fifty pages in.

My pace is closing in on about forty percent of average reading speed. That might sound pathetic, but I’m able to read fiction reliably for the first time — I know I’ve already left behind the limitation that’s always held me back. Beside my bookcase is a hip-high stack of thousand-page Robert Jordan and Steven Erikson novels, and I’m on my third one. Looking at my bookcase no longer fills me with doubt and self-consciousness. For the first time, I know can pull any of those books down and read it, which is a dream come true.

Leveling Up

I think of this kind of improvement as “leveling up” – to start again, with zero experience, on a higher tier of the skill in question, as opposed to getting better at the same limited version of the skill you’ve always done.

Leveling up feels very different than plugging away. On one hand it’s more uncomfortable and awkward, because in a way, you’re starting over. On the other hand, you quickly get the sense of sitting on a more stable track with a better trajectory, already free of many of your usual annoyances and limitations.

For example, my cooking has always been fine, but I’ve tended to overcook whatever goes in the pot first (usually onions), because while they’re cooking I’m madly trying to measure out the spices and other ingredients. The resulting dull vegetables are so familiar and comfortable to me that it doesn’t even register as a something to improve upon, although in restaurants I do sometimes notice how bright and crunchy their veg is compared to mine.

About a year ago I began to embrace the concept of mise en place – get all the ingredients and tools in place before you start cooking anything. Under this philosophy, the making of food has two phases – prep and cooking – and you risk compromising both by trying to perform them simultaneously.

I’m sure this is 101-level idea to serious cooking people, but that’s exactly why their food is better. They don’t take the same actions better, they take better actions, even though it’s all just “cooking.”

Mise en place leveled up my cooking quickly and permanently. It felt awkward at first, as all leveling up does. I kept wanting to flip the burner on and get going, only because that’s all my muscle memory knows. After a few meals cooked in the new way, the awkwardness, along with the urge to start off by heating a pan, had faded. In a very short time I had virtually eliminated overcooked vegetables from my meals, along with much of the “beat the clock” sort of stress I thought was intrinsic to cooking.

None of us are so efficient that we don’t have countless skills ripe for immediate leveling up. You might make perfect omelets, but you still create your spreadsheets manually each time, instead of sitting down for two hours and learning to use templates. You might be a master comparison-shopper, but you rely on your girlfriend to get group conversations going.

New tracks of capability await us everywhere, often just beyond a waist-high hedge of awkwardness. Once you level up, you never go back down, and struggles that seemed eternal can disappear for good.

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Photos (in order of appearance) by Nick Fewings, Florencia Viadana, Gabriel Crismariu, Dan Meyers, and Icons8 Team