The Mindset Mentor - How To Be a More Effective Reader

Episode Date: April 10, 2026

Do you want to learn how to read faster and retain more information so you can get ahead in life? In this episode, I share my proven strategies to help you absorb knowledge efficiently, boost your focus, and turn reading into your ultimate personal growth cheat code. If you're ready to unlock your full potential, I'll show you exactly how to learn smarter and transform your future. Feeling stuck? It's time to take back control. If you're ready to master your mind and create real, lasting change, click the link below and start transforming your life today. 👉 http://coachwithrob.com   The Mindset Mentor™ podcast is designed for anyone desiring motivation, direction, and focus in life.     Past guests of The Mindset Mentor include Tony Robbins, Matthew McConaughey, Jay Shetty, Andrew Huberman, Lewis Howes, Gregg Braden, Rich Roll, and Dr. Steven Gundry.   Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host Rob Dial. If you have not you done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. I put out episodes four times a week for the past 10 years to help you learn and grow and improve yourself. So if you're looking to improve your life, hit that subscribe button. Today I'm going to teach you how to read faster and retain more information inside of your head so you can use it. Let's dive in. I want you to understand this. This is something that I realized a long time ago. learning is the secret to getting ahead in life. It is. If you want to have a better life, you need to learn more. If you want to get ahead of your competition, you need to learn more.

If there's something that you can't do, you need to learn more, whatever it is that you need to learn. And I read a really concerning statistic about three years ago. And this was what it was. 33% of high school graduates never read another book. 42% of college graduates never read another book. And 80% of U.S. families did not buy a book last year. That's insane. I can't even believe those statistics are real. Eight out of 10 U.S. families didn't buy a book last year.

But if you look at the other statistic, the average CEO reads about 60 books per year. So the average CEO reads more than a book a week, yet eight out of ten American households did not buy a book last year. This is an amazing secret because it shows you if you want to get ahead of everybody else, simply learn more. Get more information into your head. And I don't mean going and scrolling on Instagram and watching 15 second videos of someone teaching you something.

I mean sitting down, taking time, and actually focusing on reading something from some of the most intelligent people who have ever existed on this planet. And there's many statistics that show how good reading is for you. Reading improves your focus, it improves your memory, it improves your empathy, it improves your communication skills, but it can also reduce your stress and improve your mental health. And I want you to understand this. This is the beautiful thing about reading a book. The smartest and the wisest humans who have ever walked on this earth have written books or written articles or written papers and even if they're not alive right now, you can still learn from them. And so for me, I love getting better. I love learning things. I'm not really a fan of reading,

but I do read because I want to learn. And so what I'm going to teach you is basically my, I guess you could call it my secret of how I read faster, but then how I take that information and I store knowledge into my brain to make sure that my recall rate is way better. So I can read faster. I'm going to give you that secret. And then the way that you can retain more information and store it for the future takes a little bit longer. But I'm telling you, you can take a book and basically digest the entire book

and have almost the entire thing memorized in your head based off of what it is that you go through and you read. Now, back in 2017, I really, that Kindle was the best way to do this. Now, I'm going to say this. I love physical books more than I love Kindle, but Kindle really opened up a lot of things for me, okay? Kindle is the secret to reading a lot of books. And here's how it works, okay? If you go onto Amazon, and I'm not sponsored by Amazon, they should pay me for this because this is going to be big for a lot of you. If you want to Amazon and you look at a book, right? Say you pull up my book, level up by Rob Dial, and you go to it, right? You can see the

price of the book if you got the physical copy. You can see the price of the book. If you got the Kindle, you can see the price of book, you've got the audiobook. Almost always, the audiobook is the most expensive thing that you can buy. What's cool, though, is if you go and you buy the Kindle version, it will give you the option for something that's called Audible Narration for most books. Audible narration is basically the audiobook, but made for Kindle. And so sometimes it's even cheaper to buy Kindle with Audible Narration than it is just to buy the audiobook itself.

and the crazy part about it is, Audible narration is the freaking audiobook. I don't understand how this works, but that's just the way they have it, right? So let's say that you want to go and you want to buy The Alchemist, right? You can look at the audiobook, I checked it the other day, it was $21,

or you can buy it on Kindle, and it's $11. And then there's a little tiny checkmark, and it says, check this box for Audible Narration, which is $12. So Kindle and Audible Narration, together are $23, when the audiobook itself is only 21. And like I said, sometimes it's even cheaper. Here's the secret, okay?

Audible narration is the audiobook, but for most of the actual Kindles with Audible narration, is while it's reading it to you out loud, the book itself, it highlights the sentence that you're on so you can follow it along. And so literally you're looking at the Kindle version of the book, you're having the reader read it out loud to you. and it's highlighting the sentence that you're on so you know exactly where you are on that page of the book. Then what you can do is you can turn the speed up to X and now you're reading the book twice as fast.

You're reading it twice as fast and you're reading it with your eyes but you're also hearing it with your ears, which means instead of using one of your senses to retain information, you're using two of your senses to retain information. Now here's the other thing that's really great about Kindle and using it is when I have a physical copy of the book, the main thing that

helped me back from Kindle before I ever tried in 2017 was that when I read a book, I underline and I highlight and I make tons of notes in my books. You can do the exact same thing with Kindle. I should be sponsored by Kindle. This is crazy. I'm like literally, it's almost like a giant promotion for Kindle is what I feel like this is. But what you can do is you can go through and you can highlight the part of the book that you like the most. And then you can make notes on the book as well. And then what's great about it is this. This is what's really good. A lot of times I'll wake up in the morning and I'll be reading a book and I'll be going through it and I'll be like excited to finish this book. But then I've got to go do something because my life exists. Right. So then I've got to get in

my car and I've got to drive somewhere. If I'm reading it at home on my iPad and I have the Kindle app and I'm like, oh, I've got to go for a drive. I've got to go into town and it's a 25 minute drive to go into town, I can then connect my phone, which also has the Kindle app, to my Bluetooth, and I can play the audiobook from the Kindle so I can listen to the audio book while I'm driving as well. And we will be right back. And now, back to the show. You can't read a book and drive at the same time, but you can with Kindle, which is what's amazing.

So I have it on three devices. I have it on my phone. I have it on my iPad. I have it on my computer. And what's good about it is, let's say that I am. I'm at home and now I've got to drive the doctor's office. So I'm at home and I'm reading the book. And it's saying it out loud to me and all of that.

Then I get into my car and I'm listening to the book. And if there's any parts that I like, what I do is I pause it, I wait until I get to the next stoplight and then I underline the parts that I liked and I'll make notes whatever I need to and I'll put my phone back down, push play and I'll keep driving my car. And then let's say I was driving to the doctor's office and I've got a 20 minute wait. Well, now I can go ahead and look at my phone. and I can keep reading the book.

I can put in my Bluetooth headphones and I can listen to the book being read to me as well. And so it doesn't mean like a physical copy of a book you can sit there and you can read it at home. And this physical copy of the book, you can read at the doctor's office. But you can't read it for that 25 minute drive

to the doctor's office and the 25 minute drive back from the doctor's office. And so what's cool about it is instead of just sitting there and scrolling through Instagram, you can read the book right there. Or this is another thing that I love. Because I've been using Kindle for,

so long, I can go back, let's say that I, I'm sitting at a doctor's office, I know it's going to take a little while, right? So for like, there were some appointments, when we would go to the doctor, I would go to the doctor with Lauren for the baby. It'd be like an hour and a half waiting in the waiting room. So instead of scrolling on Instagram or doing something stupid with my life, I would go back and reread all of my notes and highlights from another book that I read. And so in the time that we had to go like every other week to the doctor's office, I was just going back through all of the books I've read in the past. And I was relearning them again and seeing my notes and seeing my underlines and seeing my highlights, essentially rereading books over and over and over and over again in a very short period of time. That is how you can get, you can just crush books and get way better at getting through books.

You can retain more information. You can do all of that. Now let me give you a pro tip that I've never actually shared before. This is going to take longer, but this is how you actually get it into your brain. Okay, so here's the way that it works. You've always heard, you've probably heard before, if you really want to learn something, you must teach it. And so what I will do is I will read a book, I will underline it, I will highlight it, and then at the end of the book, I will go into my Google Drive, my Google Docs,

and I will put the title of the book at the top. and what I do is I look back through all of my underlines and highlights and I will literally type out all of my underlines, all of my highlights. This takes a long time, I promise you this, but it helps you really understand stuff. I'll type it all out on Google Docs, exactly what my underlines and highlights were. And then when I have a note of something of the way I can use it, this note for my podcast or that I can teach it to somebody else, or just basically how my brain is processing the information, I will then make a note under that highlight that I just wrote inside of Google Docs,

but I'll put it in a different color. And so for me, if it is in black, that means that it is actually from the book. If it is in blue, it is my notes about the book itself and how I can teach it or how I can learn it or how I'm processing it. This is what's amazing about it, is that you can read information a lot faster, but then what you can do is you can take it if you really want to go the extra level, put it into Google Docs, put your notes down, and then put your notes down, and then put your thoughts around all of your notes down in as well, because if you want to learn something

really, really well and really understand it, teach it. And so what I'm doing is I'm using Google Docs as a way to relearn, reprocess, and teach this information or how I'm going to teach it to you guys who listen to the podcast. I've never shared this tip before, but I promise you, it will help you so much if you do this. Another really big tip that I'll give you is if you're the type of person who's trying to learn more, if you're trying to get ahead in life and you're like, I just need to find some time and I need to start really focusing on it. What I would recommend that you do is you look at your schedule, you put down when you have to work, when your workout is, all of that, your drive time. But then try to look for gaps, 15 to 30 minute gaps in your schedule where you

can get in more reading. You know, I prefer to read as part of my morning routine. And then I also prefer to read in the morning as my morning routine, but I also prefer to read in the evening as a replacement for Netflix. Like, I still watch Netflix, but I don't allow myself to go on binges. So, like, if you have a show that you like, if you're, like, deep into Game of Thrones, or if you're deep into House of Dragon, whatever it might be, and you have, like, this show that you really love, cool, don't give it up. Don't take away things that you love, but give yourself one episode per day. That's about 45 minutes to an hour, and then read for the rest of the time. Don't strip yourself of something that you love, but just give yourself, just pull back a little bit, right?

A lot of people reach out to me as well and they're like, hey, Rob, how do I wake up earlier in the morning? How do I create a morning routine? But they have trouble falling asleep. Okay. This is a really great routine for falling asleep earlier and waking up earlier. Is turn off your TV and then don't allow yourself to get on your phone and then just use your Kindle and just read. use reading as the part of your evening routine. Brush your teeth, then get in bed, and then read.

If you have problems following asleep at night, read before you go to bed. And for most people that I've told this to, sleeping problems just tend to go away for some reason. So I would create an evening routine where you read before bed, allow it to make you tired, and then you go to bed earlier. This way your brain can also store all of the information that you just put into it right before you went to bed. and I want you understand, I realize this a long time ago when I was younger, is that most people stop learning. Most people are just fine with, I don't want to say they're fine with where they are. They're not fine with where they are, but they don't want to do anything about it. For me, I understood that the more educated I became on anything, the more that I can understand stuff, the further ahead in life I would get from everybody else.

And there's a really good quote that says, the difference between someone who cannot read and someone who does not read, leads to the same place. Both of them lead to ignorance. And so I want you to understand, you're listening to this podcast because you want to get better. You want to improve your life. You want something different. This is a really good place to start. I think you should definitely listen to a podcast. You should try to get as much information into your brain. But also there is something about sitting down, reading a book, taking your time, doing nothing else. Like, you know, you can listen to this podcast and you can drive and all that stuff. And it's great. It can work out, all of that. But there is something about like just sitting down and having 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour just to yourself where you're

dedicating it to you, to your mental health, to growing, to your education, to getting better. And ultimately, I think reading books is a cheat code to life. And in this day and age, there's a couple extra cheat codes that help reading happen faster and getting more knowledge into your brain. All of the knowledge that's ever existed is already in the books. There's literally no good excuse to not read. So just find more time for yourself, find more time to read. And if you want to use some of my tips to read faster but also process more information better,

you've got them as well. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories, tag me at Rob Dial Jr. R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And with that, I'm going to leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you. And I hope that you have an amazing day.