How to Read and Remember This (And Any) Book

What this chapter is about

Chapter 3 showed you that your brain is capable of extraordinary things. Chapter 4 asks a harder question: if your brain is that powerful, why do you read a whole page and remember nothing?

Jim Kwik's answer is simple: most people were never taught how to learn. They were taught what to learn, but not how. This chapter fixes that — with a six-step method you can use on any book, any course, any conversation.

The forgetting curve

Before the method, a sobering fact.

Psychologists call it the forgetting curve — a mathematical description of how quickly we lose new information. The research is clear:

• We forget roughly 50% of what we learn within one hour
• We forget an average of 70% within 24 hours

This is not a sign that you have a bad memory. It is how the human brain works by default. Without active effort, information slides away. The FASTER Method is designed to fight this curve at every step.

The Pomodoro technique — reading in focused chunks

Before diving into the method, Jim recommends one structural change to how you read.

Our natural ability to concentrate wanes between 10 to 40 minutes. After that, we get diminishing returns — our attention starts to wander and we stop absorbing information.

The fix: the Pomodoro technique, developed by Francesco Cirillo. Read (or study) for 25 minutes, then take a 5-minute break. Each 25-minute block is called a Pomodoro.

This works because of two memory principles:

• Primacy — you remember what you learn at the beginning of a session
• Recency — you remember what you learn at the end of a session

When you read for two hours straight without a break, you only get one beginning and one ending. By taking breaks, you create more beginnings and endings — and retain far more of what you read in between.

The FASTER Method

F — Forget

The biggest barrier to learning is thinking you already know.

When you approach a familiar topic, your brain fills in the gaps with what it already believes — and stops absorbing what is actually in front of it. Some people who claim twenty years of experience have one year of experience repeated twenty times.

Jim asks you to forget three things (temporarily):

1. What you already know about the topic — approach it with a beginner's mind
2. What is not urgent or important — your brain cannot truly multitask; write distracting thoughts in a notebook to release them
3. Your limitations — the belief that your memory is bad, that you are a slow learner, that you are not smart enough

"If you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them."

A — Act

Traditional education trained us to be passive. You sit quietly. You consume. You don't talk back.

But learning is not a spectator sport. The brain learns more by creating than by consuming. The more active you are, the better, faster, and more you will learn.

What acting looks like in practice:

• Take notes in your own words
• Do the exercises in the book (like the Kwik Start prompts)
• Highlight only the ideas that genuinely matter — not everything
• Ask yourself how each idea connects to your life

S — State

All learning is state-dependent.

Your state is your current emotional and physical condition. When you tie an emotion to information, the information becomes far more memorable. This is why you can still remember the song that played at an important moment in your life, but forget what you ate last Tuesday.

Most people's dominant feeling in school was boredom. Which explains a lot.

You can choose your state before you learn. Shift your posture. Change your breathing. Get genuinely curious about what you are about to discover. Consciously choose joy, curiosity, and fascination as your learning state.

T — Teach

Learn with the intention of teaching.

If you know you have to explain something to someone else, everything changes. You pay closer attention. You take better notes. You ask sharper questions. And when you actually teach the material, you learn it a second time — this time, by making it clear enough for another person to understand.

"When you teach, you get to learn it twice."

Find a learning buddy. Read the same book. Compare what you each noticed. The social accountability helps you finish — and the conversations help you remember.

E — Enter

What gets scheduled, gets done.

Most people treat personal learning as optional — something that happens after work is finished, after the house is clean, after everything else is done. Which means it almost never happens.

Jim's instruction: put your reading sessions on your calendar. Label them something that means something to you — Genius Time, Brain Training, My Hour. Treat the appointment as seriously as a meeting with your most important client.

R — Review

The final and most powerful weapon against the forgetting curve: spaced repetition.

Reviewing information at spread-out intervals dramatically increases how much you retain. Going over material once and then spacing the review over days and weeks trains your brain to hold it in long-term memory.

The simplest version: before each new reading session, take a few minutes to recall what you learned in the previous one. This does two things — it strengthens the memory, and it primes your brain to connect the new material to what you already hold.

The questions are the answer

Here is why you sometimes read an entire page and remember nothing: you were not asking questions.

Your brain receives 11 million bits of information per second from the world around you. It cannot process all of it. So it uses a filter — a part of the brain called the Reticular Activating System (RAS) — to decide what gets through and what gets ignored.

The RAS is guided by questions. What you ask your brain to look for, it looks for. What you tell it to ignore, it ignores.

When Jim's sister kept sending him photos of pug dogs, he had never paid attention to pugs before. Then, once he was looking for them — he started seeing them everywhere. They had always been there. His filter had simply never been pointed in that direction.

Your questions work the same way. Ask disempowering questions ("Why am I not smart enough?") and your brain will find evidence to confirm them. Ask empowering questions ("How can I use this today?") and your brain will find answers to those instead.

Before reading any chapter, ask yourself: "What do I most want to get from this?" Your RAS will then look for the answer — whether you consciously try or not.

Your dominant question

Every person has a dominant question — the question they ask themselves more than any other. It shapes what they notice, how they feel, and ultimately, how they live.

Jim's dominant question as a struggling child was: "How do I stay invisible?" He was in pain, and invisibility felt safe. He watched everyone else from the sidelines — wondering why they were happy, popular, or confident.

Over time, his question changed to: "How do I make this better?" And then: "How does my mind work so I can work my mind?"

The more he asked those new questions, the more answers arrived. Limitless is the result of two decades of asking better questions.

What is your dominant question? It is worth finding out — because it is quietly running your life whether you know it or not.

Choose wisely

Jean-Paul Sartre said: "Life is C between B and D." Life (C) is the choices we make between birth (B) and death (D).

Being limitless is a choice. The time to make it is now.

One thing to try today