As we speak early in the morning, Antonin Villette, 33, has already got his brain working at full capacity. After getting up at 6:30 a.m., the entrepreneur did some stretches, then five minutes of breathing exercises to improve his concentration, before taking on the test Think and get rich, by Napoleon Hill (I read, 2011). Every other morning, Antonin gives himself twenty-five minutes to completely devour a personal development or finance essay. The objective of this “morning routine” perfectly honed? “ I want to be able to use my cognitive abilities to the maximum, to have balance in body and mind”explains the thirty-year-old, reached by telephone from his apartment in Neufchâtel-Hardelot (Pas-de-Calais).
Antonin began to take an interest in speed reading in 2022, when he had just left his sales position: in search of new challenges, he enrolled in training reimbursed thanks to his CPF account. To his great astonishment, in two days, he tripled, then quintupled his reading speed, and continued to train until winning the title of French champion in this field in 2023. Beyond the time saved in his working days, Antonin combines this method with a real life discipline, aiming to rationalize his time management in all areas.
“I realized that I needed to learn things to develop sources of income outside of my salaried job. To do this, I had to manage to optimize my time and discover new things. I knew it would help me find my way”, assures Antonin, who created a financial education company last year. Speed reading and the mental map allow him to go faster in his administrative tasks, to structure his thoughts before a meeting… Methods which have also and above all, by his own admission, helped him. “inflated the ego” in a period of doubt.
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This is the great promise of “brain sports”, increasingly popular among certain personal development coaches. Through practical exercises, we would all be able to read economic essays or 19th century novels.e century in a few dozen minutes and remember many decimal places of Pi. The “mental palace” method – supposed to allow you to remember any list of words or numbers, by associating them with characters or objects, and by imagining them installed in different spaces of a place that we know well – has been practiced since Antiquity. But most of the fashionable learning techniques today emerged in the second half of the 20th century.e century.
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