Study Hacks

A brief interruption…

Study Hacks is switching to an advertising firm that specializes in my type of audience. They want you to consider filling out this short survey to develop a better idea of who you are. Here are two reasons why you should fill out the survey:

1. I’ll give away a free signed book to a randomly selected respondent (the survey asks for your e-mail address expressly and only for the purpose of this drawing).
2.  I give 50% of my ad revenue to charity, and this survey will increase the quality of my ads. Ergo, you’ll be helping charity.

That’s it. Back to our regularly scheduled programming…

Predicting Greatness

The impact of teachers is profound. If you rank the world’s countries by their students’ academic performance, the US is somewhere in the middle. In a 2009 New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell notes that replacing “the bottom six percent to ten percent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality” could be enough to close the gap between our current position and the top ranked countries.

“[Y]our child is actually better off in a ‘bad’ school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher,” Gladwell concludes.

But there’s a problem: “No one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like.”

Or at least, according to Gladwell.

Teach for America, a non-profit that recruits outstanding college graduates to teach in low-income school districts, disagrees. This organization is fanatical about data.  For the past 20 years, they’ve gathered massive amounts of statistics on their teachers in an attempt to figure out why some succeed in the classroom and some fail. They then work backwards from these results to identify what traits best predict a potential recruit’s success.

As Amanda Ripley reports in a comprehensive look inside the Teach For America process, published in the Atlantic Monthly, the results of this outcome-based approach to hiring are “humbling.”

“I came into this with a bunch of theories,” the former head of admissions at Teach for America told Ripley. “I was proven wrong at least as many times as I was validated.”

When Teach for America first started 20 years ago, applicants were subjectively scored by interviewers on 12 general traits, like “communication” ability. (A sample interview question: “What is wind?”)  By contrast, if you were one of the 35,000 students who applied in 2009 (a pool that included 11% of Ivy League seniors), 30 data points, gathered from a combination of questionnaires, demonstrations, and interviews were fed into a detailed quantitative model that returned a hiring recommendation.

This data-driven approach seems to work.  As Ripley reports, in 2007, 24% of Teach for America teachers advanced their students at least one and a half grade levels or more. Two years later, as the organization’s models continued to evolve, this number has almost doubled to 44%.

I’m fascinated by Teach For America for a simple reason: the traits they discovered at the core of great teaching are unmistakably a variant of deliberate practice — not the pure, coach-driven practice of professional athletes and chess grandmasters, but a hearty, adaptable strain that’s applicable to almost any field.

Put another way, these outstanding teachers may have unwittingly cracked the code for generating a remarkable life…

Read the rest of this entry »

Quick hits is an occasional feature where I take a breather between my epic big idea posts to share ideas, ask questions, and in general provide a catch-all place for me to catch up with you. 

Deliberate Practice in Unconventional Places

I’m not the only one with deliberate practice on my mind. A variety of bloggers have been exploring this powerful idea…

• Justine Musk published a fascinating two-part series on deliberate practice and the art of fiction writing. (If you’re one of the millions who dream of writing a novel one day, you must subscribe to Justine’s Tribal Writer blog.)
• Penelope Trunk posted on the role of deliberate practice in entrepreneurship. As a former professional athlete, she knows what she’s talking about when it comes to hard practice.
• Jonah Lehrer discusses Magnus Carlsen, who, at the age of 15, is the youngest chess player to reach a number one world ranking. Does Carlsen debunk our assumption that practice trumps innate ability? Not so, responds Lehrer. Carlsen uses computer chess programs to increase the rate at which he accumulates deliberate practice.
• Scott Young describes an interesting philosophy for keeping deliberate practice central to your daily experience: live on the edge of incompetence.
• Dan Pink points out Harrison Ford’s surprising obsession with mastery.

Do You Love What You Do? If So, I Want to Talk with You.

You may have noticed by now my infatuation with the science of career satisfaction. I want to temper all this fancy lab learning with some good ‘ole fashioned on the ground reporting.

With this in mind, if you’re someone who loves what you do — the type of person people point to and say “that’s what I want my life to be like” — please consider sending me an e-mail at author [at] calnewport.com.

I want to hear your story.

Use the Comment Thread of this Post to Ask Me Anything!

Speaking of e-mail, if you have a question, comment, or devastating insult to hurl my direction, and you don’t want to wait the 1 - 2 weeks it can sometimes take me to get through my blog e-mails, leave it as a comment on this post. For the next few days I’ll check and respond to these comments regularly.

(Photo by envios)

A Bold Decision

At the end of his first semester at Penn, a student whom I’ll call Daniel was disappointed to learn that his GPA was a lackluster 2.95. Following the Study Hacks orthodoxy that study habits should be based on evidence — not random decisions or peer pressure — Daniel asked himself a crucial question: What are the better students doing that I’m not?

When he surveyed his classmates, he noted something interesting: “the high-scoring kids weren’t on Facebook.”

Emboldened by this observation, Daniel decided to do the unthinkable: he deactivated his Facebook account.

His GPA jumped to an exceptional 3.95.

In this post, I want to share the details of Daniel’s story — revealing what actually happens when you quit one of the most ubiquitous technologies of your generation. I’ll then make the argument that although most students don’t need to leave Facebook, every student should at least give the idea serious consideration.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Great Career

Laura loves what she does. To many people, myself included (I’ve known her for the past five years), she represents the Platonic ideal of  a great career.

Laura  is a database whiz. Companies hire her to wrangle their most gnarly data into streamlined structures. If you’re lucky enough to engage Laura, she’ll assemble a handpicked team of programmers and descend on your office for up to six months. She’ll then take your generous check back to her charming Jamaica Plain bungalow and set about finding novel ways to spend it.

She allows months to pass between projects — the paydays being ample enough to buy her as much downtime as she wants. She has used this time, among other pursuits, to earn a pilots license, learn to scuba dive, and travel through Asia.

In several earlier posts, I argued that mastering a rare and valuable skill is the key to generating a remarkable life — much more important than following your “passions” or matching your career (or academic major) to your personality.  It occurred to me, however, that to continue this discussion, we need to better understand our goal; that is, we need to figure out what exactly makes a remarkable life remarkable.

In this post, I’m going to tackle this question, using Laura as our running example of someone who has achieved the end result we have in mind…

Read the rest of this entry »

The Big Give

Over 50 of you responded to my call to donate money to earthquake relief in Haiti. We ended up raising over $4700.  As I mentioned in my replies to the contributors, I’m lucky to have such an exceptional group of readers.

Here are the results of the signed book giveaway contest:

• Allen won a signed copy of the rare yellow-covered version of the red book for donating $500 — the most out of all of the contributors.
• Shruti won a signed copy for having her name drawn at random.

(Both winners have been notified by e-mail.)

We’ll return later this week back to our regularly-scheduled programming (I’m working on the next post in my series on the mechanics of constructing a remarkable life), but I want to thank you one last time for your support.

Update: As of 8:30 EST we’ve raised over $2500! You guys are amazing.

“What I’ve seen here in Haiti, I’ve never seen before.”

This is from the Twitter feed of Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medial correspondent, who is reporting from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He’s seen a lot of tough situations in his career, so this statement means something.

This morning I donated $137, the amount of my most recent advertising check for Study Hacks,  to Partners in Health, a Boston-based aid organization that has a strong presence in Haiti.

Here’s a screenshot of the confirmation e-mail:

I’m asking you to also donate to this organization.

They have great infrastructure in place in Haiti, including over 120 doctors and 500 nurses, longterm relationships with the Haitian people, and an obsession with results. A donation to Partners in Health will have an immediate impact on real people who are really suffering right now.

Click on this link to give.

If you do donate, consider forwarding me a copy of your confirmation e-mail. There are two reasons for this request. First, keeping a running total will help me convince more Study Hacks readers to follow your example. Second, I’m giving away two signed copies of the rare yellow-covered version of my red book. One copy will go to the reader who donates the most money, and the other will go to a reader chosen at random.

And I’ll leave it at that.

(Photo by Damon Winter/The New York Times)

From 30 Minutes of Studying to a 4.0

I recently received an e-mail from Ricardo, a sophomore majoring in computer science at the University of Maryland.  For the past three semesters he has maintained a 4.0 GPA — a feat he accomplished “without stressing at all.” At the core of his success is an unconventional technique that makes use of a wiki, his iPhone, and my infamous stealth studying philosophy. This technique is so effective that he dedicates only 30 minutes to review on the day before his computer science exams — yet still aces them.

In this post, I detail Ricardo’s method, including step by step instructions and screenshots…

Read the rest of this entry »