Study Hacks

The Famous Dr. McLurkin

In 2008, when James McLurkin graduated with a PhD in Computer Science from MIT, he was unquestionably a star. Four years earlier, Time Magazine profiled James and his research on swarm robotics as part of their Innovators series. The next year, he was featured on an episode of Nova ScienceNOW. The producer of the show, WGBH in Boston, built an interactive web site dedicated to James, where, among other activities, you can watch a photo slide show of his life and find out what he carries in his backpack. Earlier this year, TheGrio, a popular African American-focused news portal, named James one of their 100 History Makers in the Making — a list that also includes Oprah Winfrey and Newark, NJ mayor Cory Booker.

Perhaps most telling, even my brother, who finished his systems engineering degree in 2002, knew of James. “He’s the guy with the robots,” he recalled. “We watched a video of him in class.”

In other words, James is famous in his field. So it’s not surprising that in 2009 he landed a professorship at Rice University — one of the country’s top engineering schools — in one of the worst academic job market in decades.

With these accomplishments in mind, this post asks two simple questions: How did James become such a star? And what lessons can we apply to our own quest to become remarkable?

The answers, as  you’ll soon encounter, are not what you might first expect…

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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.

Rethinking Remarkable

A collection of recent articles dissecting the idea of remarkableness…

• Ben Casnocha has a pair of fascinating posts on building a remarkable life. His first points out the contradictions in Steve Jobs’ famous Stanford commencement speech, while the second takes issue with “attitudinal” self-help.
• Scott Young weighs in with an interesting take on whether the good life is chosen or earned.
• Chris Guillebeau has an insightful profile of a Tsilli Pines, who quit a corporate job to run her own hand-crafted ketubah (Jewish marriage contract) business. What strikes me about about Tsilli is that she avoided the conventional entrepreneurial wisdom to “start as soon as possible,” instead spending three years tuning and testing her idea until she could make the leap with confidence.
• I just finished reading an advance copy of David Shenk’s The Genius In All of Us. I’m excited for this book’s release. It covers much of the same ground as Outliers, but Shenk is more optimistic than Gladwell, aligning more with my own philosophy that once you understand what generates remarkable achievement you can harness it better in your own life. In the meantime, if you’re not reading Shenk’s blog, you should start. (See, for example, his recent post on the myth of the meritocracy.)

My Next Post

I’m in the process of writing a real humdinger of a post. It’s the next entry in my series on applying deliberate practice in everyday life. The focus is how star graduate students become stars (it’s built around an interview I conducted with James McLurkin, the famous MIT roboticist who just got hired at Rice.) The strategy I highlight, however, is wildly applicable to a lot of different fields.

Stay tuned. I hope to have it up soon…

My New Book is Available!

As you know, I have a new book coming out this summer. It’s called How to Be a High School Superstar, and it introduces the zen valedictorian concept to the students who arguably need it most: those suffering through the college admissions process. (See this article for more details.)

Though its primary audience is high school students, it also provides a general look inside the fascinating science of what makes interesting people interesting; so it will hopefully find a home with an even wider readership.

If you like my writing and are interested in this book, you should consider pre-ordering a copy on Amazon. (Fans of my red and yellow books know that I’m perennially understocked at bookstores — a large number of pre-orders will inspire the big chains to take my titles more seriously.)

The Admissions Outliers

Olivia shouldn’t have been accepted to the University of Virginia. At least, not according to the conventional wisdom on college admissions.

Olivia attended a small private school near Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She had good grades and test scores, but nothing phenomenal. More striking, she maintained a minimal extracurricular schedule. During the school year, she was a member of the dance team, which satisfied her school’s athletic requirement. She also joined the tech crew for the school musical and was the co-chair of her senior class’s community service organization.

Combined, her school year activities required only seven to eight hours of effort per week.

During the summer, she worked in a marine zoology laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, studying lobsters and horseshoe crabs with a research group run by her neighbor, a professor at the university. She started as a part-time, unpaid volunteer, but the position  morphed into a full time summer job when the professor discovered extra money in his grant.

“It was not a big commitment at all,” Olivia told me, reflecting on her high school obligations.

Students familiar with competitive college admissions tend to have the same reaction to Olivia: she’s a solid applicant, but certainly not good enough to earn a spot at a top-twenty school like UVA. Research involvement has become a standard item on modern applications — the 21st century equivalent of becoming student council president –  and her school-year activities are nearly non-existent by the standards of most competitive applications.

Olivia, however, defied this reaction.  Not only was she accepted at UVA, she also won the hyper-competitive Jefferson Scholarship – a merit-based award, given out by UVA alumni, that covers the full cost of attending the school.

Most high school senior classes have a student like Olivia – someone who defies our understanding of who should get accepted to competitive colleges. We tend to attribute these outliers to the “randomness” of the admissions process. Indeed, even Olivia was surprised by her own success: “I wasn’t stressed like the other students at my school, because I wasn’t interested in trying to impress colleges,” she told me. “I still don’t understand how I got into UVA.”

In this article, by contrast, I argue that the success of students like Olivia is not the result of randomness. It instead points to a surprising possibility: perhaps our understanding of extracurricular activities and their role in the college process is all wrong.

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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…

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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.

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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…

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