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Learning to Love Your AP History Assignments: How to Hack the Psychology of Student Motivation

The War Against Extrinsic Motivation

In 1999, Alfie Kohn, an education writer described by Time magazine as “perhaps the country’s most outspoken critic of education’s fixation on grades,” published an article in High School Magazine titled “From Degrading to De-Grading.” It listed many arguments against grades, but its first is the most repeated: “Grades tend to reduce students’ interest in the learning itself.” As Kohn explained: “One of the most well-researched findings in the field of motivational psychology is that the more people are rewarded for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest.”

Kohn is referring to the voluminous research on the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. The former describes motivation that comes from rewards or punishments outside the task, like studying to achieve a good grade. The latter describes motivation for the task itself, like practicing the guitar simply because you enjoy practicing the guitar. The popular understanding of these motivations, as demonstrated by Kohn’s conclusions about grades and learning, is that when you do something for an extrinsic reward, you lose your interest for the subject.

And this presents a problem for students…

It would be great, of course, if students could find intrinsic motivation for all academic work, but this is a pipe dream. As you move through high school and into college, work becomes demanding. Few can summon an intrinsic interest in reviewing 200 pages of AP history notes or memorizing organic chemistry equations: these are hard tasks, which require the unpleasant mental strain of hard focus. In other words, a large percentage of student work will remain extrinsically motivated — we do it to for the grade and the interesting options a good GPA attracts, or to build the expertise needed for a remarkable life.

If the fears of Kohn are true, then this spells disaster for our Romantic Scholar project. How can we make school the foundation of an interesting life if the work required is destined to become something we lose interest in?

Fortunately, this popular understanding of motivation is woefully dated. The past thirty years of social psychology research has identified many different types of extrinsic motivation, and it clearly shows that doing something for an external reward does not necessarily doom you to losing interest.

In this post, I want to draw from this research to hack the psychology of student motivation: providing you with concrete strategies for embracing even the most demanding academic challenges.

Rethinking Motivation

In an influential paper, published in 2000 in the journal Contemporary Educational Psychology, social psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci call out researchers who are still using an outdated understanding of motivation.

“In the classic literature, extrinsic motivation has typically been characterised as a pale and impoverished…form of motivation,” they begin, early in the paper’s introduction. “However, [the past thirty years of motivational psychology research] proposes that there are varied types of extrinsic motivation…some of which represent active, agentic states”, (where “active, agentic states” is psychologist speak for “states where people are fired up about what they’re doing”).

Ryan and Deci then present a continuum of extrinsic motivation. On one end is what they call external regulation of motivation. This is where you do work only to avoid a punishment or achieve a reward. Not surprisingly, this is not a sustainable strategy; it feels “alienating” and “controlled,” and it’s why in laboratory experiments the subjects who are paid to do creative tasks, like solving puzzles, get turned off and start performing poorly. (This was the type of study that led an earlier generation of psychologists to believe all extrinsic motivation was bad.)

On the other end of this continuum, however, is integrated regulation. When you experience this type of regulation, you’re still doing work for reasons outside of the work itself, but two other properties now also hold:

  1. your reasons for the task match your deeply-held values; and
  2. your approach to the task is self-determined, not something someone imposed on you.

As Ryan and Deci note, this form of extrinsic motivation “shares many of the qualities with intrinsic motivation,” and is the type of good extrinsic motivation missed by the early research on the subject.

Clearly, this is the best you can hope for when it comes to feeling motivation toward your most difficult school work, so let’s find out how to make this happen…

Hacking the Psychology of Student Motivation

To develop integrated regulation of your motivation for your school work, you need to satisfy the two properties described above. Here’s my advice for satisfying the first, which requires that your motivation for the work match your values:

  • Follow the Roberts Method. This collection of strategies helps you develop a deep interest in your major, which, in turn, will convince you that the hard work required by your major is worthwhile. If you’re in high school, the Roberts Method is easily adapted to your setting and can offer the same benefits: instead of declaring a major, as you would at college, choose a deep question to take its place. For example,  “what makes great writing great?”, or “what are the laws that explain Nature’s marvels?”.
  • Use Lifestyle-Centric Career Planning. This strategy helps you choose between potential careers by working backward from the general traits of a life well-lived. Identifying these general traits also provides a personal answer to the question of why you’re going through school.

The second property requires that your approach to a task is “self-determined.” The most powerful way for a student to achieve this feeling is to disassociate your work from its deadline. Most students let the pressure of a deadline motivate them into action: if I don’t start working I’ll run out of time before I finish and be punished with a ruinous grade! This fear of punishment is way over on the external regulation end of Ryan and Deci’s continuum, and it’s a recipe for burn out at best and deep procrastination at worst.

On the other hand, if you’re able to start and finish work early — perhaps even radically early — you not only avoid the feeling of external regulation, but the sheer novelty of your approach — at least, as compared to other students  — gives you the sense of self-determination required to experience integrated regulation.

Many students balk at the idea of deadline disassociation. “I could never start work early!,” they cry. This is nonsense. You just need the right strategies to walk you through the process:

  • Do Less. Deadline disassociation requires that you have room to maneuver in your schedule. If you’re still convinced that a crowded schedule of classes and activities is essential to look “impressive,” first read my recent article on double majors ruining your life, then, if still not convinced, read my new book on doing well in college admissions without hating your life: it’s essentially a 250-page argument in favor of a minimalist student lifestyle.
  • Use an Autopilot Schedule. This technique identifies fixed times in your weekly schedule for regularly occurring school work. It’s absolutely essential for the advice that follows. If you dabbled with these schedules before and failed, see my four post series, 4 Weeks to a 4.0, which will help ease you into a more structured lifestyle. If you’re a high school student, read the Part 1 playbook of the blue book: it adapts this approach to the unique demands of a high school schedule.
  • Use a 24-Hour Tether. Insist on starting every assignment within 24 hours after it is given out. To make this a reality, adjust your autopilot schedule to include a block for each class within 24 hours of that class’s meeting time. Use this strategy on both regular assignments and long term assignments, like paper writing. There’s something magical about doing an hour of work on a two-month long term paper the day after it’s assigned. For more details on this approach, see my article on the ESS method.
  • Overschedule by 20%. When setting up your autopilot schedule for a given class, assign yourself about 20% more time than you think you need to complete that class’s assignments. If you finish the current week’s assignments for a class, but more time remains in your autopilot schedule, use it to get ahead on your work. Over time, you will begin to slip farther and farther ahead in the syllabus, yielding a powerful sense of deadline disassociation.

Beyond an Intrinsic Utopia

Some of the most engaged and successful students I know seem oblivious to procrastination. They tackle demanding courses with ease, starting work early, focusing hard, and coming out on the other end with a smile and an ‘A.’ The science of motivation — the real science, not the out-dated “extrinsic = bad” crap still promoted by pop-psychologists — offers an explanation. These students aren’t special, and contrary to the wildest dreams of many education theorists, they don’t feel intrinsic motivation for every assignment — o-chem does, and always will, suck — but they have figured out how to make their extrinsic motivation a sustainable strategy. They connect external rewards to deep values and they adopt a self-determined approach to their assignments.

These are simple ideas, but they are too often over-looked. To make the Romantic Scholar lifestyle a reality, you should take them seriously.

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This post is the fourth in my series on the Romantic Scholar approach to student life, which details a collection of strategies to transform school from a trial to survive into the foundation of a life well-lived. Roughly every other post on Study Hacks in the near future will be dedicated to this series.

Past articles:

(photo by Orange42)

46 thoughts on “Learning to Love Your AP History Assignments: How to Hack the Psychology of Student Motivation”

  1. Great article Cal.

    What I always find (actually today as well) I am studying and I am all of the time thinking of when I can stop. ‘After this page’ ‘after I finish these questions’. The strange thing is, why do I want to stop? I am studying psychiatry right now and schizophrenic diseases is something I really love to learn/read about. And still, in some sort of way, I can’t love it.

    Grades are awful. I read Montaigne right now, not because I am taking a literature class, just because I like it. And in some sort of way, I would have never read it like I do right now if I did take a literature class.

    Dissociating the work from it’s deadline, sounds pretty cool. Going to check that out!

    Reply
  2. I feel the need to agree with Stefan. I’m probably the only one, or one of a handful of students, in my high school who has read Montaigne’s Essays, Don Quixote, Canterbury Tales (in Middle English), or the stories of Chekhov for fun. Do you think the pressures of grades can ever be positive? Does grading inevitably decay our curiosity? If I ever read any of the above books for school, I would likely recoil. Of course, my reading is imperfect as well, but I believe the enjoyment makes up for it.

    Grades discourage me from doing what I will.

    I just wanted to add my thoughts.

    Reply
  3. I try to find something in each one of my classes that I like and that I would like to improve upon. I try my best not to focus on grades and just become engulfed in what I’m learning. It seems to work pretty well. I tend to hate learning something just to memorize it and then forget it, and it seems to get me a bad grade when I do it that way.

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  4. I actually really like orgo. It’s my favorite class this semester. If I knew how much I like chemistry and how much I DON’T like biology at the start of college, I definitely would have gone straight chemistry rather than biochemistry.
    (Just a small defense for my favorite subject).
    Great article – it definitely makes you feel inferior when people keep telling you that you should be “intrinsically motivated” to “do the best you can” on every single assignment. I love college, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to throw my work in the air sometimes.

    Reply
  5. Awesome post, Cal. It’s great to tie Life-style Centered Career Planning to Deci’s self determination theory (it’s not merely a “theory” it works!) In short, zen master, you speak to the value of being centered and finding a means for taking charge instead of letting the external forces of raging deadline demands run (or ruin) life. Three cheers!

    Reply
  6. Follow the Roberts Method…instead of declaring a major, as you would at college, choose a deep question to take its place. For example, “what makes great writing great?”, or “what are the laws that explain Nature’s marvels?”.

    I am gathering these questions will naturally lead to a journey. They are externally motivated and the question’s ambiguous nature suggests a non-definitive destination.

    With that said, I want to be clear on what you mean by “Integrated Regulation.” I interpret it as:

    Do not do things for the sake of doing things. Do things that have a purpose, but focus on the process.

    Am I correct with this assumption?

    Reply
  7. Yeah, this semester, I felt the motivation-crushing consequences of worshipping the grade idol. I especially felt this about my honors composition class. It was pushing me to develop my writing and all I could look at were the grades: my professor told me quite a few times that I was too grade-oriented. It was difficult, but I finally pushed past the golden grade god and determined to take my writing assignments at my own interests. I started writing for the sake of what my topic meant to me, not for the sake of the grade. And my writing really improved. It became real. And I learned an invaluable lesson.
    You have further defined for me one of the greatest things I have learned this semester. Thanks, Cal.

    Reply
  8. At the moment I’m a high school senior. This year especially I can see two types of teachers. Unfortunately, I have a disproportionate amount of one over the other. The first type of teacher I can see is the one that religiously updates grades and gives us points for every task we complete. I think, especially at a school that is ~80% asian (no-stereotyping but my peers are seriously motivated to go to college, and this is not a joke – I got to school in the Silicon Valley), these teachers are doing a great disservice to our education. In these classes I have lost a lot of my motivation to truly learn because it excites me. With grades updated at the end of the day I simply make sure that they stay above 90%. The second type of teacher is the one who hides their grades. They will let you see it if you ask but they don’t exploit technology, especially the internet. This environment makes students come back. Day after day, as more colleges are finishing up, more and more of this one teacher’s past students show up at her doorstep espousing the awesomeness of her class. This second type of teacher really does make us more motivated to truly learn.
    In the interim I see the need for students to take initiative and disassociate from grades. However, in the long run, I see the proliferation of technology and real-time-grades as something that needs to be addressed.

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  9. Dr. Newport, this is great.

    I love reading your blog and your books; they take the widespread, deep-rooted beliefs about college and student life in general head-on. And convinced me that you’re right, and your way (with modifications, because everyone’s situation is different) is the right way.

    I recently wrote a post on ways to do homework, specifically focusing on how I did my AP World History notes and test in record time without losing motivation, all by using the Straight-A method of study chunks (and gave credit to you). Your post came the day after I wrote it and both are about/mention motivation and AP History, and, and, and…! Except that your writing is what I aim to be as good as. It’s like a sign! haha.

    Keep writing, all of us are eagerly awaiting your next post already, I’m sure!

    Reply
  10. Great post, Cal. I have been following your blog for a long time without mentioning what I do. But this post is entirely on point with my work, which is to help people pass the bar exam. A law license! Talk about extrinsic motivation! But the students who enjoy mastering the subjects on the bar exam get much more out of preparing for the exam than the ones who think only about whether they’re on target for the magical grade of “665” on the New York bar. I work to show the students how to manage their time and their expectations so that learning can be its own reward. I think, although I cannot be sure, that then they are also more likely to pass.

    Reply
  11. -Stefan
    I love running. It’s defiantly based on intrinsic motivation. It is hard work and I find myself looking forward to the end. I think other forms of work are similar where the reward can come after you’ve done the task. Looking back to previous times of hard school work brings great feelings of success and reward – something that I have to remind myself of next time I need to buckle down in school.

    Reply
  12. Awesome post, Cal!

    My semester ends this week but what you said will definitely help me in the next semester. There are some classes that I’m not too thrilled about but are required.

    I also really wanted to thank you! I’ve actually been following your blog (and read your books) for a while now but didn’t put any of it into practice until this fall after just missing being placed on academic probation. It’s actually really creepy how everything fell into place for me after I stuck to one major, committed myself to one club, and decreased the amount I worked a week. And while I’m not getting straight A’s, it’s a HUGE improvement from last year. Plus, I’m no longer sleep-deprived or stressed out.

    Can’t wait for your next post!

    Reply
  13. I don’t understand what Cal means by “deeply-held values”. Can anyone explain to me what that means?

    I’m currently a high school senior taking AP Government and I absolutely hate the class. Everyone in that class literally doesn’t want to be there. Hell, yesterday we had a test that no one was prepared for, the usual. The teacher walked out of the class for five minutes and a friend of mine found the test answers in his folder on his desk, took a picture, and dictated the answers to the test to everyone in class. No one takes that class seriously. Everyone has poor work ethic pertaining ONLY to that class. I’m also taking AP English Lit and AP Music Theory. But…I love both of them!

    Hell, I’m ditching school right now as I type, because there’s simply no reason to be there. I’m currently ditching my math (easy class, I can get an A without showing up, and there isn’t a harder class), technical art (literally, we do nothing, I learn nothing, teacher doesn’t lecture at all, he lets us do whatever we want, and I have to take the class to GRADUATE, there’s no room for another technical art class I’d like to take), and government. Today, nothing is really going on in my classes, nothing I can learn, so I decided to stay home. I’d rather do something else that I’m interested in than just show up for 7 hours just to daydream in my chair.

    It’s not that I don’t like school. I love school. I love to learn. I’m only going to my AP Lit, Band, and AP Music theory classes today. Because I love those classes. The others I just tolerate or hate.

    There is another AP Government class that I was in for a week before I was forced to switch out due to a mess-up of my schedule, I loved the teacher and the environment. The current class I’m in, different teacher and environment, you all know that I absolutely despise it. Here is the problem, I can get an A in the class I’m in right now, but I would never actually learn anything. I’d just forget it. In the other class that I loved, I heard it’s hard to get an A. Most people have a C or B in that class. So, what do I choose? I don’t want my GPA to get lowered for my senior year.

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  14. Do you think the pressures of grades can ever be positive? Does grading inevitably decay our curiosity?

    I’ll have to admit I’m somewhat distressed by this comment. One of the major points of my article was to disprove popular idea that extrinsic motivation, such as grades, is always bad. All of the advice in at the end of the article, is how to approach an extrinsic goal, like getting a good grade, without seeing your motivation decrease.

    I love college, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to throw my work in the air sometimes.

    Well said!

    Do not do things for the sake of doing things. Do things that have a purpose, but focus on the process.

    This is a good way of summarizing integrated regulation. Even more short: pay attention to both why and how.

    Yeah, this semester, I felt the motivation-crushing consequences of worshipping the grade idol

    In these classes I have lost a lot of my motivation to truly learn because it excites me.

    This is interesting to me: the point of my article is that it’s okay to have an extrinsic motivation, like trying to get a good grade, so long as you really understand why that motivation is important to you, and you control the process for achieving it.

    Yet a lot of comments, like these cited above, reflect back the conventional wisdom that you should ignore extrinsic motivations like grades.

    To reiterate:

    There’s nothing wrong with tackling a hard class with the goal of scoring high. You should not expect to have a love for learning the material in all classes. But you should make sure that you’re reasons for wanting a good grade are well articulated, and you control the process of getting there.

    I work to show the students how to manage their time and their expectations so that learning can be its own reward.

    Intrinsic motivation is certainly the gold standard for any learning project, but for a lot of subjects, it’s probably not practical. For those who can’t quite summon a love for memorizing precedence in contract law, however, there’s still hope, and that’s what I’m trying to write about here.

    it’s a HUGE improvement from last year. Plus, I’m no longer sleep-deprived or stressed out.

    Music to my ears! Keep it up.

    I don’t understand what Cal means by “deeply-held values”. Can anyone explain to me what that means?

    What makes a Good Life good? You need an answer to this question. Then you should be working backwards from that answer for just about anything that demands serious time (school, etc.)

    This answer forms the deeply-held value to which everything else is connected. Without these answers, you’re probably operating way over on the externally-regulated end of the extrinsic motivation spectrum, which is a dangerous place to be.

    Reply
  15. Let me clarify: the motivation to learn in order to get a good grade is a good thing. But it’s only a good motivation for me if it’s not the ONLY motivation. There has to be something deeper paired with it, a focus on the “why” and the “how.” Otherwise, I got fixated on grades, and I lost the perspective of why I was really in school for a month or so — to learn, grow, to prepare me for what I want to do. That’s what I meant by “worshipping the grade idol.” It’s a tunnel vision produced by focusing solely on the grade and not on the more intrinsic motivations AND reasons behind your schooling.
    Grades are good — there needs to be a standard.

    Reply
  16. Thank you for this article. I am a high school sophmore taking APUSH right now and it’s hell. It’s also worse for me because I am Canadian but I will apply these methods to my APUSH class. : D

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  17. Hello Cal!

    This is the worst semester in my life, or this year. I have got lower grades. Believe it or not: I went from straight A’s to C’s and d’s. I am a student from Sweden.

    I did also a standardized test and got a poor result. On top of this problem I have no control over my life again. No exercise, no eat healthy food and so on. This is killing me and I want a change. :'(

    I have always wanted to be successful and liked to work hard to feel the satisfaction of success. If like I got a good grade or have been disciplined for some days, it feels very good. How can I get back there? Is this is a good “intrinsic motivation” ? To want success and feel the pleasure and also grow intellectually and personally? 🙁

    Thanks Cal!

    Reply
  18. I especially like your summary in the comment thread above… pay attention to the why and how. Grades never really motivated me, I worked hardest in modules taught by the best lecturers, because they inspired interest for it’s own sake.

    With hindsight, I needed a process when that inspiration wasn’t there… I needed a way of taking responsibility for it myself, rather than blaming the lecturers!

    Reply
  19. I can personally vouch for the effectiveness of detaching yourself from a deadline and using a 24-hour tether.

    In the second semester of my freshman year, I chose to pledge a professional fraternity. Although the process was challenging, I still came out with a 4.0 at the end of the semester, despite very difficult courses.

    How? I got a head start even BEFORE the semester started. I knew I wanted to pledge, so I purchased my textbooks and other required reading and started reading them over winter break. I got so far ahead that the entire semester was a process of the class slowly catching up to me, but I was ahead the entire time. It made the readings more enjoyable and I was infinitely more prepared for class. Being prepared for class reinforced all of my early studying and started a positive cycle of preparedness for class and exams.

    I swear by this method to this very day. Students who work with me on projects think I’m crazy when I wish to start planning and delegating tasks incredibly early, but the reduced stress and more enjoyable learning experience pays off in spades.

    Reply
  20. I have always wanted to be successful and liked to work hard to feel the satisfaction of success. If like I got a good grade or have been disciplined for some days, it feels very good. How can I get back there? Is this is a good “intrinsic motivation” ? To want success and feel the pleasure and also grow intellectually and personally?

    This is not intrinsic motivation (which requires that you enjoy the task itself, not what it generates), but the point of my article is that you don’t need intrinsic motivation to be happy. Extrinsic motivation is fine so long as you satisfy the two properties I describe in the article.

    What’s a good way for a student to satisfy tHow? I got a head start even BEFORE the semester started. I knew I wanted to pledge, so I purchased my textbooks and other required reading and started reading them over winter break. I got so far ahead that the entire semester was a process of the class slowly catching up to me, but I was ahead the entire time. It made the readings more enjoyable and I was infinitely more prepared for class.hese properties? See the detailed advice in the article…

    This is a fantastic example of this psychology at work in the real world.

    Reply
  21. This is unrelated to my previous question: I’m unclear on the concept of insight. What if I don’t understand something, and am not sure how to ask about it? The most extreme example would be someone who can do all of the problems in a class, but cannot solve any related problems.

    Reply
  22. But isn’t it dangerous falling in love with your major?

    I’m sorry if I’m not getting something here, but when you become deeply attached to something is harder to let it go. Maybe in a future new learning structures and better ways of thinking will replace what we have now, if that moment comes how can we be sure that we can evolve?

    Maybe it’s because I’m from a third world country, but it seems like “experts” often refuse the present. One of my professor from compsci taught us programming in BASIC(not the visual one) because that’s the way he learned, he said.

    Sometimes I feel like I should rush through college like Steve Pavlina or David Banh and then truly start learning on my own. Maybe it’s just my university, but I feel like there is a huge difference between graduating and learning.

    Reply
  23. Of course, something that helps a ton in maintaining “love” for classes is to only choose classes that you have an inherent interest in. It doesn’t hurt to take a course outside of your favored subject area once in a while, although, no matter the intrinsic motivation at work, reading a paper for a subject that you dislike will always be difficult. Fortunately, choosing your own classes satisfies both of the above requirements (“match your deeply-held values” and “your approach to the task is self-determined”) for hacking student motivation.

    Reply
  24. To back up the above comment, there’s some viewing problems in google chrome too.

    Anyway, Cal, I’m a huge fan of the blog but I never comment. I love this post. It speaks to me directly and helps me carve a promising new year resolution, so thank you!

    I stumbled on the old “Some Thoughts on Grad School” post today and found it really helpful for my PhD adventure. Now that you are a postdoc, I’d love to see more advice for grad students. I use many of your undergrads study techniques for my PhD study except that I study everything independently outside of a structured class. It’d be great if you can share how to study as a grad student. For example, how to go through tons of scientific papers in a fast-paced lab environment. How to effectively grab the concepts from papers and apply them to your research. How to be a valuable member of the lab. How to keep your research organized. How to independently formulate research ideas. How to broaden your background in the field. As a newbie grad student, I find it very hard to understand how people do it. I think these areas are untapped. And being a theorist myself, I’d appreciate some tips from you specifically.

    Keep up good work. Your blog is definitely the most useful one on the web in my world.

    Reply
  25. Hey,

    This is an awesome post and I see a lot of similarities with my study behaviour. Although on one point we may argue, on the deadline point.
    This year I started a minor on education and there was a lot of sparetime in the schedule of the lessons. Also the teachers didn’t give any deadlines. They said that we can present our work within the next two weeks, but after two years is also not a problem.
    This was killing for my motivation. I started avoiding tasks for my minor and now I have a shitload of work. Last year we had deadlines and so my work was fnished in time and I was very relaxed in school and scored high grades. Is this a discipline problem of me or are there more students like me?

    Reply
  26. Cal, where have you gone? We’re all looking forward to see the next ones, and now that your book is over you have more free time right?

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  27. I Really liked the txt, Cal. I was very enlightening, make me feel a lot more confident about my studies from now on. Reading this I could not forget a phrase one of my friend said once: “Don’t let university mess up with your studying”. Thanks for all.

    Reply
  28. Hey, I am a high school student and I thought that you said “busy=bad.” But on your example for finishing school before dinner time, the guy obviously spends 7 hours everyday studying for school. Isn’t it better to switch up your life and do a lot of things… instead of crunching books. IDK, some of the site’s information is a bit confusing to me, but I like where you are going with this. So many people take a partially true idea and run with it. I like that you are demystifying life. I will definitely check out your books!

    Reply

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