Study Hacks

The Book Arrives

Over the weekend, I received a large box from Random House containing copies of my brand new book, How to Be a High School Superstar, which is coming out next week.  (Click here to pre-order.)

• Here’s what the book jacket says it’s about: applying the philosophies of sustainable success I preach here at Study Hacks to high school — teaching students how to build interesting, engaging, and low-stress lives, yet still do well during the college admissions process.
• Here’s what it’s secretly also about: my general philosophy on how anyone — be they a student or CEO — can build an interesting life. I combine a diverse collection of scientific results — from signaling theory to the economics of superstars — with in-depth case studies to deconstruct exactly how people become fascinating.
  

I Want Your Help

I tend to feel guilty about my abysmal book promotion skills. My lack of a Facebook fan page, for example, has been cast as a mortal sin. But as I explained to my publisher, I do have one secret weapon: the smartest, most engaged readers in the world of advice blogging.

Here’s my request: if you’re a serious fan of my philosophy, and believe this book deserves an audience, send me a proposal for how you can help spread the word. It can be something local, such as organizing a reading group with parents at your local church, or something epic, like convincing your good friend Oprah that it’s worth a read.

• I’ll send a signed copy of the book — and my eternal gratitude — to the best (implemented) idea.
• If there are lots of great ideas, I’ll send out lots of signed copies. (I have a bunch.)
• If the idea is particularly epic, I’ll throw in a free phone consultation on admissions, interestingness, or whatever else you want to chat about.

If you’re interested, e-mail me: author [at] calnewport.com

What to Expect Over the Next Few Weeks

The book launches next week on Tuesday, July 27th, so you’re going to see a lot more post traffic over the next month or so.

As part of the promotion efforts, I’ve arranged fascinating guest posts with a series of high quality advice blogs.  I’ll announce and summarize these posts as they go live in late July and early August. The result: expect a large amount of original content in the near future. 

These are exciting times. I hope you like the book, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts…

Living the focused life is not about trying to feel happy all the time…rather, it’s about treating your mind as you would a private garden and being as careful as possible about what you introduce and allow to grow there.

This quote, tucked innocuously at the end of the third chapter of Rapt,  Winifred Gallagher’s 2009 ode to focus, is life-changing.

Gallagher’s book begins with a cancer diagnosis (“not just cancer, but a particularly nasty, fairly advanced kind”). She realizes that this disease wants to claim her attention, and that this was no way to live what may be the last moments of her life. So she launches an experiment to reclaim her attention, relentlessly redirecting it towards the things that matter most: “big ones like family and friends, spiritual life and work, and smaller ones like movies, walks, and a 6:30 pm martini.”

Gallagher comes away from the experiment with a good prognosis for her disease and a visceral appreciation of a surprising fact: “life is the sum total of what you focus on,” yet most people expend little effort cultivating this focus.

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The Stanford Consensus

My technology habits are eccentric. I use an old fashioned, non-Internet connected Samsung flip phone with a postage-stamp size screen. I’m not on Facebook or Twitter, and my RSS reader is an emaciated husk, subsisting on a small number of feeds, mainly the blogs of friends. Long ago, I configured Gmail to automatically mark every message as read when it arrives in my inbox, frustrating my attempts to perform distracting quick scans for new messages during the day.

The rational foundation of my eccentricity is the increasingly alarming research coming out of Stanford’s Communication between Humans and Interactive Media (CHIMe) lab.  Pioneering researchers from this lab are converging on a scary consensus. It’s long been understood that you’re less productive when you’re constantly switching your attention; that is, the claimed benefits of multitasking are false. Researchers  at the CHIMe lab, however, have found that the impact of electronic multitasking goes beyond the momentary sense of distraction, it can also create permanent changes in the brain.

As reported in a recent New York Times article, subjects who were identified as multitaskers did “a significantly worse job” on experimental tasks that required them to filter out irrelevant information — even though they weren’t multitasking during the experiment.

“Other tests at Stanford,” reports the same article, “showed multitaskers tended to search for new information rather than accept a reward for putting older, more valuable information to work.”

Or, as Clifford Nass, a communications professor at Stanford, summarized: “the scary part for [multitaskers] is they can’t shut off their multitasking tendencies when they’re not multitasking.”

This is why I invest so much effort in isolating myself from electronic distraction. In my two fields, theoretical computer science and writing, the ability to focus on hard things for long uninterrupted periods is my most valuable currency.  If I lose this ability, I might also lose my livelihood.

As the computer scientist Donald Knuth once said, “Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.”

The Danger to Students

That’s the rational explanation for my behavior. If you want the emotional explanation, however, turn your (perhaps distracted) attention from Stanford’s CHIMe lab to my blog e-mail inbox.

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Note: I’m leaving today for a week-long overseas trip. I won’t have Internet access (by design), so I give my usual apologies about not being able to moderate comments or respond to e-mail in the near future.

The Maverick 

Esther Duflo, a professor of economics at MIT, discovered her life’s mission in graduate school. It started with a class taught by Abhijit Banerjee, a pioneer in the field of development economics. Duflo ended that semester with a clear vision: when helping the world’s poor, rigorous and controlled experiments can be used to determine which programs work and which fail.

Other thinkers had toyed with this idea, but Duflo boasts, as Ian Parker notes in his recent New Yorker profile, “[a] faith in redistribution…[and] the optimistic notion that tomorrow might turn our better than today.”

This confidence translated into an ability to conceive and then execute development experiments on an unprecedented scale. Her dissertation, titled “Three Essays in Empirical Development Economics,” became a standard in the field. As Parker reports, Duflo received offers from every top economics department in the country, with the exception of Stanford. In 2003, she co-founded a Poverty Action Lab at MIT, which has since conducted over 200 empirical development experiments. In 2004, she was made a full professor at MIT. In 2009, she won a MacArthur Genius Grant.

When reflecting on Duflo’s life, it’s clear that her mission is the foundation for her rapid success. Lots of young economists work very hard, and many have more technical ability than Duflo, whose accomplishments are more logistical than mathematical. But she focused her attention on a worthy mission, which accelerated her, to an almost ridiculous speed, along the path to becoming so good they couldn’t ignore her.

I’m fascinated by the concept of a life mission,which I define as devoting the bulk of your professional energies toward an under-served but unambiguously useful cause. As Duflo’s story emphasizes, missions can help spawn a remarkable life.

But the closer you look at the concept, the murkier it becomes…

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The Shane Black Effect 

The story is a Hollywood classic. At the age of 23, two years after graduating from UCLA with a theater degree, and eager for a source of income while waiting for his acting break, Shane Black decided to try screenwriting. He penned a buddy cop flick, featuring a deranged lead seeking redemption. He gave it the type of clipped, masculine title popular in the mid-80s blockbuster era: Lethal Weapon. The script was scooped up mega-producer Joel Silver for a quarter million dollars, catapulting Black into screenwriting stardom. Within a decade, after earning a then record $4 million for The Long Kiss Goodbye, he became the highest paid writer in the industry,

Black’s story, and those like it, drive thousands of hopeful writers to Los Angeles each year, and motivate untold tens of thousands more to bookstores to seek instruction from a bewildering array of expert advice guides. These writer wannabes take this leap with full knowledge that screenwriting is one of the world’s most notoriously elite and inaccessible industries. The Writers Guild of America counts 12,000 professional screenwriters on its rolls — that is, writers good enough to have been paid for their work — and of these pros, it’s estimated that around half are out of work at any given time. To make matters worse for the amateur, a growing number of selective screenwriting M.F.A. programs ensures a constant flow of highly-trained newcomers to compete for the few open slots that remain. In 2009, the Nicholl Fellowship, the most prestigious amateur screenwriting award, received close to 7000 submissions.

If you want to make it in screenwriting you have to be exceptional, and this is what makes it a fascinating case study for our ongoing efforts to decode the secrets of becoming so good they can’t ignore you.

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Earlier this afternoon I read an e-mail from a sophomore at Yale.

“I’ve always been a good student and I know that I’m smart and capable, but lately I’ve been having such a hard time,” she began.

“I’m having trouble completing assignments, even though I have sufficient time.  I avoid seeking out help, preferring instead to just freak out alone in my room.”

This student recognized her trouble as deep procrastination — the exceedingly common student affliction of losing the will to work.

While responding to her message, I had an interesting realization: deep procrastination, though scary, represents something important and perhaps even exciting. It marks that key transition where the momentum of “this is what you need to do” — the momentum that carried you through high school and into college — begins to wane, leaving you to discover a new source of propulsion — not just new, but also more durable and more personal.

It’s important to side step the self-help cliches in this situation. It’s unlikely that you’ll unearth a burning life’s mission hidden conveniently just below the surface of your psyche. What you seek is more fundamental: an acceptance that doing things well is hard, and always will be, and that you need to spend more time than you thought was necessary deciding which such hard things gain rights to your attention.

None of this is easy. All of it is exciting.

With all of this in mind, I had no magical solution to offer this worried sophomore. I could only suggest that she take a step back and reduce the frantic Yale pace, maybe for just one semester, leaving space for her new propulsion to build a head of steam.

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.

E-mail Renegades

As part of an exciting writing project, I’m looking for people who have taken drastic steps to reduce the distraction generated by electronic communication tools — e-mail, social networks, twitter, etc. I’m more interested in big changes — e.g., getting rid of public e-mail addresses — than I am in moderation — e.g., checking e-mail only twice a day.

I’m interested in stories from knowledge workers, entrepreneurs, and folks in academia — be it professors, grad students, or undergraduates.

If this describes you or if you know someone like this, please e-mail me: author [at] calnewport.com. 

Interesting Links

• “When it comes to student loans, financial aid, and higher education, everyone’s got an opinion. They just usually happen to be wrong.” Thus opens Ramit Sethi’s barnburner of an article on the costs of higher education.
• “Comfortably situated in Chicago outside of the ‘start-up’ echo chamber, 37Signals is focused on getting sh*t done instead of chasing the Silicon Valley venture capital death spiral” This is Tim Ferriss’ description of the tech firm 37Signals. I’ve been fascinated by this Chicago-based company since I first read about their four day work week policy. Ferriss’ article is a great introduction to their unconventional thinking on integrating work into a full life.
• “This would suggest that sometimes you’re not going to be interested in something right out of the gate.” This is one of several interesting conclusions from Ben Casnocha’s recent article on the science behind interest development. (A topic, incidentally, that I cover in-depth in my new book on college admissions. Did I mention that I had a new book coming out?)

Coming Up

I have two provocative posts in the works. One describes recent research on people who describe their work as “a calling,” while the other explores the controversial idea that competitive college admissions can actually be good for students.

Stay tuned…

The late summer of 2006 was a heady time for Terry Tao. First, in August of that year, he received the Fields Medal, an elite prize, given only once every four years, that honors the world’s top mathematicians. (One of Tao’s fellow prizewinners in 2006 was Grigori Perelman, the eccentric Russian who roared to international celebrity by solving the long-standing Poincaré conjecture.)

Next, less than a month after his return from the Fields ceremony, Tao learned that he won a $500,000 MacArthur “Genius Grant” — leading the LA Times to dub him a “Mozart of Math.”

Here’s what interests me about Tao: on his well-trafficked web site, he has a contact page that starts…

The best way to contact me is via e-mail.

It then goes on to list 22 different types of e-mails that he will not respond to — a list that includes invitations to “collaborate,” “contribute data to a project,” “give [a] talk,” or “attend seminars or conferences.” He also declines requests for “career advice” and “copies of his work.” On a separate page, he notes that he’s “not giving [media] interviews at this time,” and diverts all other queries to a representative of the UCLA office of media relations.

In other words, Terry Tao doesn’t want to hear from you.

And this is completely understandable.

The world’s top math mind is most valuable to society when it’s solving our knottiest combinatorial quandaries. Dedicating hours to interview requests and career advice seems somehow wasteful.

But this motivates an intriguing question: why have a public e-mail address at all? Certainly it would be simpler for him to omit any contact information from his web page.

I don’t know the specific reasons for Tao’s pseudo-accessibility, but his story emphasizes a general trend I first identified in my essay on quitting Facebook: our society has a warped relationship with communication technology. Instead of deploying tools like e-mail to maximize our effectiveness, we grant them default positions in our lives protected by an impossibly high threshold for disuse — a threshold usually articulated as: “If there is any possible negative consequence of abandoning full-throttled use of this technology, I won’t.”

The scenario that intrigues me is not to move to an opposite extreme and promote a world of techno-Luddism. I like to ponder what the middle ground might look like — a philosophy of work where communication technology is isolated and tuned to specific circumstances where it provides unambiguous benefit, and ruthlessly culled elsewhere.

I’m not sure what such a future would look like, but I can only hope that it doesn’t include contact policies so complex that only a mathematician can fully understand them.

(Photo by Christopher Albert)