Study Hacks

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…

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Becoming a Grandmaster

How do great chess players become great? If you read Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers, you probably have an answer: the 10,000 hour rule. This concept, which was first introduced in academic circles in the early 1970s, was popularized by Gladwell in his 2008 book.

Here’s how he summarized it in a recent interview:

When we look at any kind of cognitively complex field — for example, playing chess, writing fiction or being a neurosurgeon — we find that you are unlikely to master it unless you have practiced for 10,000 hours. That’s 20 hours a week for 10 years.

There seems to be no escape from this work. As Flordia State University Psychology Professor Anders Ericsson reminds us: “even the chess prodigy Bobby Fisher needed a preparation period of nine years.”

The full story, however, is more complex.  Gladwell is right when he notes that the 10,000 hour rule keeps appearing as a necessary condition for exceptional performance in many fields. But it’s not sufficient. As Ericsson, along with his colleague Andreas Lehmann, noted in an exceptional overview of this topic,   “the mere number of years of experience with relevant activities in a domain is typically only weakly related to performance.”

Put another way, you need to put in a lot of hours to become exceptional, but raw hours alone doesn’t cut it. 

To understand what else is necessary, I’ll turn your attention to a fascinating 2005 study on chess players, published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology. After interviewing two large samples of chess players of varied skill, the paper’s authors found that “serious study“  — the arduous task of reviewing past games of better players, trying to predict each move in advance — was the strongest predictor of chess skill.

In more detail:

…chess players at the highest skill level (i.e. grandmasters) expended about 5000 hours on serious study alone during their first decade of serious chess play – nearly five times the average amount reported by intermediate-level players.

Similar findings have been replicated in a variety of fields. To become exceptional you have to put in a lot of hours, but of equal importance, these hours have to be dedicated to the right type of work. A decade of serious chess playing will earn you an intermediate tournament ranking. But a decade of serious study of chess games can make you a grandmaster.

I’m summarizing this research here because I want to make a provocative claim: understanding this “right type of work” is perhaps the most important (and most under-appreciated) step toward building a remarkable life…

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A New Year Tradition

It’s a tradition here at Study Hacks to greet the New Year with ambitious resolutions. In 2008 I listed five habits students should resolve to avoid, including skipping classes and studying without a plan. By 2009 I could trust that my readers were beyond such basic mistakes, so I presented instead three advanced habits students should resolve to adopt: commit to full capture, use assignment folders, and finish major assignments early.

Now that 2010 looms, I want to continue the evolution of my New Year’s advice. This year, I want to throw caution to the wind and try to convince you to transform your student lifestyle. (Though this advice is college-specific, elements of it should resonate for a variety of situations, so it’s a worth a read for anyone who is feeling overworked or under-inspired.)

Specifically, I want you to make 2010 the year that you seriously consider radical simplicity…

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The Courage Fallacy

In 2005, Lisa Feuer quit her marketing job. She had held this same position throughout her 30s before deciding, at the age of 38, that it was time for something different.

As the New York Times reported in an article from last summer, she wanted the same independence and flexibility that her ex-husband, an entrepreneur, enjoyed. Bolstered by this new resolve, Lisa invested in a $4000 yoga instruction course and started Karma Kids Yoga — a yoga practice focused on young children and pregnant women.

Lisa’s story provides a pristine example of what I call the choice-centric approach to building an interesting life. This philosophy emphasizes the importance of choosing better work. Having the courage to leave your boring but dangerously comfortable job – to borrow a phrase from Tim Ferriss – and instead follow your “passion,” has become the treasure map guiding this philosophy’s adherents. 

But there’s a problem: the endings are not always so happy…

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The Grade Whisperer is an occasional feature in which I use the Study Hacks philosophy of do less, do better, and know why, to help students overcome their academic problems.

The Parent Trap

I recently received an e-mail from a student whom I’ll call Karen. She is a sophomore at a top-20 university and is struggling with her parents’ ambitious plans for her college career.

As Karen explained: “Deep down my parents just want to make sure I have a better life than they do.”

But their relentless pressure for Karen to become a doctor (”they argue that doctors have stable jobs”) eventually became too much to handle.

“Second semester of my freshman year I put my foot down,” Karen recalls. “After a tearful and hurtful argument they finally relented and said I should try economics instead.”

But this compromise hasn’t gone well.

“I’m struggling…because I’m simply not interested in my economics courses,” Karen told me.  “My history of human rights course, however, is absolutely fascinating and actually made me seriously consider going to law school and maybe getting an MPA in Public Affairs, or even going to business school.”

Karen reduced her woes to three questions:

1. “Should I stay at my school? And if so, should I change my major?
2. “Should I transfer?”
3. “Should I take a gap semester or year off?”

“I’m just sick of trying to be someone I’m not, but I have this deep-seated fear of being a starving person on the street if I follow my passions.”

Sounds like a job for the Grade Whisperer…

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Please excuse a brief interruption from our normally scheduled programming. I have two quick notes that I think might interest many of you…

Looking for a Few Good Volunteers

One of my eventual goals for Study Hacks is to support student groups on college campuses around the world. These groups would meet regularly and use the Study Hacks canon to help figure out their college life. They would also blog about their experience, providing a wealth of examples for other students to follow.

I want to launch a few small pilot groups during this upcoming semester. If you’re interested in starting one of these groups on your campus, send me an e-mail.

Among other benefits, you and your group members will get a lot of one and one interaction with me regarding your personal overhaul efforts.

Learning on Steroids

One of my favorite bloggers, Scott Young, recently announced a program called Learning on Steroids.  The goal is to help you implement what he calls rapid learning strategies in your student life. The program “fills the gap between [information] consumption and action,” and provides “detailed implementation strategies, personal help and a kick in the ass to get started.”

In other words, it’s meant to help you go from reading about being a better student to actually becoming one.

You can read more about it here. I’m mentioning it now because he’s launching a limited beta test of the program in January. If you think you might be interested, click here to sign up for his pre-launch mailing list while space still remains.

A Bluegrass Slog

I recently began taking bluegrass guitar lessons.

It hasn’t been easy.

The style is precise, which means that it requires an abundance of repetitious practicing.  A typical session might proceed as follows:

1. Listen to the same 10 - 30 second stretch of a song again and again, deconstructing the lead painfully, note by note, using your ear and a lot of trial and error.
2. Play this section of the lead again and again for another 30 minutes to an hour — rarely getting through more than a few phrases without a mistake that forces you to start over.

Repeat this enough times, with an increasingly complicated progression of songs, and a weekly check-in with a teacher to correct subtle mistakes in your technique, and you’ll eventually be able to make your way through some basic bluegrass tunes without embarrassing yourself. In other words, the path to becoming even a passable amateur is long and demanding.

I’m sharing these observations because I think they provide an interesting metaphor for the task of building a remarkable life...

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