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…

A Star is Born

The direct source of James’ stardom is obvious.  In 1994, as part of his senior thesis project at MIT, he designed a swarm of a dozen microrobots he called Ants. Inspired by the insect of the same name, the devices produced complex behavior — such as playing capture the flag — using only simple rules.

To call this swarm a breakthrough risks understatement. It wasn’t an advance, it was a leap. In the early 90′s, roboticists were just starting to discuss the potential of swarming groups of robots; no one was building fully functioning and autonomous swarms.

“Our group at MIT was way out in front,” James recalls. “Carnegie Mellon had some work moving in that direction, but that’s it; no one in Europe at the time, for example, was even thinking about it.”

When James published the paper documenting the project, it sparked a sensation that spread beyond the robotics community. James and his Ants were featured on Good Morning America. Magazines such as Discover, Omni, Popular Mechanics, and Business Week featured the project. The Pulitzer-prize winning humorist Dave Barry satirized the mini-robots in one of his widely-syndicated columns.

James became a star in the field.

After graduating from MIT, he stayed on for two years as researcher and lecturer — an honor considering his lack of any graduate degree at this point — before heading west to receive a masters from Berkeley.  He returned to Massachusetts in 1999, earning his PhD at MIT while working on the side with the Bedford-based iRobot Corporation.

With the support of iRobot, which was impressed with his work on the Ants, James upped the ante again, designing a swarm of over 100, tissue box-sized robots with many more capabilities than his Ants. These new robots could form structures, explore rooms, and even coordinate perform a beep-based orchestra. No other robotics researcher had a deployment that could rival the size or complexity of James’ new swarm.

Once again, the media turned their spotlight on young engineer: generating the stories highlighted in this post’s introduction. The impact of this work made James’ path to  professorship frictionless. Who wouldn’t want to hire one of the world’s most accomplished and well-known roboticists?

Decoding the McLurkin Factor

Steve Martin famously described the key to fame as: “be so good they can’t ignore you.” James confirms Martin’s axiom. By building two robot swarms that were an order of magnitude more complex than any that existed at the time or since, well-deserved stardom followed. But what lessons can we extract from his path to excellence?

A common reaction to James’ story is to emphasize the importance of thinking big. To borrow a phrase from Jim Collins, if you don’t have “Big Hairy Audacious Goals,” you can’t accomplish amazing things. According to this view, the core of the McLurkin Factor was his willingness, as an MIT senior, to think big — conceiving and executing the almost impossibly-ambitious Ants project.

This message resonates: it’s simple and it provides a satisfying little burst of enthusiasm. Not surprisingly, you encounter it often in the success literature. For example:

• In his history of modern American food culture, The United States of Arugula, David Kamp cites Emeril Lagasse reading The Magic of Thinking Big to spark the growth of his food empire.
• The final chapter of Jason Fried and David Hansson’s much hyped (but disappointingly generic) advice-guide, Rework, concludes: “If you want to do something, you’ve got to do it now. You can’t just say you’ll do it later. Later you won’t be pumped up…”
• Steve Pavlina, another fan of audacious goals, notes: “most people underestimate what goals are truly ‘realistic’ for them,” preventing them from taking the “dice roll” needed to win big.

And so on.

But is this good advice for the aspiring grad student? James is skeptical…

Beyond Audacious Goals

“We never viewed the Ants project as a major jump,” James told me. “If anything, with this project, we were dialing back…our goal was to simplify greatly.”

To understand this modesty, you must understand Rod Brooks’ robotics laboratory at MIT. During the mid-90′s, the lab was leading a revolution in robotics — moving the focus away from hulking, C3PO-style androids, and towards smaller, replaceable, biologically-inspired devices.

Next door to James’ office in the lab was Maja Mataric, now the head of USC’s Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, who, during the 90′s, was a leading thinker on robotic swarms. (During this time, Mataric was writing papers with titles such as Coordination and Learning in Multi-Robot Systems.) James’ undergraduate supervisor was Anita Flynn, now the president of MicroPropolsion Inc., who, during the Ants-period, was shrinking the size of electronic motors — enabling the micro-robot revolution. (She’s well-known for building the world’s smallest robot, which at 10 mg is roughly the weight of a dozen grains of sand.)

James quickly integrated this knowledge into his repertoire of skills.

“I went to the lab as an undergrad to interview for a position,” he recalls. “Anita told me they’re not hiring. So I came back with some robots I had built, and some I was halfway through building, and she said, ‘okay, you can work in the lab, and use our parts, but we can’t pay you.’”

Once in the lab, James moved through project after project, under the careful supervision of Flynn, each expanding his abilities.

“I had friends call me in the lab, in the middle of the night, and say: ‘you have to go out and do something,’” James recalls. “To have an MIT student say you have no life, that’s a problem. But I was having so much fun.”

By the time he conceived of the Ants project for his thesis, James was an accomplished robot engineer with a number of successful projects under his belt. He also had a cutting-edge knowledge of microrobotics, and was “marinating” in a lab environment obsessed with biologically-inspired systems.

With this in mind, the idea of building a robot swarm that behaves like insects was not a big hairy audacious goal at MIT in the mid-90′s, it was water cooler conversation. And it made perfect sense that James — with his advanced robotics skills and enthusiasm to see projects to completion — took on the challenge.

The  Bleeding Edge

James’ story is not unique in the annals of science. As Robert Weisberg, a psychologist at Temple University, points out in his book Creativity, great scientific discoveries are rarely the result of “inspiration that blesses [only] geniuses.” They tend instead to be advances made by individuals at the bleeding-edge of knowledge and technique in their field. To the progenitors of breakthroughs, the ideas often seem obvious and incremental. To those without their level of expertise, however, they can seem miraculous.

In Weisberg’s retelling of the discovery of the DNA double-helix, for example, Watson and Crick didn’t win the race to decode DNA’s structure because they were brilliant. Instead, it was because they had mastered the brand new technique of x-ray crystallography (which is used to probe the structure of molecules) and had recent experience decoding the structure of a protein from a tobacco virus that had properties similar to DNA.

Like Watson and Crick, James’ bleeding edge knowledge made his big break seem obvious.

Let’s unwind the implications:

1. To become a star, in graduate school or elsewhere, you need to make an important advance in your field.
2. Important advances require bleeding-edge expertise. (Once this expertise is gained, however, the breakthrough itself will probably seem obvious.)
3. Therefore:  To become a star, you should focus on getting to the bleeding edge of your field as quickly as possible.

This last point is more difficult than it might seem. Many graduate students, for example, never arrive at the bleeding edge of their field. Instead, they reach a comfortable level of knowledge — enough to understand relevant research, and make their own acceptably-complex contributions, but not enough to make bold advances.

Put another way: Thousands of chemists could understand Watson and Crick’s 1953 paper on the double helix, but only a handful had the knowledge needed to have discovered it for themselves.

(Note: The idea of a comfortable level of knowledge is similar to Anders Ericsson’s notion of an “acceptable plateau” of ability where most people stall if they don’t deliberately push their skills forward.)

This motivates an obvious question: How do you get to the bleeding edge?

Returning to James’ story, we find a compelling answer…

The Power of Stretch Churn

“Every semester, my supervisor, Anita [Flynn], had me write out goals,” James told me. “We would go back at the end of the semester and look at what I did and didn’t do. She would tell me, ‘it’s fine that you didn’t get this all done, but what’s not fine is your inability to estimate how long something will take.’”

James describes this lesson as perhaps the most valuable he learned as an undergrad at MIT. Under the tutelage of his supervisor, he honed his ability to choose projects that were hard enough to stretch his ability, but still reasonable enough that he could complete them. She wanted him to be ambitious and set big goals, but she had no tolerance for goals so big that they were beyond his ability to finish in a reasonable time frame.

This should sound familiar. The type of stretch project James describes provide a perfect match with the theory of deliberate practice.

In a 2003 study of deliberate practice and sports stars, for example, researchers Janice Deakin and Stephen Cobley noted that elite figure skaters spent most of their practice time on jumps — one of the most difficult elements of their routines — while “second tier” skaters spent more time on the easier, more familiar elements of their routines.

James’ stretch projects are like figure skating jumps: they’re hard and uncomfortable, but completing them is the key to getting better.

With this in mind, I argue that the secret to James McLurkin’s success is his ability to choose the right projects. By resisting work that reinforced what he’s comfortable with, yet also sidestepping overly-ambitious projects, he consistently advanced his skill until he arrived at the bleeding edge of research robotics.  Once there, the “breakthrough” projects that cemented his reputation became obvious next steps.

Put another way: stretch projects are an effective way to integrate deliberate practice into fields without clear competitive structures and coaching. If you’re a figure skater, a top coach can walk you through the hard jumps you need to get better. If you’re a grad student (or entrepreneur, writer, or knowledge worker), however, there are no such coaches to guide you through this process.

Stretch projects can fill this role.

To make this more concrete, let me give you a couple definitions:

• Stretch Project: A project that requires a skill you don’t have at the outset.
• Stretch Churn: The number of stretch projects you complete per unit of time.

If you’re interested in building a rare and valuable skill in your field, ask yourself a simple question: What’s my stretch churn?

James’ value was off the charts.

To give you another example, in my own recent efforts to push out onto the bleeding edge of systems research on wireless networking (a shift from my grad student work on the theory side), I’ve fostered an obsession with my stretch churn. It’s tempting to fall back on the skills I’m comfortable with (i.e., “I’ll handle the theory, you guys figure out if it works”), and it’s equally tempting to try to  change the field in one quixotic swoop (i.e., “Let’s revolutionize wireless broadcast!”), but neither would advance my knowledge, and I desperately want to get to the bleeding edge where the real advances are made.

With this in mind, I’ve spent the past few months in a constant state of discomfort — obsessing over channel coherence times and hacking complex wireless network simulators, among other decidedly non-theoretical diversions — and have been loving it: with each stretch project complete, I feel myself growing more knowledgeable.

(In a recent bid to accelerate this effort, I’ve begun reading through this year’s proceedings of the top three wireless conferences. My mantra: Expertise is destiny.)

Conclusion

In the quest for big accomplishment, there’s no escaping the discomfort of deliberate practice. As James’ story emphasizes: for many fields, grad students included, a metric such as stretch churn can be an easy way to integrate this hard work into your life.

Big goals are overrated. As is hard work for the sake of hard work. Master your field and the breakthroughs will slide into focus.

(Top photo by cctvprojdoc)

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.

Beyond the List Quality Hypothesis

We’re surprised by admissions outliers like Olivia because their accomplishments fall short of the quality we expect from top applicants. This surprise, of course, requires the belief that the role of extracurricular activities is to signal important qualities about the applicant. It’s common, for example, to hear students talk about an activity demonstrating their “leadership potential” or “passionate commitment.”

I call this understanding the list quality hypothesis, and if you subscribe to this belief, Olivia remains a mystery; her activities don’t signal enough outstanding things to make her competitive at a top school.

Having spent the last three years researching outliers, like Olivia, for my new book, I’ve noticed a surprising trend: the greatest asset of these relaxed superstars is not the quality of their activities, but the fact that they’re genuinely interesting people. This trait, which I call interestingness, permeates their application – from their essay to recommendations – and has a profoundly positive impact on their admissions chances.

For these students, extracurricular activities play a different role than for their peers.  They don’t use activities to signal their qualities, they use them instead to transform themselves into more interesting people. In other words, what’s important about an activity is not its impressiveness, but its impact on your personality.

I call this idea the interestingness hypothesis, and it upends conventional wisdom on how to get accepted at a competitive college.

How Olivia Got Into UVA

In March 2008, when Olivia sat down for her final interview with the Jefferson Scholarship Committee, she was plagued by nerves.

“At the time, I felt really insecure,” she recalls. “Maybe I should have played varsity soccer and lacrosse, and you know, become student council president.”

Then one of the committee members turned to her. “So, tell me about these horseshoe crabs,” he asked.

Olivia began to talk about her research from the past summer, where she helped the graduate students in her lab try to match the movement of horseshoe crabs in New Hampshire’s Great Bay to the movement of the tides. They were pursuing the hypothesis that crabs use the tides to coordinate their migrations.

It soon became clear that over the past three years, Olivia had developed a deep interest in this work. It had started, perhaps, during the  daily commute to campus, which she made with her neighbor – the professor who ran the research lab. His enthusiasm for marine zoology infused their conversations.

“One morning — to give you an example — the professor began going on about a paper on some neurotransmitter in the brain of lobsters,” Olivia told me. “It wasn’t his area of research, but he was fascinated anyway.”

This enthusiasm, evidently, proved contagious, as Olivia began to pursue the subject on her own time.

The conversation with the scholarship committee shifted. Olivia began talking about the book Emergence, by Steven Johnson, which describes how simple small-scale decisions can aggregate into complex large-scale behavior (for example, dumb ants creating smart colonies).

Olivia had read the book for fun, and started riffing with the committee about how Johnson’s ideas might apply to marine zoology. “Was it possible,” she wondered out loud, “that the complex migrations of horseshoe crabs might also be an emergent trait?”

Most students, when faced with a similar interview situation, fall back on emphasizing their activities and the traits they signal. “Running my church youth group,” they might say, “is another example of my leadership ability.”

Olivia followed a different path. She didn’t emphasize her activities (which, in isolation, weren’t all that impressive) or the qualities they supposedly signaled, instead she let her natural interestingness come through – and her interviewers were entranced.

Put another way: she rejected the list quality hypothesis, embraced the interestingness hypothesis, and won a full-ride scholarship for her efforts.

Students Aren’t Born Interesting, They Earn It

The interestingness hypothesis is appealing — using a small number of activities to transform yourself into an interesting person is much less demanding than trying to build a long list of time-consuming commitments. But when I tell the story of relaxed superstars like Olivia, most high schools students balk.

“That’s great for her,” they say. “But there’s nothing in my life that I’m that interested about!”

They then go join the Key Club.

This reaction is based on the common belief that only a few lucky students are born naturally interesting, while everyone else has to prove their worth the hard way – one demanding extracurricular commitment at a time.

But is this true?

In 2001, a research team led by Professor Linda Caldwell of Penn State University, conducted an experiment that effectively put the idea of the naturally interesting student to the test.  They gathered a group of middle school students from four rural Pennsylvania school districts. A subset of these students were randomly selected to receive a six-week training course called TimeWise. The goal of the course was to teach the students to make better use of their free time (their theory was that less bored students are less likely to fall into dangerous behaviors, such as drug use).

One of the lessons, for example, taught students how to balance what they “have to do” with what they “want to do,” while another provided strategies for following up on an idea that seemed interesting.

After the course finished, all of the students were subjected to a battery of tests to assess their interestingness. As Caldwell described the results in a 2004 paper, the group that received the training showed “higher levels of interest (and thus lower levels of boredom) than the [control] group,” they also “scored higher…on initiative…the ability to restructure boring situations…and the ability to plan and make decisions [about their] free time.” They participated in more new and interesting activities than the students in the control group and were overall more happy.

This is an astonishing result.

We tend to think about interestingness as an innate trait possessed by a lucky few, but Caldwell and her team revealed that a half-dozen common-sense lessons were enough to make a significant difference in the measured interestingness of randomly-selected middle school students.

If these basic lessons had such an impact on bored middle schoolers, imagine the change possible for someone committed to the goal of becoming more interesting.

How to Become Interesting

Intrigued by Caldwell’s results, I called her to ask if she could distill some lessons from her research. I wanted her advice for a student hoping to become more interesting.

“You need to be exposed to many things – you should expose yourself even though you might not know if you’ll be interested,” she told me.

“You need some time when you turn off the phone and the instant messenger and take a walk to appreciate the world without something in your ear.”

(This should sound familiar to fans of Ben Casnocha, one of the most interesting people I know.)

In other words, to become more interesting…

1. Do fewer structured activities.
2. Spend more time exploring, thinking, and exposing yourself to potentially interesting things.
3. If something catches your attention, use the abundant free time generated by rule 1 to quickly follow up.

Olivia’s story follows this structure. As a sophomore, she was a believer in rules 1 and 2; she kept her obligations light and maintained an addiction to interesting things. After getting a good grade on a chemistry project on nitrogen in marine habitats, she e-mailed her neighbor on a whim (demonstrating rule 3 in action). “I knew he did something with lobsters,” she recalls, “and thought ‘maybe he would want an unpaid volunteer over the summer.’”

He did. And two years later she won the Jefferson Scholarship.

Pulling The Pieces Together

My argument is simple:

• High school students place too much emphasis on the qualities demonstrated by their activities. In a quest to demonstrate as many good qualities as possible, they end up stressing themselves with unwieldy lists of time-consuming commitments.
• Students like Olivia highlight a different approach. They show that that being interesting can go farther than being widely accomplished. With this in mind, they use activities to build their interestingness – not their credentials – and therefore enjoy happier lives.
• The research of Linda Caldwell supports a powerful corollary: any student can become more interesting – it’s not an innate trait possessed only by a lucky few. The key, roughly speaking, is to allow yourself more time to stare at the clouds, and then be prepared to follow-up when you spot something cool.

These ideas are so important that I dedicate the first half of my new book arguing their validity. I’ll also be returning to this territory over the next few months, as I continue this series on what really makes impressive students impressive. In the meantime, however, you can ease your mind into this counterintuitive conversation with a simple thought: Just because most students follow the same stressful strategy for becoming a standout, doesn’t mean that it’s the only strategy for reaching this goal.

Just ask Olivia, who quipped, when reflecting on her path into UVA: “I feel like I’m the luckiest person in the world.”

(Photo by Greenmonster.)

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.

The Reality of a Post-Facebook Existence

Daniel’s decision to leave Facebook wasn’t easy.

“I was worried that I would be out of the loop,” he admits. “That I would miss event invitations, not know what was going on with my friends, or be able to effectively lead the organizations I run.”

What really happened?

“Well, as expected, I did miss some invitations to events,” Daniel recalls. “But my friends would forward me invites, and I never missed anything crucial.”

“I also didn’t lose any friends, or even really lose touch with anyone. I still had e-mail and a phone, and I see these people every day.”

Daniel’s mom, not surprisingly, was “ecstatic” about the decision, while many of his friends were shocked. “After my deactivation,” he recalls, “I started getting texts that demanded: WHY DID YOU DEFRIEND ME!? WHERE IS YOUR FACEBOOK!?”

But pretty soon people stopped caring. They had their own lives to lead.

The Monastic Pleasure of Post-Facebook Studying

In contrast to the mild negative effects to his social life, the benefits to Daniel’s academic life were significant.

He was initially worried about “symptom substitution” — the idea that with Facebook gone he would simply find another online distraction to fuel his procrastination.

But this didn’t happen.

“After clicking around the web for a bit, I would become incredibly bored,” Daniel recalls. There’s something about the “endless trickle of messages” served up by Facebook that proves especially addictive. Without that steady supply of attention crack, it became easy for Daniel to “swear off the Internet.”

Consider, for example, a calculus final he faced during his first Facebook-free semester.

“With the time and concentration I regained, I was able to hunt down and complete problems from 20 different practice final exams, and then get tutoring on any issues that remained.”

The average grade on the exam was a 34. Daniel scored an 80.

He has since persuaded several friends to follow his lead in deactivating their accounts, and they’re enjoying similar boosts to their performance.

A Different Way to Think About the Technology in Your Life

I recently received an e-mail from a high school student who estimated that her Internet-obsession was slowing down her work by “a factor of 5.” When I suggested that she ask her parents to unplug the modem until her homework was done, she balked.

“I can’t do that,” she exclaimed. “I have to hand in assignments for one of my classes online, and there are really good web-based dictionaries I use for my Spanish homework.”

Take a moment to ponder this reaction.

This student was experiencing extreme suffering and poor performance because of the Internet. Yet, she judged the trivial inconvenience of plugging in a modem before submitting a completed assignment, or using a slightly less effective paper dictionary for her Spanish homework, as outweighing the exceptional benefits that would be yielded by going offline.

To me, this reaction captures the problem with ubiquitous technologies, like Facebook, that make claims on your attention. To many people, the burden of proof falls on the Luddite — you better have a pretty damn good reason for eschewing this technology! Like the girl from above, or Daniel’s shocked classmates, any inconvenience generated by opting out of a popular technology can be a sufficient argument for maintaining the status quo.

I argue the you should reverse this logic: before adopting a technology that can make a regular claim on your attention,  insist that its benefits unambiguously outweigh its negatives.

It’s important that I’m clear: for many students, this assessment would lead them to keep Facebook in their lives — they get social and entertainment benefits from the service, and because they have no problem turning it off while working, they suffer few negative consequences.

For students like Daniel, however, who discover that the technology is wreaking serious havoc, there should be no hesitation to quit.

This same philosophy led many professional thinkers and writers, including Alan Lightman,  Donald Knuth,  Neal Stephenson, and Leo Babauta to quit e-mail. In their line of work, the benefits of e-mail were swamped by the negative effects. Their criteria was not, “is there anything bad that would happen if I quit e-mail?”, it was, instead, “do the benefits outweigh the negatives?”

My bottom line here is simple: Technologies are great, but if you want to keep control of your time and attention have the self-confidence to insist that they earn their keep before you make them a regular part of your life.

(Image by Etienne)

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…

Stealth Studying 2.0

Back in the early days of Study Hacks, I published a popular article titled The Art of Stealth Studying: How to Earn a 4.0 With Only 1.0 Hours of Work.  At its core was a simple idea:

If you can…slice and dice [test preparation] into a large number of small, 5-10 minute chunks, integrated naturally into your daily routine…it will feel to you as if you are doing no studying at all.

In researching the red book, I met a pair of straight-A students who used this approach to eliminate “studying” (i.e., large amounts of review in the days leading up to an exam) from their schedule altogether. The stealth studying article was my attempt to bring this wildly unconventional take on academic work to the attention of a wider audience.

I recommended that students immediately process their lecture notes into small, question-based study guides, and then study from these while walking between classes. These quick bursts, I argued, when spread out over an entire semester, can eliminate the need for long study sessions.

Ricardo took this basic idea, and then added a high-tech twist.

In more detail, he did the following:

1. He created a free wiki using PBworks.
2. For each course, he created a page on the wiki for the next exam.
3. After each lecture, he put aside time to add the relevant notes to his wiki.  To do so, he would create a subpage for each topic, and then list the main points, add snippets of sample code, or summarize any other information relevant for the exam.
4. Following the stealth studying philosophy, he would then access his wiki using his iPhone while walking to class and waiting for the lecture to begin, doing quick bursts of review. (PBworks plays nicely with iPhones, making it easy to browse the wiki on the run.)

These quick bursts of review, conducted throughout the term, prevented the need for long stretches of studying. Ricardo admits that on the day before an exam, he might take “30 minutes to look over my wiki, do a few sample problems that the professor posted, and then get a good night’s rest.”

His 4.0 over three semesters testifies to the surprising reality that this approach can really work.

In More Detail…

Let’s fill in some more details of what this strategy looks like in practice. I asked Ricardo to send me some screenshots of his system as used to study for CS 131, a class in object-oriented programming.

Below is the page he setup for the first midterm in the course (click here for a larger version):

There’s nothing flashy going on here. He links to a subpage for each topic that might be covered on the midterm. On average, his professor covers one topic per class, so Ricardo was adding pages at the rate of one or two per week.

Below is one of these topic subpages (click here for a larger version):

Notice that Ricardo uses basic formatting to keep the pages readable when accessed on his iPhone.

To study from the subpage above, he would convert each line into a question on the fly. For example, seeing the term “Binary Search Algorithm” on his screen, he would turn away from the screen and try to recreate the bullet points that follow from memory.

And that’s it.

This procedure assumes, of course, that you’ve already mastered the fundamentals of being an efficient student. For example, that you’re trying to really understand the information as its presented in class — raising your hand to ask questions when confused. (If you daydream through lecture, you won’t be able to create an effective study guide.) And that you have enough control over your schedule to ensure that these pages get made right away. (For students who deploy an autopilot schedule — or something similar — this should pose no problem.)

Beyond Computer Science

What strikes me about Ricardo’s approach to computer science was his willingness to start from scratch. The details of his system might not work for you, but the big idea of reducing a problem to its basics, and then coming up with an original strategy, is applicable to many situations.

Next time you face an energy-sapping academic, extracurricular, or even professional challenge, take a step back to ask two simple questions:

What do I really need to accomplish here to succeed? Ignoring the conventional approaches, what would be the least painful, most effective possible way to get this done?

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…

Major Nonsense

I receive a lot of e-mail from students wondering whether they should change their major.

I almost always give the same answer: “no.”

For one thing, I find that undergraduates overestimate the importance of their major for finding a job. As I’ve argued before, unless you want to be an engineer or go to graduate school, it’s often more important to demonstrate the capability to do superstar-caliber work than it is to build specific knowledge.

Furthermore, I also tend to dismiss the complaint that a major isn’t your “passion.” As I recently explained, I think passions are constructed through the process of mastery, not discovered. Few 19-year-olds actually have a real passion for an academic subject.

As I often tell worried students to soothe their anxiety: “There’s no such thing as the right major for you. So chill out.”

Karen’s issue, however, was something different…

Though it’s true that there’s no right major for most students, there are, as I’ve argued before, wrong reasons.

Specifically, we know from decades of research on motivation that if you feel extrinsic pressure to do something, you’re more likely to develop mental barriers. In college students this often manifests itself as deep procrastination.

It was this factor that made Karen one of the few students to hear me say “changing your major might not be such a bad idea…”

My Advice

Here’s what I told Karen:

1. Stay at your university.
2. Don’t take a gap year.
3. Do switch your major. It doesn’t matter what you switch to, so long as it’s your choice. Sell this switch to your practical-minded parents by emphasizing your potential interest in law or business school, and noting that the admissions staffs of these programs are tired of the same old political science and business majors. Studying something like history, English, or philosophy can actually improve your chances of getting into a prestigious school.
4. Keep a light schedule and focus your energy on becoming an A* student, as this is what will open the most doors to you after graduation (and end up making your parents proud in the long run).

To summarize, I supported Karen’s belief that her force-fed major was an issue. But I thought the bulk of her remedies — taking a gap year, switching universities — were too drastic. By simply taking back control of what she’s studying, then turning her focus to the more important question of how she’s studying it, the stresses and anxieties that vexed her will hopefully start to slip away.

The 25 Year-Old Freshman

When Jay graduated high school in 2002, he bypassed college to compete with a professional drum and bugle corps, eventually becoming head of percussion and winning a regional championship.

Over time, Jay sagely realized that “this was not heading toward a long-term career.” So in the fall of 2008, he enrolled in college as a 25 year-old freshman.

Like many new students, he allowed his study habits to coalesce randomly into a half-assed jumble of procrastination and stress.

“My strategy was to earn a 4.0 through losing lots of sleep cramming for exams and saving papers until the last minute,” Jay recalls.

He was earning good grades this first year, but as he reports: “it was killing me both physically and mentally.” Around this time, his daughter was born, straining an already tight schedule.

“It was a disaster waiting to happen.”

His words proved prophetic. This fall, during his first semester as a sophomore, Jay “hit the wall” with a pair of tough upper-level classes.

“Not knowing how to study or manage my time put me behind,” Jay says. He bombed his first exams, earning a D on one of them.

“I realized that I needed to re-learn how to study,” Jay says. This led him to Barnes & Noble, where he stumbled across an intriguing, yellow-colored book. This, in turn, led him to Study Hacks.

Things began to change…

The Transformation

“Following the advice on your blog,” Jay recalls, “I performed a post-exam post-mortem on my two bombed midterms and realized that my ‘studying’ had consisted of rewriting the textbooks.”

“There was no understanding of the information.”

Inspired by the concept of an autopilot schedule and the philosophy of fixed-schedule productivity, Jay adopted the following structure for his week:

“It allowed me to study at maximum efficiency and still spend time with my family in the evenings.”

There are two things worth noticing about this schedule. First, it ends at 4:30 every afternoon. And second, it contains blocks labeled “prep course.” This is time Jay set aside as a shadow course: during these blocks he updates study guides and begins ridiculously early preparation for his real courses — preventing the need to add lots of extra study time right before exams.

And that’s not all.

Intent on mining the Study Hacks Canon for all it’s worth, Jay adopted the quiz-and-recall method for review and deploys the stealth studying strategy during walks between buildings. In class, he takes notes with a mixture of Q/E/C and focused question clusters, depending on the material. He also uses one of my all-time favorite strategies, the Sunday ritual — a block of time on Sunday dedicated to “hammering out a plan of action for the week ahead.”

The Results

“I have upped my grades in my two disaster classes to the middle B-level,” Jay reports. “And I’m striving for an A with two more exams left in the semester.”

Even more important: “My daughter gets to see her father in the evening free of hassle, and my girlfriend can enjoy our company without the distractions of open textbooks and half-written papers.”

Conclusion

The maturity that comes with Jay’s age, and the responsibilities of a family,  certainly stoked his motivation to make systemic changes to his student lifestyle. But the general lesson is applicable to any student: big turnarounds require big effort.

###

Spread the Word Contest Update: Congratulations to Nazim, who won my reader contest that asked students to help spread the word about the Study Hacks philosophy. Nazim personally recommend my books to dozens of students. He also donated his own copies to his school library, eventually getting them put on prominent display near the entrance. For his efforts he’ll receive a signed copy of a rare yellow-jacketed, galley version of the red book.

Economic Troubles

I recently received the following e-mail from a Berkeley student:

I left [an economics] exam positive I would get an A…The mean was a 77…I ended up getting a 55 — absolutely awful…I feel beyond frustrated by this and am wondering why, perhaps in your analysis, did I think I did so well when I absolutely nuked it?

I receive several e-mails of this type each week. They all follow the same basic format. The student is surprised by doing poorly on a test and is hoping that I can offer some ingenious strategies that will prevent the disaster from happening again.

I’m happy to answer these e-mails, but I’ve been fearing recently that a dangerous sentiment lurks beneath — a sentiment I need to combat.

The Black Box

I discuss a lot of technical studying tactics here on Study Hacks. I fear that this may have communicated a false image of studying as a black box: On one side of the box, study strategies are inserted, and, on the other side, test grades are output. Therefore, if the test grades defy your expectation — as it did for our Berkeley student from above — the answer is to change the inputs. When students write me with stories of academic woes, they are often hoping that I can offer up a different set of inputs to the black box that will guarantee to generate the grades they desire.

Busting Open the Black Box

Studying, however, is not so abstract. My response to the Berkeley student, for example, was to ask the following question:

Why did the students who got the top grades on this test score so much higher than you?

My goal with this question was to bust open the black box. I wanted her to think about the details of this specific class with its specific style of tests, and then answer the question of what exact type of preparation would have been best for this challenge. (Longtime fans of Study Hacks will recognize this as the post exam post-mortem method.)

Only once you have an answer to this context-specific question should you turn to the specific study strategies I talk about here. Think of them as an arsenal of tools to help you conquer a well-defined challenge, not inputs to an abstract process.
Our Berkeley student, for example, noted that the professor took concepts that were mentioned only briefly in class, and then expanded them into long, complicated questions on the exam. She stumbled on these questions which led to the poor grade.

With this specific analysis in mind, she can now imagine how to best prepare for the next exam in the course. She might, for example, build a one-page study guide for each concept mentioned in class — even the small ones. In addition to doing an out loud lecture explaining these ideas, she might also search for a few sample problems from her textbook, and even the web, for each concept, so that she can practice applying them in different contexts. This would better prepare her to tackle this style of question on the next exam — both in terms of knowledge and confidence.

The point here is that her studying process is not a black box. The specific strategies enter the scene late, only after she spent the time to immerse herself in the details of the unique challenge before her.

My Challenge to You

Next time you have trouble on an exam, I want you to consider doing the following. First, perform a post-mortem of the type I described above. Get a sense of exactly what type of perparation would produce A’s in this specific class. Second, after this analysis is done, contact me for advice on strategies that best fit the preparation requirements you identified.

Once you bust open the black box, you’ll be surprised by how quickly you can turn around your performance.

Academic Hell

Last December, I received an urgent e-mail from a reader whom I’ll call Alice. At the time, she was halfway through her sophomore year at one of the country’s best known public universities.

“I definitely need advice about switching to a zen valedictorian lifestyle,” she began.

As the e-mail continued, I learned that Alice had entered college as a pre-med major because, in her words: “I considered it a ‘difficult,’ technical major and thought it would be a safe option.”

As Study Hacks readers know, such a poor justification for your major is a recipe for deep procrastination. Sure enough, Alice was soon struggling. To compensate, she decided to switch majors. This time she chose a double concentration in business administration and economics — once again driven by her quest for something that was “difficult” and “safe.”

Not surprisingly, she fared no better with this new direction. By the first semester of her sophomore year, life became grim.

“I would go to the main library on campus and find myself unable to focus,” she recalled. “I would read passively for about 2 hours, check Facebook numerous times, check my cellphone for text messages, or stare at a study guide until I thought I ‘knew it’. ”

“Everything was basically going downhill.”

Alice eventually fell “far, far behind” in her classes.

“I was taking 17 units and felt like I was in academic hell,” she recalls.

Eventually, things got so bad that Alice had to withdraw for the remainder of the semester. When she wrote me, a few weeks before the new semester began, she was worried about her impending return. She didn’t want to repeat her past mistakes.

My Advice to Alice

I didn’t want to overwhelm Alice, so I extracted from the Study Hacks philosophy a few simple suggestions

1. Choose a major you really like. There’s no such thing as a “safe” major. You’re always better off sparkling in a major you love than forcing yourself through an econ major because it impresses your dad.
2. Choose courses you really like. Keep a normal to light course load, and use the abundant free time this generates to kick ass (i.e., become an A* student).
3. Limit your extracurriculars to one or two things. Make them things you love. Focus on them exclusively for the remainder of your time at college.
4. Use efficient, tested study strategies. Refuse to simply “work” until you feel done.

“Thank you so much for your advice,” she responded. “I can’t wait to implement it.”

A couple weeks ago, near the end of her first semester back on campus, Alice wrote me to report on how things had gone…

Alice’s Turnaround

Returning to campus this past winter, Alice tackled her deep procrastination head on. Her first step was to drop her hated business and economics major. She replaced it, instead, with something chosen purely for its intrinsic interest: a double-major in political economy and political science.

(I would have preferred a single major, but at least these two majors are highly correlated and therefore overlap in course requirements. Heeding my advice, she did drop the ethnic studies minor she had briefly considered adding.)

She also revamped her academic schedule.

“I spent a great deal of time picking what I considered to be the easiest possible course schedule,” she said. “Three history courses and a physical science course.”

The light course load immediately reduced her stress and gave her the opportunity to try out the A* approach to academics.

“It ended up working out really well,” she reports. “I was interested in my courses and forced myself to speak out in lecture, even if it was in front of 200 people.”

“Asking questions was nerve-wracking as hell, but my professors remembered me. My African American history professor, for example, told me I was the only student in his class who was ‘really that engaged and very on top of things’ and my American history professor told me I was one of her brightest students.”

Alice received an A and an A- in those classes, respectively, and she did it without hating her work.

Aiding those efforts was a renewed commitment to the straight-A method.

“I employed your ESS method and began my papers ridiculously early,” she said “I also used a paper research database for two research papers and received solid A’s on both.”

“I hate to admit it but I didn’t feel bad when my classmates were complaining about getting B+’s on those papers”.

“I employed the morse code method for my readings, the textbook method to simplify my studying for my physical science course, and even took the time to create those 3-minute outlines inside my blue books.”

“Small changes that had an incredible impact.”

On the extracurricular front, she promptly quit the IM soccer team and resigned her position with a campus fashion magazine. (“I would never have done this before,” she told me.)

This left her extracurricular time free to focus on the squash team and her job as a writing tutor. As predicted, the increased focus on a small number of activities not only reduced stress but also increased her impressiveness.

“Having more time to spend on squash meant I was able to run the team better and I ended up organizing the team’s first trip to Nationals,” she reported.

“And having more time to spend on tutoring meant I was better able to help my tutees and devise strategies to help them overcome their writing woes. Many of them who had started the semester with C’s in their writing courses ended the semester with A’s.”

These results didn’t go unrewarded.

“My supervisor noticed the impact I had on my students,” she said. “He called me one of their ‘best and brightest’ and offered me a paid position in the fall — an honor given only to the top 5 to 10% of all campus tutors.”

Conclusion

Not everything is perfect for Alice. She did much better this semester, but did not score the perfect straight A’s she desired (the science course, she now admits, was a mistake). Her recent e-mail included a collection fresh questions about how to continue polishing her student skills (it addressed, for example, some issues with her autopilot schedule).

But the big picture gains cannot be ignored. Alice did so poorly during the fall that she had to withdraw. She hated her major and could barely force herself to work — often waiting until the last possible minute. She was constantly behind and always stressed.

By embracing all three components of our philosophy to do less, do better, and know why, she experienced an amazing turnaround — transitioning from academic hell to the life of a happy campus star.

If you’re really suffering through your college experience, consider Alice’s example. She’s proof that major improvements to both quality of life and performance can be achieved fast.

(Photo by laughlin)

In early May, I received an interesting e-mail from a reader. After the standard introductions, he said:

Though I’m progressing towards my goal to become a physicist, I’m also very interested in writing a novel.

He noted that before diving into a novel he would probably have to first “write a short story or two.” He wanted my advice for how to kick off this project in time for summer.

“This sounds like a great idea for a Grand Project,” I replied. “But I would first be definite that this is an important goal in your life, because I predict you’d need at least five years of focused work before landing a book deal becomes a possibility.”

My answer reflects an observation that plays an increasingly important role in my understanding of the world: if you want to do something interesting and rewarding — be it writing a novel, becoming a professor, or growing a successful business — you have to first become exceptional. As Study Hacks readers know, I think Steve Martin put it best when he noted that the key to breaking into a competitive and desirable field is to “become so good, they can’t ignore you.”

In other words, there’s no shortcut. If you want the world to pay attention to you, you have to provide a compelling reason. It doesn’t care about your life goals.

In this post, I want to discuss a simple method with a complicated back-story. It’s a technique that can help you move efficiently down the road toward becoming exceptionally good.

The story behind this advice starts with an old friend who possessed an unlikely talent.

The Saga of Sickabod Sane

Around high school, my longtime friend, Chris, began to show a natural ability for rap music. This was somewhat unexpected considering that we lived in a sleepy, 2000 person town, not far outside Princeton, New Jersey. But this didn’t seem to deter Chris.

By the time he arrived at NYU, the novelty-song ethos that drove his high school creations began to wear away. He developed, in its place, a mature ear for crafting brain-burrowing hooks and complex beats. By the time he graduated, in 2004, his friends agreed: a professional music career lay in Chris’s future.

Let’s jump ahead to the fall of 2006.

At this point, Chris’s catalog had grown, as had the quality and inventiveness of his music. A steady stream of small-time players had emerged with promises to help Chris achieve his destined break, and the best of his songs had earned cult followings. But he hadn’t yet received any attention from the industry heavyweights.

Around this time, Chris and I had a phone conversation that would change the way we both thought about the art of becoming good.

In the month or so leading up to the call, Chris had made his first tentative stage appearances at a series of open mike nights. The last of these performances had been at the infamous Tuesday night bootcamp, held at the Pyramid Club, a popular underground rap venue in midtown Manhattan (see the picture to the right).

Anyone could sign up to perform during the bootcamp open mike. But it was a decision few made lightly. Pyramid attracted aspiring rap talent from all five of New York’s boroughs — birthplace to some of the industry’s most talented (and hardest) performers.

Not an easy audience.

In addition the open mike, the club’s emcee, an industry veteran with the stage name Mental Supreme, also hosted a semi-regular rap showcase. It cost $100 to enter, and the winner went home with $1000. It was judged by industry insiders, and was considered to be a place to spot upcoming East Coast talent. Anyone brave enough to face the demanding crowd could sign-up for the open mike. But only the best of these performers were invited to grace the showcase stage.

As I learned during our phone call, Chris’s first performance at Pyramid had been shaky. But something about the club seemed right.

“This feels like the place to be,” he said.

We soon hatched a plan. He would forget the random advice he’d been receiving from various friends and hangers-on — the suggestions to hand out demo CDs in front of radio stations or network to meet the right executives. Instead, he would turn his focus solely onto the Pyramid Club. He would return to the open mike again and again until he was able to win over that crowd. After that, he would progress to the showcase and play to win.

Our logic was simple: if he couldn’t become good enough to win over the Pyramid Club crowd, he couldn’t become good enough to attract industry attention. So why waste energy doing anything else?

I’m going Pyramid it up,” he said at the end of the call.

“Yep,” I replied. “Time to Pyramid it up.”

As the months passed, Chris got better. His early halting performances gave way to the occasional not bad performance. He worked harder on his songs, trying, week after week, to craft that one beat or lyrical turn that could impress his skeptical crowd.

Eventually, he scored his first Pyramid hit; an avalanche of improbably complex flows that he dubbed Mixtape. During his first performance of the song he received one of the highest honors you can achieve in New York’s underground rap scene: audience members touched his sneakers after a few of the more particularly tight lines.

Chris was invited to perform Mixtape at the next $1000 showcase. He earned third place. Afterwards, talking to the judges, he learned that he lost on his stage presence scores.

He returned to the studio, working late into the night, as was his habit, to craft ever-catchier hooks. Before his open mike performances, he now also took to incessant practice — going over every beat of his on-stage movements.

The rate of Pyramid hits began to increase. Soon the audience was singing along to their favorite songs.

He entered the $1000 showcase again, this time wielding an unapologetically original track called Top 8 — an homage to MySpace that somehow integrates three different rhythm changes with a Broadway-style musical chorus.

This time, he won first place.

He entered the contest three more times, winning twice more and tieing for first place on the other occasion. The club retired him from competition — no one else had a chance when he performed. He was only the second rapper to ever achieve this distinction.

More recently, he heard about another club that hosted a $1000 rap showcase. On a whim, he entered it. He won that contest, too.

At this point, Chris had finally become so good that the industry couldn’t ignore him. Natural talent hadn’t been enough. He needed the focus of the Pyramid challenge to drive him to develop his skills as far as they could possibly go.

After his string of showcase victories, he signed with a serious manager. Since then, his life has changed. He’s been flown to L.A. and Miami to record with well-known producers. He has meetings with high-level record company executives. It’s clear that the pieces of a professional career are careening into place.

The Pyramid Method

The difference between the first two years after Chris’s graduation, and the two years that followed our fateful phone call, couldn’t be starker. The key to his transformation was two-fold: (1) Chris focused his attention on improving his standing at a single venue; and (2) this venue provided clear metrics, so he could track his progress and use this to tweak his practice to be as effective as possible.

I call this general technique the Pyramid Method. I claim that it’s a powerful approach for anyone looking to transform an interest or natural talent into an expertise that cannot be ignored. Regardless of the pursuit in question, if you want to take it someplace serious, follow Chris’s example. This means:

1. Pick a single relevant venue to join at the entry level and work to increase your standing.
2. Make sure the venue offers clear metrics on your progress; use these metrics to guide your efforts to get better.
3. Forget all the other bullshit advice and mini-strategies people offer for getting ahead in your pursuit. If you can’t master this one venue, then you don’t yet deserve the world’s respect.
4. Put your head down, and get it done.

The Novelist

Let’s return to our aspiring novelist from above. What venue could he choose to apply the Pyramid Method? I suggest his college’s literary journal. The entry level for this venue is getting a piece published. The higher levels include getting a story featured on the cover and being invited to join the editorial board.

If he can’t conquer this venue then he certainly can’t expect a book deal. So instead of wasting time reading about tricks for getting an agent, or diving straight into a novel manuscript, he should consider pouring all of his writerly focus into this Pyramid.

My Pyramid

To give another example, when I wanted to improve my non-fiction chops before pitching my third book, I picked a respected online magazine as my own personal Pyramid. This publication had an approachable entry-level because it encouraged submissions. Its best staff writers, however, were professionals with good reputations. I set my goal to become a staff writer with recognized talent.

I began by trying to get any piece accepted. Two years later, I was a staff writer, and I had one of my feature articles chosen to be included in a book of the magazine’s best writing of the past decade. (Ironically, it was a piece about Chris.)

This required a huge amount of work. But my effort was focused like a laser beam. As a result, the quality of my writing made huge leaps during this time.

Conclusion

This method doesn’t provide shortcuts. Becoming exceptional requires an exceptional amount of work. Trust me, you can’t avoid this. But not all work is made equal. And the Pyramid Method focuses your attention exactly where it needs to be.

Eric’s Literate Concerns

A reader named Eric recently sent me an interesting question. Next semester, he’s facing an English Lit course.

“My concern is that the best grade I ever got in high school English was a ‘B’,” Eric explained.

He wanted some feedback on his plan for the course.

“I read about Q/E/C notetaking in the red book, but I’m not quite sure how to apply it to these courses,” he said. “Would it help if this summer I picked some novels and practiced the technique? Or would it help me more to just read some novels for pleasure in preparation?”

From Clusters to Deep Thinking

I’m pleased to see a student planning ahead for an academic challenge. As I’ve said before, if you don’t constantly question your study habits, you’re in danger of falling into a rut.

When it comes to the specific challenge posed by English Lit, however, Eric needs some guidance. Sounds like a job for the grade whisperer.

Here was my advice:

• For an English class, Q/E/C notes on your assignments won’t help. Novels can’t be reduced to an orderly collection of big ideas.
• Instead, take zero notes on the novel as you read. That’s right, none. Instead, focus on really paying attention and enjoying the intellectual experience. Location will really matter. Find some place quite and contemplative to do this work. Drink strong coffee.
• You’re not completely off the hook, however, when it comes to notetaking. During class discussion, take the best possible Q/E/C notes possible. Pay particular attention to the points made by the professor.
• These notes won’t come easy. The ideas discussed in an English lit class can be messy and complicated. My suggestion would be to set aside 1 -2 hours each week to wield the notebook method. Use it to help work through some of your thoughts on what you just read and what you heard in the most recent discussions.
• When it comes time to write a paper — even if it is a small critical essay — expect to spend serious time with the notebook method before you even think about writing. I’m talking at least 3 – 5 hours.

This is a crucial point. For a course like English Lit, the ideas produced by deep thinking are your main preparatory currency. The time you spend contemplating, somewhere quiet, with your notebook, is equivalent to the time a pre-med spends memorizing triglycerides. If you don’t invest some serious effort you cannot expect to do well.

With this mindset, however, our friend Eric should be prepared to turn in an A* effort while many of his frustrated classmates switch to a business major in shame.

(Photo by laughlin)