Study Hacks

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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Note (11/24/09): I’m leaving this afternoon for a Thanksgiving road trip. I’ll be slow to moderate comments and answer e-mail for the next week. I’m up to Nov. 10 in my reader e-mail queue. If you sent me an e-mail after that date, you haven’t been forgotten, and I’ll get to you as soon as I can.

Problems with Passion

My friend Scott Young recently published a blog post with an intriguing title: “What if you have more than one passion?” He reports that several readers admitted that they have “a hard time focusing” because they have “too many passions.”

My readers report their own problems with passion. Here are some excerpts from recent e-mails:

• “I’m currently feeling great antipathy for physics…I’ve found myself questioning my passion for the subject. “
• “My only true passion is biology, but it’s a damn big field in which I have no focus other than my general spiritual love for green things.”
• “Yes, this particular major isn’t my passion. However, my studies are funded by my disciplinarian father…”

My point here is that “passion” seems to be a common source of problems. For some, they have too many passions and don’t know where to focus their energies. For others, it’s the lack of a passion, or maybe a belief that their particular passion won’t bring them somewhere worth going.

In this short post, I want to share a new way of looking at this troublesome concept…

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Note: I started writing this article last April, when I was down in Rio de Janeiro. After my recent return from the similarly contemplation-inducing Bologna, I decided to finish it.

Ancient Wisdom

When I began writing this article I was sitting on the balcony of a hotel room in Rio, looking over the beach pictured to the right. To my ear, the waves in Brazil are absurdly loud, which had the effect of miring me in a haze of tropic contemplation. It was in this state that I happened onto a thought that I couldn’t shake: perhaps the students who are feeling the most run down and worn out by college should take a moment to ask themselves a simple question…

Am I living well now or preparing to live well later?

This question is not new. In tribute to the death of a good friend, Tim Ferriss posted a full length translation of Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life. I read this translation around the same time that I was thinking about this post, and one passage in particular caught my attention:

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Note (8/31/09): I’m leaving tonight to give a research talk in Bologna, Italy (yes, it’s a tough life I lead). I’ll almost definitely have internet access, but I’ll also be quite busy, so I give my typical warnings about being slow to post, answer e-mails, and moderate comments over the next week.

The (Over) Committed Student

Last week, I received an e-mail from a student who I’ve advised in the past. His new semester was about to start and he was worried about his schedule.

“I think I’m overcommitting myself,” he told me. “I considered dropping some activities, but it’s hard because I want to do them all.”

He then asked me to review the following “time budget” that he created for his schedule:

• 5 courses — 24 hours/week in class
• Lab volunteering — 15 hours/week
• Peer educator and mentor — 10 hours/week
• Exercise — 6 hours/week
• Hospital volunteering — 3 hours/week
• Executive of a club — 5 hours/week
• Public speaking club — 8 hours/week

After reading his e-mail, I realized it’s time for me to revist one of the main themes preached here on Study Hacks: simplicity is beautiful.

The idea that doing less can actually make you more impressive is, of course, the cornerstone of my Zen Valedictorian Philosophy. I’ve also argued that doing lots of extracurricular activities is meaningless for your job hunt, and that overloaded course schedules are like a devestating virus that can destroy your life.

In this post, I want to add a new strategy to your minimilast arsenal.

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Dissertation Hell

Writing a doctoral dissertation is a peculiar endeavor. There’s a general understanding, suspended out there in the stress-fraught ether of graduate student life, that this is supposed to be a brutal process. Consider, for example, the popular blog Dissertation Hell. Its tagline reads:

A place to rant publicly but anonymously on the many tortures of writing a dissertation.

In a recent post, titled A Last Day in Hell, an anonymous graduate student notes:

Many asked how I balance [my dissertation] with my life. The truth is I never did! … I did this for three or so months, 8 to 14 hours a day, every day of the week.

In a particularly dark twist, the student adds:

My aunt died of leukemia during that time, but I had promised her I would finish, so the night I found out I doubled my efforts and kept on going. EVERYTHING got put on hold.

Fortunately, during my own dissertation process, I was able to observe most of these frantic conventions with some semblance of objectivity. Having already written two books, and published over 20 peer-reviewed papers in my field, the task, while demanding, seemed far from “hellish.” But it did get me thinking about the conventions of student life and how we handle work.

In this post, I want to share some thoughts on why these big student projects cause so much stress and a strategy for alleviating this suffering.

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Passion Plays

I’m proud to announce that as of this afternoon, I’m officially caught up with the reader e-mail I received during my recent vacation. While working through the final batch of these messages today, I came across a student, from the University of Melbourne, who mentioned the following in the middle of a longer question:

Yes, this particular major isn’t my passion. However, my studies are funded by my disciplinarian father who insists…

What caught my attention was his use of “passion.” I hear this term often from students in reference to their selections of college majors. (They’ll apologize or lament that they aren’t following their true passions, before moving on to enumerate the specific issues that trouble them.)

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From Drinking to Ulcers

Earlier this week, I stumbled across the following letter to the editor, published in the New York Times. It was written in response to an editorial, printed on June 30th, about tackling the binge drinking problem on college campuses.

To the Editor:

The solution to binge drinking problems on campuses is simple: college curriculums need to be more rigorous. If college programs required their students to put in a significant number of hours per week doing work related to their classes, campus drinking would soon find itself limited to one or two nights a week.

Furthermore, those few nights a week would be more moderate, since the students would drink knowing that they needed to get up in the morning and keep hacking away at that thermodynamics problem set.

I suspect that one of the main reasons students who aren’t in college drink less than college students is that they have to get up in the morning and go to work at a real job, where they are accountable for their behavior.

Caroline Figgatt
Munich, July 1, 2009

The writer is a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

What caught my attention, of course, was the biographical sentence at the end of the letter. Only an MIT student would think that the answer to a social problem is to work people too hard to have time to develop the problem.

At first, I found this note amusing, but this soon gave away to a darker thought: why do schools like MIT allow this type of mindset to not only exist, but become the norm? If a large percentage of the student population here were becoming physically injured in unsafe campus buildings, or falling ill due to a disease outbreak, the administration would rush to stamp out the problem. But the issues of the mind that are common here — unhappiness, detachment, chronic stress — are viewed with a tinge of nostalgia, or, secretly, approved as part of what makes MIT unique.

Based on the daily e-mails I receive from students across the country, it seems like this indifference is endemic. Campuses might invest in mental health programs to catch the worst of the sufferers when they make their fall, but there’s little effort to prevent these falls in the first place, or, more importantly, impede the slide into tolerable unhappiness that many students silently accept.

I’m curious about your thoughts. What’s your experience with stress on your college campus, and how your school handles the issue?

Update (7/8/09): I’ve returned from California and am once again online. (The picture below is of the trip; I’m the guy in the back.) I have 30 - 40 e-mails from readers, built up during my absence, that might take me a while to work through, so excuse the delay in my responses. I will eventually get back to everyone.

In Praise of Grittiness

While on vacation, I read two books. The first was Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, which has been causing an idealistic stir among the usually cynical intelligentsia. The second was Winifred Gallagher’s Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. Both intrigued me, though I’ll admit that I’m still processing the ideas. You’ll probably hear more about them from me at some point in the future.

Today, however, I want to briefly mention one piece of social psychology research, described by Gallagher in Rapt, that resonates well with our conversation here at Study Hacks.

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