Study Hacks

A Nervous Sophomore

The following question came from a sophomore finance major at a well-known state university:

I have read and heard that entry-level investment bankers have to work long hours doing meaningless grunt work assigned by bosses (sometimes portrayed as evil)…How can your career craftsman philosophy be applied to high stakes fields such as finance?

This reader believed in my career philosophy and was perfectly happy to sidestep the flawed idea that he should “follow his passion.” But the option of heading into investment banking — a popular choice for his major at his university — was making him nervous.  The requirements for standing out in this field seemed brutal and he wasn’t inspired by the rewards you can obtain for banking stardom (more respect and money in exchange for more work hours and stress).

I told him not to become an investment banker.

Here’s why…

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The following line is from an e-mail I recently received from Georgetown’s HR department. It references “GMS,” the slick new database system they installed to unify all employee services:

Please remember to log in to GMS a few times each day to check your Workfeed for any items requiring your attention and/or approval.

Among the tenure-track faculty, the message was a source of amusement: the idea that professors at a research university should be checking with the HR department several times a day, just in case there is some administrative task waiting for them to complete, runs counter to everything we’ve ever been taught about how people succeed in academia.

I’m mentioning this note here, however, because I saw it as an example of a deeper principle currently shaping the American knowledge work environment — a principle with destructive consequences.

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A Reddit Gem

A reader recently sent me a link to this fascinating Reddit thread. It’s titled:”I’m not as smart as I thought I was,” and it features a high school senior worried that his intellectual abilities are lacking.

Over 700 people wrote comments in response. One of the top comments was from an MIT graduate who had struggled with and then overcame similar feelings of inadequacy when he first arrived in Cambridge.

Below, I’ve reproduced key passages from his note (edited slightly), as I think he has something important to say — for both students and graduates — about the psychological complexity of the quest to become so good they can’t ignore you…

The people who fail to graduate from MIT, fail because they come in, encounter problems that are harder than anything they’ve had to do before, and not knowing how to look for help or how to go about wrestling those problems, burn out.

The students who are successful, by contrast, look at that challenge, wrestle with feelings of inadequacy and stupidity, and then begin to take steps hiking that mountain, knowing that bruised pride is a small price to pay for getting to see the view from the top. They ask for help, they acknowledge their inadequacies. They don’t blame their lack of intelligence, they blame their lack of motivation.

During my freshman year, I almost failed out of differential equations.  I was able to recover and go on to be very successful in my studies. When I was a senior, I would sit down with the freshmen in my dorm and show them the same things that had been shown to me, and I would watch them struggle with the same feelings, and overcome them. By the time I graduated MIT, I had become the person I looked up to when I first got in.

You feel like you are burnt out or that you are on the verge of burning out, but in reality you are on the verge of deciding whether or not you will burn out. It’s scary to acknowledge that it’s a decision because it puts the onus on you to to do something about it, but it’s empowering because it means there is something you can do about it.

So do it.

The Deliberate Student

I just received the e-mail reproduced below from a computer science major who successfully applied the deliberate practice hypothesis to his academic work.

This is good food for thought for students home for Christmas break. As you think about your fall and make plans for your spring, remind yourself of the following essential truth:

When it comes to studying, there’s a huge difference between doing work and doing useful work. If you’re not putting a lot of thought into navigating this distinction, you’re probably mired in the former.

On to the e-mail…

A Simple Tower

My friend Chris Guillebeau just published his latest manifesto. It’s called The Tower.

In the manifesto, Chris asks: “what truly matters?”

“The purpose of life,” he eventually answers, ” is to create something meaningful that will endure after we’re gone.”

What caught my attention today was an article Chris wrote promoting The Tower. It was a parable about a farmer who realizes that a simple life in his fields — a life devoid of distraction and undue stress — was not enough.

“Deep inside his soul,” Chris writes, “the farmer wanted a challenge.”

It’s not just the content of Chris’s article that interests me, but also where he posted it: on Leo Babuta’s minimalism blog, Zen Habits.

Whether or not this was his intention, Chris hit upon a crucial tension in our corner of the self improvement world.

To understand this tension, keep in mind that Zen Habits is the flagship of the powerful minimalist movement. This is a movement that rejects stuff and busyness; it drives people to give away junk they don’t need,  stop acquiring, and live cheaply, which in turn lets them step away from overly-demanding jobs, debt, and long commutes.

It’s most visible proponents have gone so far as to move into tiny houses that they build by hand and that can be pulled around on a trailer.

Minimalism is a powerful idea. Clutter and demands in our lives leads to clutter and demands in our minds, which in turn leads to stress and unhappiness (c.f., Winifred Gallagher’s under-appreciated book, Rapt). And if our current cultural situation is anything, it’s cluttered.

But Chris’s post highlights the achilles heel of minimalism. We are also wired to make an impact (c.f., Victor Frankl). Once distraction is cleared from our lives something meaningful needs to fill the vacuum.

When I browse the most pure of the minimalism blogs, like Tammy Strobel’s compulsively readable Rowdy Kittens, this background attraction toward legacy pulls at my attention. I crave simplicity. But I also crave challenge.

Bringing together these two cravings, in my humble opinion, might be one of the most original and effective ideas to come out of our piece of the web; a point of convergence that the different schools of advice blogging — lifestyle design, minimalism, the passionistas, evidence-based success strategists — are all blindly evolving towards; perhaps even a grand unified theory of building a happy life in modern America.

Of course, I’ve been nibbling around the edges of this convergence for years here on Study Hacks.

My student readers have had my mantra drilled into their head time and again: Do less. But do the very small number of things you do very well.

My readers in the career world are increasingly hearing a variant of this theme: Choose one thing to do really, really well, then leverage this value to take control of your career.

There is, however, a lot of work to be done to advance this convergence. (For one thing, I can’t hold a candle to Leo or Tammy’s ability to evoke the contentment of simplicity.) Which is why I was happy to see Chris stroll over to Leo’s world, admire the uncluttered view, and then ask, “now what?”

(Image from Rowdy Kittens, taken by Tammy Strobel.)

Project Problems

Earlier today I answered an e-mail from an undergraduate at a well-known college.

She was studying neuroscience. A true believer in the Study Hacks student canon, she had pared down her commitments so she could focus her attention on her major and a related research position.

But then came the second paragraph: “I have a new project that I want to put together,” she said. “Something about the neuropathology of abnormal psychology.”

She admitted that she was having trouble with this ambition because no one at her school did behavioral neuroscience research.

“But I really want to get involved in that area,” she emphasized. “How do I find someone to work with me? I’m stuck.”

I told her to abandon the idea.

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The Berlin Study

In the early 1990s, a trio of psychologists descended on the Universität der Künste, a historic arts academy in the heart of West Berlin. They came to study the violinists.

As described in their subsequent publication in Psychological Review, the researchers asked the academy’s music professors to help them identify a set of stand out violin players — the students who the professors believed would go onto careers as professional performers.

We’ll call this group the elite players.

For a point of comparison, they also selected a group of students from the school’s education department. These were students who were on track to become music teachers. They were serious about violin, but as their professors explained, their ability was not in the same league as the first group.

We’ll call this group the average players.

The three researchers subjected their subjects to a series of in-depth interviews. They then gave them diaries which divided each 24-hour period into 50 minute chunks, and sent them home to keep a careful log of how they spent their time.

Flush with data, the researchers went to work trying to answer a fundamental question: Why are the elite players better than the average players?

The obvious guess is that the elite players are more dedicated to their craft. That is, they’re willing to put in the long,Tiger Mom-style hours required to get good, while the average players are off goofing around and enjoying life.

The data, as it turns out, had a different story to tell…

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A Common Query

Earlier this fall I received an e-mail from a rising freshman at Yale. It read, in part:

As college draws nearer, I am growing increasingly concerned about what I’m going to do with my life.

Most of the people around me seem to think that the safest route for me is to go pre-med, because it is a well-defined path that leads to a stable career.

The thing is, I don’t really want to do pre-med. But I don’t know what else I want to do with my life. What should I do?

I get this question enough that I thought it worthwhile to share my response (put into bullet point format for readability). I’m hoping the new college students among you will find something relevant here…

My Response

• Don’t go pre-med.
• Instead: table the question of your future until the start of your sophomore year.
• During your freshman year, take core courses and use your leftover electives to sample more exotic subjects. Try out a few activities to find out which seem interesting and, more importantly, which offer the most compelling opportunities to someone willing to pay it a lot of attention.
• Then, at the start of your sophomore year, make some choices: Choose one major (not two, not three). Choose one or two extracurricular areas to focus on (not three, not four). Then attack these small number of things with a large amount of time and attention. Become excellent at them.
• At this point, put aside any doubts about whether you made the right choices. Always move forward. Never look back and wonder.
• As you know, I don’t believe in pre-existing passions. In my experience, there is no right or wrong major or activity waiting out there for you to discover. There are, however, right or wrong reasons for pursuing something.
• Motivational psychology tells us that what matters in a pursuit is the loci of control. If you’re going after something because you sampled it and you found it interesting, that’s a good enough reason for your mind to get on board and provide the motivation and engagement you need for a good, successful student career.  If you’re going after something only because “most of the people” around you thought it sounded safe, that is, from a psychological point of view, a disastrous reason. You’re in for unhappiness at best and deep procrastination at worst.

To summarize: First take some time to see what’s out there, second make your own choices (but don’t sweat them), and then third go big without reservations.

(Photo by CanWeBowlPlease)