Study Hacks

A Note from David

I recently received an e-mail that caught my attention. It was from a reader named David, and it outlined a set of unorthodox study habits he had used to tackle his final years of university. One habit, in particular, shone through: he doesn’t take notes.

To quote David:

I changed my attitude on note-taking. Basically, I don’t.

Just to keep things interesting, I should also add that David scored six perfect A’s at the end of the first year of his no note-taking experiment, and, by the way, he also had a kid; three weeks before final exams. So before you complain that you’re short on time just remember this: he has much, much less free time available than you.

Could You Go Note-Free?

In this post, I want to briefly describe David’s note-free studying method. It won’t work, of course, for all class types, and certainly not for all student personality types, but, if something about this decidedly Zen Valedictorian style approach sparks a glimmer in your eye, it’s worth taking out for a test drive.

David’s Note-Free Study Method

We’ll let David explain the system in his own words. I’ll occasionally interject my commentary to keep things appropriately over-intellectualized.

I recorded every lecture and occasionally wrote down a few points if I thought they were important enough. This meant I was paying full attention in class: unconcerned with taking everything down. This is key: I could engage fully, and even if I forgot the details, I absorbed the big picture.

A great insight lurks here. The idea of paying attention fully — complete engagement, no energy expended on typing notes or remembering some point that sounded important — seems novel compared to the standard college classroom experience. But imagine the effectiveness with which you could absorb big ideas if your full attention was harnessed to the cause?

When it came to review, I didn’t have to wade through piles of notes, stripped of their context, and try to make sense of them. I had one sheet for each class, onto which I added a few-lines of abstract for any important texts we used that week: names, dates, and main arguments.

Now comes the cool part…

My technique was to take a quick look at one such sheet, and then listen to the lecture on an mp3 player as I went about my business — walking to work, washing dishes, drying diapers, even, on occasion, in the pub. Much of my studying was spent in the garden or walking by the river — no stress, no effort. But as I listened, it went in. Things the lecturers stressed once or twice began to leap out as important on re-listening.

This is worth reiterating: he studied in the pub! And also in the garden, and while doing chores, and while walking by the river. David has taken our tentative adventure studying concept and pushed it to a new level of comprehensiveness. You simply glance at a one-page summary and then re-experience the lecture, listening carefully. By the time a test arrives: you’re an expert.

Trouble-Shooting the Note-Free Studying Method

Some common objections that we can easily address:

• My class has a lot of material that has to be memorized!
  Separate the memorization from the big-idea ingraining. You can flashcard or focused-cluster the material to memorize and save the listen and think approach for the big idea learning.
• I’ll never remember the important little details if I don’t write them down!
  That was David’s fear too. However, he was surprised by how the combination of listening to the lecture carefully the first time, plus one or two subsequent careful listening — with a few notes jotted down for the main arguments and sources — really stuck the material in his mind. You might want to try adding a quiz-and-recall element to the process. Every 10 minutes or so, stop the recording and try to summarize the main points, out loud, hopefully without startling your pub mates.
• Is this different from stealth studying?
  Yes. It’s similar in spirit, but stealth studying still has you take classical Q/E/C notes. I think of note-free studying as a cool variation of the stealth method — one that goes where I was too afraid to go before.
• This technique will never work for my science/econ/anatomy/math class!
  You’re right. It won’t. Save it for liberal arts classes that center on papers, essay exams, and big, interesting ideas.
• I don’t have time to listen to full lectures more than once!
  Think critically about how much time is taken up by the studying this method replaces. Also remember: David has a baby…

Conclusion

The technique is not for everyone. But it’s cool. And it highlights just how much flexibility you have when you reject standard study conventions and start experimenting for yourself. David’s a great example of the Zen Valedictorian philosophy in action: reject a deferred rewards approach to school; demand a good life now; then squeeze as much as possible out of the time you spend working.

[Update: I wasn’t clear about this in the original post, but I am excited to hear about not just college experiences, but also high school and graduate school experiences. Just shoot me an e-mail if you have something interesting to share…]

Experience-Based Advice

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big believer in experience-based advice giving. This philosophy maintains that most advice devised in an experiential vacuum — constructed only to sound cool — fails to provide much utility to real people. To counter this, I try with this blog, and through other avenues, to keep in constant contact with real students, their issues, and, most importantly, their attempts to solves those issues.

Are You a Zen Valedictorian? Tell Me About Yourself…

With this in mind, I want to hear from you. Specifically, I am looking to chat with students who have integrated parts of the Zen Valedictorian philosophy into their life. I want to learn more about the realities of this approach to the college experience.

For example, do you…

• Have a more relaxed and happy student life than many of your friends, but do just as well (or better) academically?
• Have a story about radically simplifying your life and reaping benefits?
• Have some activity your involved with that’s really innovative and interesting?
• Have a unique take on student life? The meaning of life? Or how to be happy?
• Have a “conversion tale” to tell? For example, realizing that a million club memberships isn’t helpful or that a lot of the work your friends do is just because they feel that’s how students are supposed to behave.

If any of this applies to you, please e-mail me. I want to hear more about your experiences and thoughts on college life.

The Power of Innovation

At the core of the Zen Valedictorian philosophy is the idea that if you really understand the psychology of impressiveness, you can, in effect, hack your image — making yourself outrageously impressive without having to become outrageously hard working.

I introduced two techniques for achieving this goal. The first, focus, stated that becoming very good at one thing was more impressive (and less time consuming) than becoming kind of good at many. The second technique, innovate, was more difficult to parse. It stated that any activity that made someone think “how did he do that!?” would yield rewards that were disproportionately large compared to the effort put in.

In this post, I dive into the details of this idea and describe both why the innovate factor is so strong and how you can achieve it.

Some Innovative Examples

Let’s begin with some examples. Below are three activities that generate the “how did he do that!?” response. Each is based, loosely, off of real students:

1. A high school student who designed a technology-based curriculum recently adopted by several states.
2. A college student who setup the U.N.’s first youth advisory council and led the effort to write a youth rights constitution adopted by the Arab League.
3. A high school student who ran a web design company that involved the managing of a dozen contract employees and servicing 5-figure corporate contracts.

Each of these examples, most will agree, are impressive. These students, no doubt, will have many interesting opportunities afforded to them: they’ll get accepted to good colleges (relative to their grades) and have their pick of cool jobs. Lurking behind this reality, however, is an insistent question: why, exactly, do these activities command so much respect?

Some Non-Innovative Examples

To help answer this question, consider, as a point of comparison, the following list of more standard activities:

1. A high school student who was the president of two student clubs and was a member of the varsity tennis team.
2. A college student who did well in a double-major and also sat on two different student activity councils.
3. A high school student who played trumpet in her state’s regional orchestra.

Compared to the previous list, these three activities probably did not elicit the same level of admiration. Certainly, these students are more impressive than the average schlub, but, on the other hand, we don’t imagine them necessarily breezing into top colleges or having their pick of post graduation jobs. Whereas the students in the first list might be called superstars, these latter students might be stuck with the moniker of “grind,” “hardworking,” or, pronounced, no doubt, with a note of disdain: “ambitious.”

Why do we judge these two student groups so differently?

If pressed, you would likely guess that impressiveness is a function of talent and hard work. The above examples, however, falsify this hypothesis. The activities of the second list require just as much hard work, and, in many cases, such as varsity tennis and regional orchestra, more natural talent than the activities of the first list. Yet, the first list strikes us as much, much more impressive.

Indeed, the real reason the first list is so much more impressive can be attributed to a little understood phenomenon…

The Failed Simulation Effect

When presented with a student biography we tend to oblige our instinct to mentally simulate the path that led to that student’s achievements. For example, when we hear about a student holding down two different club presidencies and a spot on the tennis team, we imagine the hectic, running from meeting to meeting lifestyle that supports that volume of tasks. We have no problem with this simulation. We know students like this. We feel that, with a high enough tolerance for pain, we too could be that busy. It’s hard work. But it’s not mysterious.

What happens, however, when presented with the story of a student who works with the U.N. and drafted a constitution for the Arab League? Our simulation apparatus fails. We don’t know how, exactly, one becomes a player in major international organizations.

The effect of this failed simulation: a sense of novelty and wonder.

And it is exactly this feeling that we end up interpreting as the sensation of being “really damn impressed.” In other words: The first three sample students elicit great admiration not because they are harder working or more talented than the second list, but because we cannot simulate the path they took to their achievements. This failure intrigues us. We don’t feel like we could have done the same. We don’t feel threatened. A sense of novelty and wonder sluices through our synapses.

Leveraging the Failed Simulation Effect

Understanding this subtle mental effect allows you to maximize the impressiveness you reap from the effort you expend in activities. The key, we now understand, is to push activities into a realm where most people cannot easily imagine the steps that got you to your destination. Here’s the good news: such pushes are a function more of planning and creativity than of hard work.

From my experience in deconstructing the paths taken by these types of students, I can identify three steps that will help you get to this impressiveness sweet spot:

1. Enter a Closed World and Exceed Expectations. The first step is to get involved as an insider in a world that interests you. This might mean landing an internship, or shadowing someone, or joining a relevant club. Once there — and this is key — tackle the opportunities given to you with vigor. Complete them fast. Go slightly above and beyond. In such entry-level, non-full time situations, the people above you will be pleasantly surprised that you are getting things done. You will soon be rewarded for this.
2. Package Insider Connections. After you’ve proved yourself in this world, you’ll begin to notice interesting opportunities that only an insider, like yourself, would know about. Look for an opportunity to lead a project that would be available only to someone on the inside. Leverage your insider knowledge to its fullest extent.
3. Escalate. The solo project from (2) will defeat most people’s simulation apparatus as it was built upon connections available only to insiders. In this final step, leverage this effect, and the good job you did your past project, to shake loose an even more un-simulatable project. Repeat this process a few times, with each iteration ramping up to an even more insider-supported, harder to simulate project.

Case Studies: How The Three Example Students Applied These Steps

Let’s examine how these three steps were applied by the sample impressive students at the beginning of the article.

Case Study #1: The high school student who wrote the curriculum.
She satisfied step (1) by taking a student internship at a well-known technology company. She then satisfied (2) by getting involved — and following through — on an internal project involving the application of the company’s technology to educational settings. Finally, (3) was satisfied when she volunteered, as her main intern project, to package up these findings into a full curriculum. By doing a good job and following through, she got the company to pitch the curriculum to their school partners; several picked it up.

None of this required any more effort than the standard high school summer job. But because it leveraged opportunities only available to someone working inside the education department of a technology company, it appears, to an outsider, to be un-simulatable — “how do you get states to adopt a curriculum you wrote!?” — and thus really damn impressive.

Case Study #2: The college student who worked with the U.N. and Arab League.
Attending school in the middle east, this student met up, by coincidence, with an old friend who had started an international youth activism network. To satisfy (1), he agreed to start a chapter of the organization in his own neck of the woods. He pushed the chapter to meet regularly and grow. By doing so, he met some important contacts and identified some important youth issues in the middle east. To satisfy (2), he made a lateral move to start his own organization focused solely on middle east youth issues. By attending conferences, and making phone calls, people got to know him. Finally, to get at (3), he leveraged this status and his connections to get invitations to help lead relevant initiatives at the U.N. and the Arab League. No mystery. He ran a youth organization in an under-represented region. These international bodies wanted to work on these issues. It was a natural fit.

This was hard work. But no more so than the running of any large club. Because, however, it dealt with an insider world — a vibrant sub-culture of international youth activism — it yielded rewards — involvement with the U.N. and Arab League — that, to an outsider, seem absolutely inexplicable.

Case Study #3: The high school CEO.
I’ll come clean: this story is based on the company I started in high school with my friend Michael Simmons. Mike and I knew how to design basic web sites because we were, well, nerds. Hoping to make some money, we stumbled across a local guy who ran a business directory web site for the Princeton area where we lived. To satisfy (1), we setup a little deal to help small business he listed build simple web sites. To satisfy (2), we leveraged the portfolio and experience this provided us to strike out on our own. One of our key insights working with the business directory was that it was easy to find sub-contractors that would, for a cut of the fee, tackle most of the time-consuming tasks of designing web sites. We landed a few clients and made some money. Finally, to satisfy (3), we leveraged the fact that our company looked like a big deal to hire a CEO, print some fancy marketing materials, buy suits, build up our team of sub-contractors, and, most importantly, raise our fees.

The company was fun. We never had more than one or two clients at a time. And our responsibility was mainly keeping them posted while our sub-contractors did the work. Looking back, Mike and I estimate the time we spent was roughly equivalent to being the president of a student club. The rewards, however, were so much higher. Because we leveraged the insider knowledge gained by working with a local web portal, we were quickly able to get to a point that foiled most people’s simulation apparatus.

In Conclusion

I apologize for the length of this article, but the subject of activity innovation is tricky. It is also, I must admit, one of my favorite issues to explore. If you’re looking to make an impact in this world — and you want to do so without suffering a steady stream of stress-induced panic attacks — you need to look beyond the standard exaltations to simply “get started!” and “work hard!” and “follow your passion and it will all work out!” Instead, think carefully about how impressive achievements really come about. When you know what you’re doing, you will be surprised by how soon you can get somewhere that earns serious admiration.

Reviving The Walking Dead

I meet a wide variety of students in my capacity as a professional advice giver guy. The type that most concerns me, however, are those who are completely overwhelmed. Having worked closely this fall with several students in this state, I have learned an important lesson: extraordinary stress cannot be eliminated by extraordinary organizational strategies.

After a certain point, a schedule becomes too full: smarter to-do lists and more efficient review tactics, like a band aid on a sucking chest wound, will help slow down the bleeding, but miss the larger problem.

What does work? In this post I offer a simple prescription for those students who feel they are just a small step away from tumbling into a stress-fueled breakdown. It’s a devious little bastard of a tactic that I call the activity vacation.

The Activity Vacation

This strategy is simple. If you feel overwhelmed by everything you have to do as a student, commit yourself to the following: during the next semester you should be involved in exactly zero extracurricular activities. That’s right: nothing. No school newspaper. No volunteering at the hospital. No eco-rep position for your dorm or activity council for the student government. Revel in the luxury of answering every request that comes your way with a sonorous “nooooooooo.”

But that’s not all. Not only should you cut every extracurricular activity from your life for this one semester, but you should also choose the absolutely most interesting possible slate of courses. (If your custom-designed triple major doesn’t provide you this flexibility, consider also cutting out one or two of those majors!)

How to Cut Activities Without Burning Bridges

There is some subtlety to temporarily cutting activities out of your schedule. A couple rules to help prevent lasting damage:

1. If the activity is one of the most important activities in your life and represents something that you really enjoy and that you want to focus on and build up to become a real skill during your college career, then politely inform the relevant parties that you need to take a break for one semester to focus on your academics and that you look forward to returning during the semester that follows. This is college, not the Navy: they’ll understand. (Important Caveat: Do not apply this rule to more than one or two activities! Focus, focus, focus…)
2. If the activity does not fit the above criteria, cut it for good. This is a time sink. Remember the laundry list fallacy: more is more stressful, not more impressive. The activity vacation is a good excuse to do some house cleaning.

The Benefits

The activity vacation provides three powerful benefits:

1. Immediate stress reduction: Your schedule is open and your courses are manageable. You have plenty of time to get things done. You can sleep. You can read. You can watch dumb TV. You can get a girlfriend and master guitar hero (preferably in that order). Life is good…
2. Re-engagement with your academic side: When you’re overwhelmed, it’s easy to develop an antagonistic relationship with your courses. They become the demon bastards that keep forcing you to stay up all night. You grow to resent them. And after this, your quality of life takes a turn for the worse. No fun! By instead adopting a slate of courses that you really enjoy, and then, and this is crucial, giving yourself the time to actually engage them, and get into the material, and do extra research and connect the assignments to other things you care about, you’ll rediscover that intellectual spark that can make college so enjoyable.
3. Discovery of the serendipitous: A common theme on this blog is that a lot of the most powerful (and non-time intensive) accomplishments arise, in part, from exposing yourself to randomness. The lack of regular activities during your activity vacation gives you the free time to seek out the random and interesting; e.g.:
   • Meet interesting people.
   • E-mail random bloggers, read random books, and go to random talks and conferences on campus.
   • Hang out in the media room in the library and browse random magazines.
   • Write lists that use the word “random” as many times as possible.
   • Pitch a freelance article.
   • Learn how to write a screenplay.
   • Hang out with people who are smarter than you.
   • Audit interesting courses.
   • Choose a course you love and start reading about cutting edge research or publications in the field. Chat about these with your professor.

If you want a role model in this regard, consider freshman Ben Casnocha, who recently posted a list of his notes from the 14 different speakers he went to hear speak this spring.

But Wait! If I Drop Activities for a Semester I’ll Never Get Into Medical School!

Sigh. I think we’ve covered this territory before; i.e., here and here and here and here and here and here and, of course, here.

Cue The Zen Valedictorian

I hope you didn’t think you’d get away with a major idea article that didn’t tie back to the Zen Valedictorian! You know better. But this is, in fact, a key hidden benefit of the activity vacation. Because it’s temporary, you’re more likely to give it a shot. Once in your vacation, however, you are, in essence, trying on the Zen Valedictorian lifestyle for size.

I’ll bet that once you’ve tasted what student life could be like, and get a glimpse, from your randomness exposure, of the type of cool, focused, innovative, and low time-intensive activities that you could be doing instead of your standard stress-inducing slag heap of boring extracurriculars, you might just become a permanent ZV convert.

At the very least you’ll learn to chill. A worthy goal.

Adventure Studying in Action

At the conclusion of last week’s post about adventure studying, I asked students, who were so inclined, to share photographic evidence of their most adventurous expeditions. I wanted to take a moment to pass along one such story.

The picture on the right (courtesy of cyrus_sj) captures the location of one Study Hacks reader’s favorite adventure studying destination. As she recalls:

Back in my senior year, I was about to have my finals exam in my Chinese class. I was having a lot of trouble studying for that exam; I felt like I needed a break, So I jumped at the chance to take a trip with friends to the nearest waterfall (about four hours away).

This particular falls was three levels high. We climbed up the mountain and crossed a few streams to get to the source. I still remember how every bit of nature we passed seemed so interesting.

Well, I struck a deal with my friends. I’d take care of their stuff under a crude cottage while they’d jump into the water. I got to make them happy, and get through a lot of material at the same time.

The change of scenery was just what I needed to concentrate. The place was so peaceful; I didn’t feel any pressure to cram things in my head since I wasn’t surrounded by panicked students. I ended up getting a perfect grade on that exam.

If you’re enjoying the type of sunny day I am here in Boston (I celebrated the end of a rainy stretch with a long run this afternoon), ask yourself: where could I be studying?

If it’s interesting, send me a photo, I’ll share it with the gang…

Exam advice week here at Study Hacks is winding down. So sad! Next week it’s back to the normal mix…

An Inspiring Space

Two days ago, I spent an afternoon roaming Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, which, in its new building, is situated right on the harbor. While exploring the main exhibition space on the the fourth floor, I stumbled into a room they call the mediatheque. It was stunning. The ICA’s architecture has the fourth floor cantilevered out over the water of the harbor. This particular room hung off the bottom of this ledge, and featured a steep set of descending tiers. At the bottom was a full-length picture window through which only water is visible. (See the picture above.)

The full effect is hard to describe. You lose your sense of height and location in space. Are you in a ship? In a building? Are you a few feet above the water or hundreds? Very Zen.

My first thought: this would be a damn good place to work on a paper.

You Can’t Do That!

For many students, this thought reeks of heresy. Conventional wisdom says: studying happens on campus, or, if you’re feeling particularly crazy, maybe in a Starbucks near campus. And that’s it. It is supposed to be a grind that takes place in in the same old boring libraries surrounded by the same old boring people. And by the end, with your eyes rimmed red with exhaustion, and your skin sallow and whitened from fluorescent saturation, you can grin, feebly, and announce: I survived…

Here’s my question: does it have to be like this?

Beyond the Ordinary

At Dartmouth, I frequently sought ways to challenge this conventional wisdom. When I would see the hooded sweat-shirted masses trudging toward the library at the beginning of finals period, I would turn and run in the opposite direction. I was known to drive 20 minutes away from campus to study at bookstore where no one knew or cared that my school had exams. I would sometimes tackle thorny take-home exam questions while walking the banks of the Connecticut river. Anything to avoid the cinder-blocked study lounges that most students believed — bafflingly — that they were contractually bound to inhabit during this period.

Introducing Adventure Studying

I call this tactic: adventure studying. The basic idea is simple. Our minds crave novelty. If you work on exam preparation and paper writing in novel environments, it becomes easier to engage the material, be more creative, form stronger comprehension, and, overall, dare I say it, perhaps even enjoy the process.

My Challenge to You

I’m embarrassed, however, that as an undergraduate I didn’t have the confidence to push adventure studying as far as I should have. I want you to make up for my shortcoming. I want you to push the adventure studying concept to its limits. What is the most outrageously exotic yet undeniably perfect location where you can migrate your exam preparation or final exam writing? Try it.

Ignore ingrained student traditions of camping out in libraries and study lounges. Redefine finals period to be a source of personal reflection and novelty and intellectual adventure.

Some examples of adventure studying possibilities:

1. If you have a car, spend a day reviewing in a completely different town. Preferably one that is small, and idyllic, and more than 30 minutes from campus. Switch between little cafes, the public library, and parks. Meet the locals.
2. If you’re near a body of water and live somewhere reasonably warm: spend a day reviewing in your bathing suit. Cycle through: reviewing; napping; swimming; then back to reviewing. I’ve never tried running through flashcards at the end of an ocean-battered jetty; but I imagine it’s not a bad way to learn those art history dates.
3. Head to the nearest big city and camp out at museum. Find your own local equivalent of the ICA mediatheque room.
4. If your family owns a vacation house that has been opened for the season: camp out for a couple days. Bring a friend. Study during the day, have philosophical, semi-incoherent conversations at night. (Don’t, however, go late-night drunken skinny-dipping. According to the movies this will lead to you getting eaten by a shark.)
5. Load up some quiz-and-recall study guides in your backpack and hike some place isolated and wild. Switch between studying and wandering and reading and zoning out in a Thoreau-esque state of blissfulness; like Into the Wild — but, hopefully, with less death. Who says you can’t review on a 5000 foot summit? It’s better than the library basement.

The Golden Rule of Study Advice

I’ll let you in on a critical secret: no one cares how or where you study. You don’t have to punch a time card when you enter the library. The dean doesn’t track how you spent your day. Take 100% advantage of this reality.

Just because it’s “tradition” to spend the week before exams holed up in the library in some macho display of academic self-flagellation, this doesn’t mean that you have to follow this path. Why can’t you study alone on the beach? Or in your parent’s cabin in Maine? Or sitting on a bench near that crazy, completely enclosed Egyptian Tomb they have setup at the Met?

The Zen Valedictorian Tackles Finals

You might have noticed that I tagged this article with “The Zen Valedictorian.” I think the adventure studying concept fits nicely with the ZV philosophy. It’s about the larger goal of constructing the college experience you want, not stumbling through the path of least resistance.

If you take up the adventure studying challenge — and I hope you do — keep me posted. We want to hear about your adventures. I’ll share the best with the full gang. Bonus points for pictures.

A Good Day

It’s a nice spring day here in Boston. This morning, when I arrived at my office at MIT, I decided it was too nice to spend staring at a computer screen. After a quick triage on my schedule, I brought some class readings to a local coffee shop.

After I finished what I needed to get done, I wandered over to the humanities library to participate in one of my favorite activities: wandering the stacks looking for random interesting sections. I soon stumbled across a shelf of books on academic theories of motivation. I pulled down a collection of papers from a symposium held at the University of Nebraska in the early 1990’s. This in turn brought to my attention a particular research team, from the University of Rochester, that has been uncovering a theory of self-determination and motivation that has strong resonance to our recent discussions.

I tracked down the group’s web site and printed a few of the more interesting looking papers. My plan for the rest of the day: I’m going to bring these papers downtown to read while I eat a hot dog, watch the marathon, and enjoy the sun.

The only thing missing is a little transitor radio to keep me up to speed on the Sox game — but somehow I get the feeling, in the downtown Boston crowd, these updates won’t be hard to come by.

Yes, a good day indeed…

I don’t normally post outside of my Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule. But this story seemed like a perfect addendum to Friday’s discussion of the Zen Valedictorian, and I have some time to kill this afternoon, so the result: a bonus weekend post. Enjoy your Sunday…

The Tale of Tyler

Earlier this month, I received several e-mails from a reader whom, for the sake of his anonymity, I’ll refer to by the pseudonym Tyler. This student attends a top university. He recently returned after taking some time off to travel and work. In his recounting, he had burnt out trying to live the grind lifestyle. He needed the time off to get away from the undergraduate meat grinder and rediscover his direction.

His Return to Campus and Simplicity

On his return to campus, Tyler vowed to live a different lifestyle. Serendipitously, this decision coincided with the publishing of my Radical Simplicity Manifesto, which captures many of the core principles more recently detailed in the Zen Valedictorian Philosophy. Motivated, in part, by the manifesto, Tyler made some major changes to his student life.

His changes included:

1. Declaring a classics major.
   Tyler had been on track to major in biochemistry. He wasn’t interested in medical school, but people in his life assured him that such a major was “practical.” On his return, however, Tyler realized that if he didn’t focus on something that truly ignited his interest, he might once again tumble toward a burn out. So he declared a classics major. He enjoyed these courses. They helped him understand the world and his place it in. He wanted more of this intellectual stimulation. Practicality be damned.
2. Slashing and burning his extracurricular schedule.
   Tyler was tired of running from one activity to the next, fueled by the belief that more was better, and without a full resume his post-grad options would dwindle. No more! On his return, he cut out all major activities from his life with the exception of one: assisting in cancer research in a campus lab. This work provided obvious meaning, and he made it the primary target of his extracurricular energy.
3. Pro-actively enjoying his new free time.
   In his initial e-mail, Tyler shared with me a touching story. A few weeks into his newly simplified semester, he saw, at the last moment, an announcement about a well-known author coming to speak on campus. “With my old schedule, I never would have had the time to go to something like this,” Tyler recalled. But with his new, underscheduled lifestyle, he wandered over, got engrossed in the talk, hung around after and managed to meet and chat with the author. The event opened his eyes. There is a lot of meaningful living to be done when you give yourself the time.
4. Focusing on his pared-down academics.
   With his schedule lightened and his major aligned with his interests — not some vague notion of practicality — Tyler has put renewed focus onto his coursework. Gone is the adversarial relationship with his assignments, as existed with his old, overloaded schedule — a context in which every new deadline stung him with a fresh injection of stress. Instead, he can now revel in his work. He takes his time with assignments. He can go back over readings and ponder their meaning. He can work on paper ideas for days before actually writing. Stress has been replaced with engagement and curiosity.
5. Innovating.
   Tyler smartly noticed that his interest in biochemistry and cancer research as well as the classics, is an unusual combination. With this in mind, we recently applied for two different fellowships. One will allow him to stay on campus over the summer and work seriously on his research. The other will allow him to take classics courses over the summer while researching. As Tyler reported to me, his underscheduling allowed him to invest a couple weeks pondering his classics fellowship essay. Combined with the excellent grades he now earns in these classes, and the great recommendation this spawned, it was no surprise to hear, earlier this week, that he had won the grant.

The Zen Valedictorian at Work

Though I hadn’t yet described the Zen Valedictorian Philosophy when Tyler returned to campus, he had stumbled upon most of its core principles. He went from overloaded to underscheduled, cranked up his focus on his major and his single extracirricular, and, with his summer fellowships, he has begun the process of innovation.

The effects, you’ll notice, are exactly as predicted by the philosophy. The underscheduling led to an immediate stress reduction and a new engagement with college life. He enjoys his coursework and can now pursue random opportunities — like attending an author’s talk or applying for a fellowship. Also as predicted, the focus allowed by this underscheduling led to drastically improved academic performance. He credits his strong work in his classics courses as the key to him both being notified about and then subsequently winning the summer course grant. Finally, we can only imagine how the full innovative picture here — the departmental star, interesting, classics-spouting, cancer-researching student scholar — will open powerful, fascinating opportunities for Tyler after he graduates.

Imagine what would happen if you followed Tyler’s zen example…