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Study Hacks Blog

Resolve to Make 2010 a Year of Radical Simplicity

A New Year TraditionOrganized

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

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

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

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If You’re Nervous About Quitting Your Boring Job, Don’t Do It

Weekend WorkThe Courage Fallacy

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

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

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

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

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The Grade Whisperer: Karen’s Overbearing Parents

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

The Parent TrapAdvice

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

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

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

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

But this compromise hasn’t gone well.

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

Karen reduced her woes to three questions:

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

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

Sounds like a job for the Grade Whisperer…

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Are You a Guitar Player or Club Owner?

A Bluegrass SlogBluegrass

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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Heidegger with Hefeweizen: Rethinking the Power of Context

Boring on HorsebackA Quiet Pint

A few weeks back, on the recommendation of Ben Casnocha, I started working my way through David McCullough’s biography of a young Theodore Roosevelt: Mornings on Horseback. I was interested in the subject, but the early chapters of the book, which detail the late-19th century New York social scene, were not grabbing my attention.

Not willing to give up the endeavor, I made some changes. First, I prepared a plate of a pleasantly sharp Australian Cheddar that I had discovered on an absurd sale at our local Whole Foods. I then poured a glass of an Italian Abruzzo (a purchase inspired by my early-September visit to a vineyard in the hills outside of Bologna), and settled onto my couch — the splash of incandescent light from my reading lamp the only illumination in the room.

In this setting, my mind eased free of its previous resistance and began to absorb McCullough’s slice of life details. I found myself engaging the material in a way that just a few minutes earlier had been impossible. Something about the tang of the cheese, and the dry sweetness of the wine, supported by a creeping, yet controlled buzz, opened my mind.

This experience provoked an interesting thought: the context in which you do academic work is extremely important, yet most of us give it little consideration…

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Are Passions Serendipitously Discovered or Painstakingly Constructed?

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 PassionQuiet Study

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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A Study Hacks Primer

Fixed-Schedule Redux My friend Ramit, from the exceptional I Will Teach You To Be Rich blog, just published a guest post I wrote about fixed-schedule … Read more