I recently began reading Haruki Murakami’s excellent mini-memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. If your life requires a non-trivial amount of creative work, I highly recommend this quick read.
Today, I wanted to focus on a few quotes that resonated with my thinking. On page 77, Murakami remarks:
If I’m asked what the next most important quality is for a novelist, that’s easy too: focus — the ability to concentrate all your limited talents on whatever’s critical at the moment. Without that you can’t accomplish anything of value.
You’ve heard me make this argument before. But Murakami takes the idea somewhere interesting when he then notes:
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.
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.
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.
Here’s what happens, without exception, at the end of my normal work day.
First, I make sure my master task lists are up to date. During the day I tend to collect todos in a text file on my computer desktop because it’s fast and easy. I also have a small spiral notebook that I use to capture things when I’m away from my desk. (I always have this with me!) I transfer everything new from these collection bins into my master task lists.
I then read over these lists in their entirety. If something pops out as being somewhat urgent, I set its due date for the near future. Because I use Google Tasks, this means it will show up on my calendar as well. I do this review every day so that I trust that if I put something on a task list, it won’t be forgotten. Without this trust, the tasks would still percolate around my brain.
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.
UPDATE (2/17/10):My new book, which is scheduled for publication in July, 2010, is now available for pre-order on Amazon. If you’re excited about this title, and want to ensure that you get your copy the day it comes out, consider ordering it in advance. (I have a feeling we’re going to sell more than they expect, and stocks will run low.)
The Relaxed Superstars
I receive a lot of e-mails asking about my new book. I realize that I’ve only given a few vague details on the project to date, so I thought I would rectify that today by bringing you up to speed.
Synopsis
The book focuses on a group of high school students I call relaxed superstars. These are students who live low-stress, under-scheduled, relaxed high school lives yet still do phenomenally well in college admissions. In the book I tell their stories and deconstruct how they pull this off.
To date I’ve interviewed around 20 such students. I can guarantee that their stories will change the way you think about college admissions. You’ll encounter students who enjoyed abundant free time (due to reasonable course loads and minimal junk extracurriculars), yet still breezed into schools like Stanford, Princeton, and MIT. Their secret almost always involves focused attention on an innovative project they loved.
It’s almost June. For high school seniors, this means two important milestones have passed: college admission decisions and graduation. You know where you’re headed next year and have nothing to do until you get there.
In this post, I want to offer you some friendly advice for how to best use this final summer to prepare for the new world you’ll soon face. If you want my general thoughts on how you should tackle college, read last year’s open letter to students awaiting their admissions decisions. Today, by contrast, I want to get more specific.
Below I’ve listed three suggestions for how to prepare for college …
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.
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?”
I recently received an e-mail from a student who was struggling in his calculus class. “I’m out of options,” he told me. “I practice the problems in the book again and again, and I still do poorly on the tests.” He concluded that he just didn’t “get math.”
I told this story because it highlights a common problem. I’m not talking about math difficulties. Instead, the real issue here is the danger of hidden assumptions. This student was confounded by his assumption that reviewing practice problems is the way to study for math. He decided, therefore, that the only way to improve his grades was to spend more time. Not surprisingly, this did little help — leading to his catastrophic conclusion that he simply couldn’t handle the work.
He needed to change the foundation of his study philosophy, but couldn’t see beyond the surface.
