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Study Hacks Blog

What is Your Time Worth?

The Lecture After LastSchedule

In a talk given at the University of Virginia, soon after his famous Last Lecture, the late computer scientist Randy Pausch tackled an apropos subject: time management. Early in the talk, he revealed an interesting tidbit:

“When I meet with my new grad students,” he said, “I ask them how much their time is worth.”

His goal was to get them thinking about their time as a valuable commodity. It costs a university around $80,000 a year to support a doctoral student (sadly, only a small fraction of that is passed on in the student stipend). If you follow the standard grad student schedule, showing up in the afternoon and working into the night, then your time is being valued at around 30 to 40 dollars an hour.

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Pruning Your List of What Matters

Ahead of the CurveQuiet Study

Recently, I’ve been reading Ahead of the Curve, Philip Delves Broughton’s memoir of his time at Harvard Business School. It’s a reasonably interesting read, buoyed more by Broughton’s writing ability (he was a professional journalist before arriving at HBS) than the events that transpired (attending b-school, as it turns out, is not an adrenaline-soaked adventure).

There was one passage, however, from page 85 of the paperback edition, that caught my attention. It reads:

At a meeting of the Mormon Club, [the dean of HBS] explained the secret of his success. He has whittled his life down to just four things: work, family, faith, and golf.

This focus was later elaborated:

As an academic, he used to arrive at his office at dawn and work in silence until lunch time. Only then would he engage with the world…On Saturdays he played golf, and on Sundays he spent the day at church with his family.

Then came the conclusion:

Such discipline had propelled him to the leadership of the school.

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Does Living a Remarkable Life Require Courage or Effort?

A Non-Conformist ManifestoJamie & Cal in California

My friend Chris Guillebeau runs the fascinating and extremely popular blog, The Art of Non-Conformity. What I like about his site is that: (a) Chris is a good writer; and (b) he actually does interesting things, and then reports back about them.

On his FAQ page, Chris notes the following about the philosophy motivating the site:

  • “My target market consists of people who want to live unconventional, remarkable lives.”
  • “You don’t have to live your life the way other people expect you to.”
  • “From time to time, people will try to stop you from pursuing your goals. You can safely ignore them.”
  • “We’re waging war on the status quo, mediocrity, and the passive act of sleepwalking through life.”

These same ideas, of course, show up again and again in the growing number of popular blogs and books that tackle the topic of building a remarkable life. At their core, they all express the following belief: the key to living a remarkable life is mustering the courage to step off the “safe path.”

In this post, by contrast, I argue that having the courage to ignore the status quo is of minimal importance for achieving this goal. The most important factor, instead, is becoming so good at something that society rewards you with a remarkable life.

(I should mention, before continuing, that Chris and I are in agreement about this philosophy — c.f., this recent post from his blog — I’m using the above quotes only to typify the standard thinking about the topic.)

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Should Your Major Be Your Passion?

Passion PlaysGrand Project

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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Only at MIT…

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 … Read more

Grit, Grinds, and Living the Low Stress Life

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 GrittinessCal in Cal

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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Diligence vs. Ability: Rethinking What Impresses Employers

Note: I’m leaving tomorrow for a one-week California vacation. With that in mind, I give my normal warnings about being slow to moderate comments, reply to e-mails, and post new articles until I return.

Graduation WisdomGraduation

With graduation season winding down, job hunting is on many students’ minds. Because of this, I have a habit of sharing career advice around this time. Last year, I pitched the idea of lifestyle-centric planning. This year, I want to briefly discuss a crucial distinction that can shape the character of your college experience: the difference between diligence and ability.

The Diligence Hypothesis

Over the years, I’ve advised hundreds of stressed college students. The reason for their stress is almost always the same: time famine. The student are taking more than the normal course load and often have an absurd number of extracurriculars commitments.

This leads to an interesting question: why are they doing this?

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On the Value of Hard Focus

Running WisdomMurakami

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:

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