Interview: How to Become a Straight-A Student with Cal Newport

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Optymyze with Bryan Johnson.

More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimize podcast podcast. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Cal Newport about another one of his great books. Cal is officially the first person that we've had on the show three times, which is actually quite fitting because Cal is probably my favorite author, a new friend, and someone whose work I deeply respect and admire. We've talked about and featured his so Good They Can't Ignore youe, which is phenomenal. So check that note and book and interview out. And then Deep Work, his most recent book, which is man, if it's not my favorite book I've read in a long time, it's always tied for that top position. Extraordinary look at the importance of doing deep versus shallow work. And then today we're going to talk about one of his older books called how to Become a Straight A Student. The subtitle is the Unconventional Strategies Real College Students Use to Score High While Studying Less. So before becoming a professor at Georgetown and getting his PhD at MIT, Cal created the most popular study hacks website in the world. And I didn't even know he wrote this book until I was Preparing for Learning 101 and I happened to be buying a different book and this was a recommended title and I'm like, well, if Cal wrote it, it's got to be awesome. I've got to get it, read it. And it was perfect synthesis of the science of learning. Although Cal doesn't talk about the science in the book, he just interviewed Phi Beta Kappa students who didn't grind, who didn't have to work obsessively hard, yet performed at the top of their class, and their ideas happen to be exactly what the science says works. So anyway, that's a very long prelude to welcome Cal back. Cal, thanks for taking the time. Thanks for all you Do.

Sure, Brian. As good as always. I guess I just can't stay away from you is what happens. I try to stay away and I end up back again on your podcast. So I've given up trying to stay away. Always happy to be back.

Right on. And I'm thrilled to have you back. And we've gotten so much positive feedback from the prior chats and the notes we've done on you and your book. So how to become a straight A student without having to grind. Tell us about your thoughts when you wrote the book, then we'll drill into some of the big ideas.

Yeah, it is relative to my age. An old book for me. I'm not old. I'm 34 years old. But actually that book came out a decade to the month before Deep Work, which is even hard for me to believe. So I didn't realize I'd been out of college that long. But actually that came out. I wrote that book right after graduating college. I did the majority of the research during the spring of my senior year of college, and then I wrote the book during the sort of my first year as a grad student. So it goes back to sort of my early days, you know, as a student were these issues of how do I get good grades and how do I do it without grinding, how do I do it without staying up all night, which I hated to do something I never really wanted to do. These issues were very relevant to me at the time. So looking back through the mist of time, I can remember that period where these were some of the big questions of my life.

Yeah, that's awesome. It was funny, too, when I read the book that I didn't realize it was precisely the decade. But I could see so many of the themes that you discussed in Deep Work that you were starting to unpack and in a very clear, cogent manner in this context, a decade before. Which leads us to our first big idea, which is pseudo work, as you called it, versus real work. Can you talk to us about that?

That was probably my first sort of embryonic encounter with what became the concept of deep work. And in the context of straight A student, it was just this simple formula that seemed to be more or less correct the more I observed top non grind students. And the formula was the total amount of work produced is a function of time spent multiplied by your intensity of focus. And it's a rough. It's not an actual equation. But the point in using that multiplication is to show that they have the same relative relationship. If you wanted to double your Amount of work, you could double the amount of time you spent, but it could be equivalent to double the intensity of focus. And this is something I had observed, leveraged to great advantage by a lot of the really elite level studiers that I was observing in school. They could bump up that intensity of focus much easier than they could bump up the amount of time they had to spend.

That's awesome. And then the result of that was you mentioned something funny of like you got so good at this that you were so, you know, ready for the finals, that you didn't even need to go study yet. You didn't want to make your roommates feel bad, so you'd go pretend to go study while they're pulling their all nighters. So that idea that in intensity when we jack that up allows us to paradoxically get so much more done in so much less time, right?

Yeah. You know, it's funny, it was just on Tuesday I was talking to a Georgetown student who was reading straight A and using the strategies, and he commiserated on exactly that point because he has the same problem now. He says, I feel bad during finals period because everyone has this grim face on, like, here comes the slog, you know, it's 48 hours without sleep. And. And he was ready. But the thing I like to emphasize for my own story was I started school not a good studier. So my first year of school, my grades were fine, not great. And then I launched a systematic series of self experimentation in the fall of my sophomore year where I said, I'm going to very systematically experiment with different ways to handle the main academic tasks on my plate. After that semester, I got a 4.0 in every semester until graduating. And I did not. There's no possible mechanism that would have made me much smarter in the summer between my freshman year and my sophomore year. So really the only independent variable that changed between those two years was my study habits. So, you know, sometimes people say, well, you got all these good grades, but how much of that's really your study skills versus maybe you were just, you know, born really smart or something like this. But I have that self imposed experiment that is really the skills that make the huge difference. I mean, it really can make a huge difference in the amount of time it requires to get really high grades.

That's awesome. And you were, you were, you were blessed with both the high level of intelligence and the study skills that you evolve. But the point being, whatever your natural inherent aptitude may be, it will be enhanced and amplified via these types of study habits, then you make the point of you're actually going to be working less and in performing at a higher level once you've dedicated yourself to these practices. And again, you talk about it's really cool to bookend and from how to become a straight A student to deep work and just to step back for a moment, as a consumer of your content, I highly recommend both. So most people listening to this are more mature. So there are students that are listening to this. We got a picture of a mom camping and her 7 year old was listening to one of our philosopher's notes laying in the tent with the ipod. And it was just the most unbelievably cool image. But for the most part, you know, we're either past college or, you know, have kids and all that stuff. So I. This is a great book to read if you're a student at the high school level. It's really written for the college level, but it's applicable to the high school level if you want to perform at a high level. And then for parents, I mean, this is just, I think I would argue out of. We talked about a different number of books in Learning 101, but this is the book to read from a practical perspective if you want to help your kids perform better in school, I think. And then of course, deep work for the parent to get more out of out of more intense work and less time put in. Anyway, long aside pseudo work versus real work, it's all about the intensity. Can you give us an idea or two on how to increase our intensity in this context?

Right. Well, I mean, especially in the academic setting that, you know, a couple things you can do is one, if you just sort of plan where you're going to work, when you're going to work and how you're going to work, these make a big difference, Right? So don't just let me pull out my books, let me just go at it. If you find a location that you associate with intense focus, I used to use the second floor of the Dana Biomedical Library on the campus of Dartmouth College. Cement floor, not fancy bookshelves, but like exposed metal bookshelves. And crucially, all of the fluorescent lights are on motion sensors. So once you got to a carrel at the end of a row, so you're down at the very end between two rows of books, give it 10 minutes, all the lights turn off and then all you have is the desk lamp. So you're surrounded by books on this dark concrete floor telling you that's the place you go if you Want to lock in your focus. If I had been working at the, you know, the, the student center, surrounded by everyone else and all the noise and all the socializing, the same amount of work would have taken me probably three times the amount of time.

That's so cool. So that's the where. Tell us about the when in that when, where and how.

Right? So you also see in Straight A Student some of the first stirrings of my thinking about time management and productivity, which have evolved over time and again. In Deep Work, which really is a bookend to this book, you get a sort of a much more evolved picture of the professional side of how a professional could do time management. But you see the early ideas back then, where even then I was advocating you need to control and plan your time. So even as a college student, lay out the schedule. Here's the days of the week, here's my classes, here's my club obligations, here's my job. If I'm working a part time job at school, you lay it all out and you see where is the free time open in my calendar? Once you see that, you can actually start giving a job to your time. Just like the budgeting advice of giving every dollar a job, you start saying, okay, well I see, I know I regularly, for example, have this problem set once a week for this course. Well, why don't I put aside a regular time when I do this? I always work on this, you know, Tuesday morning from here to here, and then I finish it Thursday afternoon during this block. Okay, what time do I want to leave open when I have big papers due? Well, that's really. Wednesdays are very open in the afternoon, so let me protect it and so on. So you're really controlling and working with your time and like a professional, almost like a professional student. When am I going to do this work? What's the best time for me to do it? This ends up being much more conducive to intense focus than if you do what most students do, which is say, I'm going to wait until I have nothing left on my schedule for the day, which is going to be 9 o' clock at night, and then say, all right, let me just go grind away in the library at a very low level of intensity, so minimizing the amount of work I get done. So play with every hour you have available, look at the whole landscape of time availability for the week and the semester and work with that and making your plan for when am I going to tackle the various specific academic tasks on my schedule that's awesome.

And you make the important point too that. And you alluded to it implicitly there. But to make it explicit that start early. Right. Do what's important before the end of the day because that's a. You're. Well, tell us about that.

Yeah. Well, for example, after my transformation sophomore fall, I never pulled an all nighter as a college student. In fact, I rarely ever studied past maybe eight or nine o' clock at night, which is incredibly rare at college. A big part of it was, is I took advantage of the time that was available between waking up and dinner time because there's actually a lot of time available in there. You often have a couple hours first thing in the morning and then in between classes there's another two or three hours in there. So instead of just lazing around in the afternoon, oh, I've got another class, maybe I'll play some video games, whatever. I took that time and I took advantage of all of it. So by the time I got to dinner, I probably have gotten in maybe four or five high intensity hours of schoolwork done where most of my peers had done none at that point. And at a high level of intensity, four or five hours can keep you on top of what you need to be on top of most days.

And then you aggregate that and compound it over the course of a semester, over the course of four years, and you get so far ahead that you make it look easy to perform at that highest level.

It does. And the other trick I would give along those lines is looking out farther ahead in your time horizon. So another trick that elite students had is they look ahead two, three, four weeks and get a sense of there's a major paper due or there's a major exam coming up on this date three weeks in the future. And it's kind of busy the few days before that, but it's okay. I'm looking multiple weeks ahead. So now I can really back up and say, no, no, this Monday I'm going to start working on this paper two weeks ahead of time. I'm going to start getting some work done here. When you control your time, it all seems natural. But to your peers, it seems like you're some sort of warlock. What you're working on, you're working on the paper that's due in three weeks. Like, how are you working on it now? What's going on here? But that's what avoids the type of pileups that'll otherwise happen if you just wait, hey, what's due this week, what's due tomorrow? What you're going to get five times out of 10 is these pile ups. You say, whoops, there's three major things due tomorrow or I'm away all day. We have a swim meet all day and I have a major paper due the next night. And that's a bigger driver of exhausting all nighters than I think anything else in school is when you don't control your time on the long scale, you leave yourself vulnerable to these pileups where suddenly a lot is due and you have been looking ahead and you really don't actually have enough time to get it all done.

And then the grind occurs. It's funny because although a Phi Beta Kappa student at UCLA did not, I wish I had, as I mentioned in the little PNTV your book, @ that point I did not have these skills. I was very much a crammer, had fun seeing how efficiently I could perform as well as I could. And that was kind of a game for me. But the thing that I did that I think helped me out a lot was the first thing I did when I scheduled my classes was I never put up two finals on the same day. So literally, as I looked at what I wanted to do and architected my schedule was Monday, Wednesday, Friday, perfect. Knowing that unfortunately I didn't.

Have.

The systems that we're talking about here to actually schedule well, because I wound up kind of cramming. But at least I had enough time to effectively address each one serially rather than getting hammered by all of them at once, you.

Know? Yeah. And what you're saying there is actually very important because this is a blind spot that a lot of students have, that when it comes to their schedule, there's two mistakes that students often make. One mistake is that more is always better. If the normal course load, it's a quarter system, it's three courses. I'm going to take four. If it's a semester system and the normal course load is five, I'm going to take six. That somehow doing lots of courses is going to make you seem more impressive to the outside world or that you're somehow not living up to your potential if you don't. So that's mistake number one. The mistake number two is actually not thinking about the energy and social and time ramifications of different schedule configurations. I always did this and say, well, this course is hard and this course is I'm going to put an easy course in the schedule. And hey, can I get out of having to take a course if I do an independent study or I Have some extra credits. Well, that would really free me up some more time. The way I saw it is I wanted to have as much time as possible to do as well as possible on the smallest number possible of courses. That still allows me to graduate with a major on time. And that can play a huge role. So a lot of the stresses and scheduling difficulties that students have are self inflicted because they scheduled what I used to call in my older blog post heart attack semesters where it's well, I don't want to think about the ramifications. I just think it's important that I take these seven courses and six of them are biolabs. And it's crazy. And so what you did there is actually incredibly smart. Build very reasonable schedules, be very conservative. Say if I have a quantitative course, balance it out with something with a completely different type of assignments and maybe put in a course that I just know is going to be easy. There is no shame in that. In fact, that type of architecting could be at the key of making sure that you get the type of focus you need on the courses you do take to do as well as.

Possible. It's really, really powerful. And for those who don't know Cal's background, this is again Phi beta Kappa, Dartmouth, MIT, PhD, now teaching at computer science at Georgetown. This isn't the slacker's manual. This is the perform at your peak and really achieve all that you're capable of achieving. Manual and do so again without having to grind simply by having the systems in place to allow that.

Right? Yeah, but it is kind of a slacker's manual in the sense that the people who follow these techniques, those who just did on their own, or those who came along later and followed the book, it's just significantly less grinding work than the average peer. So it will, I mean, this is my warning. It'll make you feel like a slacker if you use these techniques. Because there is a staggering amount of inefficiency in student study skills. Never again in your life are you going to find something which there's so much inefficiency and you can get so much gain from so little tactics. But at college, it's the absolute largest inefficiency I've ever observed as you know, an author, an entrepreneur or an academic that you can be in the top 5% of your class while studying less than most of your class with relatively common sense study overhauls. That's just how inefficient most people are. So if you're a student, take advantage of the sweet spot that you're currently in, that's.

Genius. So to be a peak performer while being a slacker simultaneously from the, from your own self perception and flow from how the world views you potentially. And it's cool too, because in deep work you actually frame that in the sense of deep work is now simultaneously more rare and more valuable. So the inefficiencies in the college marketplace, if you will, of getting good grades is so ridiculous that you can literally show up in the top 5% performance wise while being in the bottom 5% slacker wise. If you take the time to systematically optimize your study habits, this is great. And again, the, whatever it is, four or five hours of reading this book to get the kind of basic nuts and bolts and then to go 1% incrementally optimize, get a little bit better day in and day out via implementing these strategies, the returns are just huge. To round out the you have the study questions when, where and how long? So we talked about where in that awesome concrete slab library, we talked about when earlier, the better. And in those open slots that give intensity. How long, how long should any given burst.

Be? Yeah, my recommendation in that book was you go 50 minutes, 10 minute break, 50 minutes, 10 minute break. That's roughly the right ratio. The only caveat that I feel like I need to add now, 10 years later, because of the way technologies have advanced, is be very careful about the break. In other words, you take the 10 minute break to give your mind some time to refresh and relax because it's very intense. If you're doing high intensity studying, it's very intense. But just make sure in that break you don't do something that can wrench your attention away and put you into a different type of world that has its own obligations. So if you jump into an email inbox, or I guess if you're a college student, it would be more like maybe like a social media feed or on the Snapchat. And it throws you into a whole different mindset of social interactions. For example, you're going to have a hard time coming back. So when you take your 10 minute break, do something that's not going to completely change your context, calm your mind down, go for a little walk, get some water, look out the window, but keep your attention pretty much under.

Wraps. Okay, so then I love this, this idea that don't blow your brain up is how I like to describe it. So when you're focused intensely, don't then go jack yourself up with more of the Brain stimulating social feed and kind of hyper dopamine rich non restorative time. What would be a tip in terms of, well, what should we do during those 10.

Minutes? Well, it's helpful to keep in mind that for most of my college experience, which is what I was drawing from in writing this book, this was really before an age of laptops. You didn't have a laptop with you when you were studying. This was sort of before WI fi and laptops and it was before, not even before smartphones, but it was before cell phones. So for most of my college experience, I didn't have a cell phone or a laptop. So just think back. What would Cal do or be able to do in this situation 10 years ago? And like, okay, well he wouldn't have a cell phone to look at and he wouldn't have a laptop with email or the Internet on it because you had to go downstairs to the lobby of Dan and Biomedical and wait for the public computer if you wanted to look at the Internet and then everyone could see what you were looking at. So what would be left to Cal in that situation? Basically anything that would answer, you could answer that question for is a fine break. So for me that often meant I'm going to go fill up my water bottle at the water fountain. Or like sometimes I look at the books on the shelf above me. I always like to play bookshelf lottery. I'm a nerd, I'm an academic. But bookshelf lottery, like what's this? Just pull something off and look at it. It's stuff that's not going to blow up your brain. Just give you a little bit of a.

Breather. That's awesome. So I'm six years older than Cal and I literally didn't even have an email address in 1996 when I graduated from UCLA. What I would do, because I always worked in super intense, I never, I just didn't have time. I worked, you know, 25, 40 hours a week while I was in college as well. And some of that I was had time to study, which I used as an, as an intense basis. But anyway, when I was on, I needed to be on because I didn't study as much as other people did. But what I would do is I'd walk to the little, you know, social, I don't know what you call it at UCLA and I'd play a game of pinball or two or three. Like that was kind of one of my. Turn the brain off, just go have fun. Kind of in that way which I remember Fondly as being a great way to just get out and then to go back in and to hit it hard. But I love your point that you need to oscillate. You can't do this type of intense work for hours and hours at a time. And you don't want to. You shouldn't try to go in, hit it hard, come back out, and then schedule it.

Appropriately.

But. But you do that and you'll get a ton of work done via that. Super high.

Intensity. Yeah. Like let's say you have a four hour block, for example. If you decide you're going to sit down and try to hit peak intensity for four hours, you'll make it maybe, I don't know, an hour, 90 minutes before you burn out and then the whole block is ruined. On the other hand, if you do 50 minutes, 10 minutes off. 50 minutes, 10 minutes off. Fifty minutes, 10 minutes off. 50 Minutes, 10 minutes off. I mean, you've just gotten a lot of work done there, right? I mean, that's. You've just got yourself 3 hours and 20 minutes worth of high intensity work. So these little but well conceived breaks on a regular basis actually can increase the total number of high intensity work you're able to get done in a given.

Period. Awesome. And of course, you talk about it more in the book. Tell us about the number one way to learn and kind of the worst way to learn, which you juxtapose in the.

Book. Yeah. If you only remember two things from this book or from this interview. One is work produced is time multiplied by focus. And the other is active recall is everything when it comes to learning any type of material. In my opinion, the only activity that really matters is trying to replicate the information from scratch without looking at your notes as if you were lecturing a class. If you can do that, you know it. If you can't do that, you don't know it. It's brutal, it's intense. It's also incredibly efficient. It's the most efficient possible way to learn. The opposite of active recall is passive recall, which is where you're reading over information again and again. This is the cliche that I highlighted my textbook. How many times can I read the highlighted paragraphs of my textbook before I drop to sleep in the middle of the night? That is by far one of the least efficient possible ways you can learn. Active recall is the only game in town. Any other activity, throw it out of your study skills.

Arsenal. This is so good. And this is one of the most exciting things because I read your book after Reading a few books on the kind of, the more classic science and what the research shows on this stuff in terms of lab work vis a vis your research with these top performing non grinding students. And they call it of course the fluency illusion, which is what everybody does, they reread their notes. Oh yeah, I recognize that it's, I'm fluent in that and it's an illusion. So your point, and I want to have you say it again because it was so perfect and I want to make sure everyone gets it, is you need to quiz and recall the material, shut the book, get rid of your notes. Can you describe for us again what you need to be able to do to pass the standard of knowing.

It? Yes. The only activity that matters is can you replicate the information from scratch without looking at any notes as if lecturing a class. And that final piece is important. That means it's not just replicating from scratch a solution, but you're able to annotate what you're doing and in a confident and convincing manner. So a lot of this means you're going to be speaking out loud and you're going to get some weird looks, which is another reason why you probably want to study someplace isolated because it does make you look a little bit crazy. But this applies across all types of material. I was a computer science major and an art history minor, so I got a lot of practice on two very different types of material. But practicing concepts from art history, I would be lecturing. I would just lecture out loud just as if I was talking to a class. And when I was practicing, say a math problem for computer science, I would be, I love just a white piece of printer paper replicating the proof or idea, writing it from scratch on that blank piece of paper and explaining every step as if I was at a chalkboard. Okay, so why are we able to go from here to here? Well, we're really just simplifying terms and you know, here we're applying this whatever, whatever. Right. So it's not just you can regurgitate an answer, but if we put you in front of a classroom, people would understand what you're saying. So it's annotating as you replicate the answer without looking at any notes. Again, it's really hard in terms of mental energy you're consuming per minute of work, but it works so well. I used to talk about this with studying for art history is it ingrains the material so efficiently and so fast that you do it. Once you know it, you never have to go back to it. So it's very efficient that I would find myself days later on an essay exam and I could remember sort of word for word, the right sort of ideas or observations to put here. Because there's something about teaching something out loud from scratch that ingrains it in your neurons much more effectively than almost any other activity I've ever.

Studied. So much there reminds me of Barbara Oakley's A Mind for Numbers. Barbara taught one of the most popular, if not the most popular class in history. Over a million students took her. Basically, how to learn. I forget what she called it, but on whatever one of those large platforms is. But she has an idea in her book. Explain it like I'm five, right? To be able to. The scientists call it elaborate, you know, to be able to explain that. And I love the way you described it if you're up on the chalkboard. And this is why I do what I do when I go through the note is that's my final test. Did I get this author's idea? Can I distill what I think are five of the most salient, most important ideas? Just let it rip, you know, and I've got my little, my little subtitles, but that's it. And I either get it or I don't. And then to your point, it reveals what you don't get, whereas rereading your highlights.

Doesn'T. Yeah. And the key with active recall is so depending on the type of material, there's. You form different types of questions to do the active recall. And so I get into this in the book that, you know, if you're in an art history class, you're going to be forming these question, evidence, conclusion clusters that you can test yourself on if you're in a math class, actually gathering a lot of math problems that you're going to practice with. But in all cases, in the end it all comes down to you trying to answer problems from scratch. But the nice thing about it is it has this winnowing effect. So you go through all the problems that you need to know. If you get it right. Once you give a convincing lecture, check it off, you never have to go back to it again because of the ultra efficiency of this method of locking things in. So that means the next time through you're just looking at the problems that you didn't check off that time. Oh, and now you get most of those. Okay. Now the next time through it's an even smaller number. So you have this very sort of geometric progression of reduction of the amount of material you need to Study, because once you do this, once you know it, most people that do passive recall linearly scan everything as many times as possible. So it means that you are, you're spending much less time on the things you need the most help on and a lot too much time on the stuff that you know too well. And it's an incredibly inefficient actual, you know, allocation of your cognitive.

Resources. So good, says the professor of computer science. And of course, in the book, you go through all that and you talk about how to write essays and how to do a number of different things that we're not even going to talk about right now. Take different types of exams, literally how to approach an exam. We won't go into that right now, but in the book, it's just awesome. One more idea I want to talk about before starting to wrap it up is the spacing it out. I loved the idea. Again, scientists called it distributed learning. But can you talk to us about the importance of spacing out our studying.

Time? Yes, this is probably relevant on different scales. On one scale, there's the notion of when you're actually controlling your time in advance. What you're really avoiding is these really long monolithic blocks. Eight hours starting in the evening, going to the early morning hours of all trying to learn one thing as you get more and more exhausted, which has this very negative feedback loop, because as you get more exhausted, your intensity of focus goes down, which means your rate of learning goes down because of our work produced formula. So then it increases the amount of time you need to learn to work, and that makes you work longer. And then your intensity drops even more. And it's this sort of very negative feedback cycle. And so what's more efficient from this standpoint is that you have these more spread out in the day and in the week, intense burst. Because what you get by doing that is a much larger average intensity level, which means when you sum this all up, what you need in that total hours worked section or category of that formula is much less. So it's a little bit paradoxical, but sort of breaking stuff up, spreading it out actually means you're reducing the amount of time, even though it feels a little bit less aggressive or intuitive than just let's power, you know, let's, let's clear the schedule, let's wait till night, and let's just power all the way through.

Things. That's so cool. And then, and then check out Learning 101, where I talk about, I talk about Cal's idea and then I combine it with a couple other perspectives of distributed learning. And one of the metaphors one of the authors used was if you're going to water a lawn, right, you're in la, you got a lawn, everyone wants it to be nice and green. You can water it once for whatever an hour, right. Once a week and watch it get brown around the edges. Or you can water it three times a week for 20 minutes each and you're going to watch it stay lush and green. So that idea of that's how our memory works, you want space in between the sessions. So you get both the intensity that Cal just described and you get the desirable difficulty of having to go back into your mind and remember what you were thinking about, rather than the illusion that you actually got it in that six hour manic attempt to cram it all into your brain. Right. So you master it and you retain it at a significantly deeper.

Level. Yeah, I mean, the life of these elite students really does look different than the life of most other students. I mean, it's just even paced, things are spread out, you have free time in the evenings, you get to do other things. I wrote this series, a blog post after the book came out a few years later called the Romantic Scholar that really gets into the psychology of building. Like a college experience in which you're engaged with the ideas. Your life has a very reasonable amount of stress in it, yet you're still doing impressive things. It's going to open up impressive options. You're still showing off all your mind has to have, but it's. This rhythm is so different. I work, but it's not all day and I have my evenings free and things are spread out and I avoid heart attack semesters and overload days. And because I control my time and have reasonable schedules, I get really into the subject and I'm going to hear speakers on the thing I'm studying. And now I feel much more intrinsically motivated. So you can really craft using these type of ideas as a foundation, but then building off of them, you can craft a really good academic college life, a life in which you're learning, you're setting up potential possibilities for yourself, but you're also happy. Your stress is low, your engagement of what you're doing is high. And this is kind of the standard I want college students to have. I mean, just I, I don't like this notion, which is increasingly common, especially at elite schools, that college somehow is a thing that you're going to white knuckle and you're going to suffer through. Like I Got to get through it. It's all about just like, can I get through with heavy course loads and grind through and somehow if I do that on the other side, everything will get better. But you know, it doesn't. Life is just as hard on the other side as college is. Inside jobs are just as hard as it is to try to get good grades. So college is the perfect time to start adopting mindsets, using the type of ideas you talk about so much on your show where you say, I want to craft a good and meaningful and successful, but also good in a lot of different aspect lives. That's the time to start that type of crafting and something as simple as. Well, let me rethink how I study is a good starting point for a really long journey that has a lot of important.

Destinations. So good. Now I want to hear you describe kind of creating autonomy via excellent grades. But before we go to that, I just want to echo that and again, bookended. This is how to start that as a college student. To become a straight A student without grinding and to create a beautiful, happy, integrated, flourishing life. And then one of the things that deep work gave me the permission to do is to really, really, really solidify my shutdown complete, where I simultaneously work harder than I've ever worked in my life and work more spaciously and less than I've ever worked in my life. I'm done at almost every day at 10th hour. Roman style is what I call it. 4pm I'm offline. I don't work on weekends. So with that intensity, I'm able to get more done in less time and be more present with my family than I've ever been. And to start that in college or even at these elite prep schools right in high school, of just learning these tools and then extending them throughout our lives is just unbelievably inspiring. And again, why I'm so drawn to your work is that through line of being so good they can't ignore you, but on your terms. And with an integrated life where you're just not fritting your time away in pseudo work or pseudo play for that matter, be all in on whatever you're doing.

Right? Yeah. We used to use the phrase when I work more with students, that there's a big difference between hard work and hard to do work. And hard work was I am trying to learn this algorithm and it's getting my full intensity. And it's hard in the sense that it's using all my resources, but it's not hard to do in the sense that it's draining, you don't like it, it doesn't feel fulfilling. It's like something that you would rather not do. And there's a huge difference. Grinding your way through an overloaded course load with way too many hard classes where you're barely sleeping is hard to do work. And you shouldn't be trying to create a life that is just difficult to get through. On the other hand, obeying the Roman hour, which, you know, for college students, maybe it's eight instead of four because they tend to, when they wake up, they wake up a little bit.

Later. A little different when you got a four year.

Old. Yeah, like eight o'. Clock. Okay. But still, that's very impressive for a college student that you know, you're working incredibly hard during the day and nailing it, getting it done, you're in control of your time, you're done at 8, you got your evening free to do other things. That is hard work, but not hard to do. It's actually sustainable life. And the motto for a while, this was actually the motto of my blog, which I started right after this book. So this, after this book I started. This is why my blog is called Study Hacks, because it was actually, let's talk about the stuff that was in this book and extend it. And in those years where I was really focused on student stuff, right after this book came out, the motto of the blog was do less, do better, know why. And this was my motto for students. That kind of became a motto for life, which was do a very small number of things that you want to do well. So have one major, don't do three majors, have a very reasonable course load each semester, don't try to overload it. Maybe have one significant extracurricular activity at most, but not a ton. But then do those small number things really well, which is, you know, give them a lot of attention, use really smart study skills and then know why. So why am I studying this? Read about it outside of class, go see speakers, you know, be involved and involve yourself in the, in the community surrounding it. Get involved about the intellectual excitement around it. That's the recipe for a really thriving college life. That you keep things very limited, do less, just what you need to do, not too much, really focused, and then do those things all out. And that's hard. That's hard work, but not hard to do work. And that's what's going to build you a college life, that you thrive, but that also that you really.

Enjoy. Beautifully said. I'd like to hear you riff briefly on the you end the book with, look, we're talking about this and performing at a high level, but not for. Not for the sake of it, but to create autonomy so we have the opportunities in our lives. And you kind of touched on that with your three adages there in the motto for your blog. But can you, can you talk to us about why? Like, why do we want to become a straight A student? What does that do for us in the big.

Picture? Yeah, because there's very common pushback. If you write a book that says how to become a straight A student, here's the pushback you're going to get a lot of there's more to life than grades. Grades don't capture inherent brilliance. A, B, C and D. And that's what really matters. And a bunch of other excuses about why it's okay that I don't have really good grades or we should ignore grades or we need to get rid of grades. And sort of. My defense of it was two things. First of all, the reality of the world is that when you leave college to go out into the real world, they don't have a lot to measure you on. Grades is one of the big things they're going to use. It's going to be the screen for interviews at sort of any type of elite places. And a lot of places it could be the whole ball game. So by having really good grades, you have opened up the amount of options you have after college so that when it comes time to make those choices, more options there is going to be lighter than less. Second, it's actually not that irrational for companies, especially in a knowledge economy, to use grades as a useful proxy. The reason is think about what it actually means to get good grades. What it means is we're going to give you a diversity of cognitive challenges. Can you learn this language? Can you learn this type of mathematics? Can you learn this type of essay? And can you take on a lot of cognitive challenges, manage your resources, manage your time, manage your cognitive resources and succeed at a lot of them with a variety of different timing constraints, semester after semester. That's actually a pretty good proxy for what it means to succeed in almost any sort of knowledge environment. So it's not actually that bad of an indicator of how good are you, taking on a variety of different cognitive challenges and figuring out how to succeed at each of them. So I'm pro grades, and I don't think it follows. Of course it's true that grades aren't everything, and of course it's true that there's some unfairness in grading systems, but not as much as people think. And of course you don't have to get good grades to be successful in life, but it's not a bad goal because when you're 18, 22 years old, this is going to be one of the biggest bargaining chips you have in terms of setting off or having choices in what you do after school. So all things being equal, if you have the chance to read a book like this and to get really high grades, take it. You're still in control about what you do in your life after school, but this is going to give you a lot more.

Options. That's awesome. And you describe a similar theme and so good. They can't ignore you as career capital. So what we're really doing is we're creating a little bit of career capital, a lot of bit of career capital at a critical phase of our lives where that's really the only capital or not the only, but one of the most substantial forms of capital that we can create of. Look, we've proven that we can use finite resources to perform at a high level, which makes us capable of continuing to do so in whatever context we choose to take our skills. So good they can't ignore you. Like I said, it's a good.

Proxy. Yeah, it's all in this book. Basically all my future books. All are line latent in the straight A student.

Book. Yeah. Yeah. That's so cool. And then in Cal is also. So again just to just to wrap up this, we've got how to become a Straight A Student. We've got so good they can't ignore you. We have deep work. And of course Cal has so much other stuff you can check out@calnewport.com which I highly recommend you do. He has a recent Harvard Business Review article called Is It a World without.

Email? No, no, it was a modest proposal. Eliminate.

Email. Even.

Better. Yeah, the Swift reference, I think.

Yeah. Okay, so then Google that. Just Cal Newport, Harvard Business Review, hbr. We'll get you to that and other contributions there. But just that idea of what can we do if we really, really get focused in our lives, decide what some people important, eliminate the distractions and go all in on what matters most in the context of the 21st century without having to check out and leave society, but to just fully engage on our terms most powerfully. So I'm really excited about that continuing evolution of work and as always, just thrilled to be connected. I appreciate you and your wisdom and being so generous with your.

Time. Sure, Brian, I'm going to have to keep writing books so I can come.

Back. Look.

Forward Isn't it a bit odd that we went from math to science to history but somehow missed the.

Class on how to.

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