PNTV: How to Become a Straight-A Student by Cal Newport (#327)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, how to Become a Straight A Student by Cal Newport. How to Become a Straight A Student. Subtitled the Unconventional Strategies Real College Students Use to Score High While Studying Less. I read this book as part of my preparation for Learning 101, which I'm excited to film next week and share with our members next month. Back to school time. Cal Newport. I saw this title as I was kind of researching different titles. Cal Newport's one of my favorite writers and favorite people. He wrote two other great books we featured. He wrote more than that, but the two books we featured are Deep Work. Phenomenal book. One of my favorites of 2015. Highly recommended and so good. They Can't Ignore youe. Another extraordinary book. And this book is a fun look at Cal went to Dartmouth. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa, worked really hard and didn't do that well freshman year. Then he learned some tricks and hacks, did way better, all A's, I think his last 36 classes. But he worked less. He figured out how to do it and then he met all these other Phi Beta Kappa people and realized they were actually some of the most engaged socially and kind of well rounded students on campus. They weren't grinding and he thought that was pretty interesting. He asked him some questions. He wound up interviewing a bunch of Phi Beta Kappa students from elite schools around the country who very importantly weren't grinders. They weren't the people that were working all the time and complaining about it all the time. They're people that had a well balanced life yet performed at the top of their class. This book is a distillation of the big ideas he picked up from them. I wish I had it, ucla. I graduated Phi Beta Kappa and I wasn't a grinding student. But I would have benefited from the wisdom in this book which was written 10 years after I graduated. So five big ideas here. Hope you enjoy. Excited to share. First one is the first chapter is Pseudo Work. He said what he found was Cal found when he interviewed these top performing students who didn't grind was that they made a distinction between pseudo work where you're kind of sort of working but you're really hanging out and being distracted with real work. And what I loved about this idea in particular was the fact that Cal wrote a book, Deep Work, basically on this idea that he started unpacking a decade earlier. In these interviews with these great students, there's pseudo work, kind of sort of doing work, and then there's real work. And he says the thing you need to pay attention to is a formula which is basically work. Like the amount of work you actually get done or studying in this case is a function of the time you spend doing it times the intensity with which you do it. So work produced or studying, effective studying done equals the time you invest times the intensity with which you invest that time. Now, grinding students or students who don't perform well and spend a lot of time doing it, they spend a ton of time, right? But their intensity is so low that they have to spend a ton of time in order to get an equivalent amount of work. Whereas somebody who shows up and says, look, I'm going to be super focused, right? They're super intense over the same amount of time, they get a ton more work done. So just to plug in a number here, let's say that the grinding student who does pseudo work, work, unit of whatever, right. Has to put in 10 hours at a level 3 intensity, right? And then they get this amount of work done, a certain amount of work done, right? They're ready for a test that they need to study for, they need to prep for, right? He says, well look, 10 hours at 3 intensity. All you need to do to get the same amount of work done is to adjust your intensity. If you dial up the intensity to 10, then you only need to put in three hours of work. That's a winning equation. And the basic essence of the book, or a big part of the book is figuring out how to work this equation and what do you need to do to dial in the intensity such that you can work less time to get an equivalent amount done. That's how you perform at a high level as a non grinding student. So remember, your number one enemy is pseudo work. We'll talk about. Do we talk about that? Yeah, we'll talk about when and where and how long to study to deal with some of that stuff. But for now, check in. Are you doing real work or are you doing pseudo work? And this applies whether we're talking about studying or working. Of course you need deep work time blocks if you want to create masterpiece days, right? You can't have your Internet on and your smartphone blowing up at you notifications. That's pseudo work. And you're going to have to spend a lot more time to get the equivalent amount of work done than the person who shows up with a ton of intensity. One of my favorite ideas and personal practices I'm most excited about. Second big idea here is procrastination. This is chapter Number two, you gotta conquer your procrastination. And Cal makes the important distinction that none of these straight A students actually conquered procrastination completely. Right? They didn't get rid of the urge to procrastinate. We all will always have the urge to procrastinate at some point or another. Some work's gonna be boring or as Cal says, suck. And it's just not gonna be inspiring, right? So you're going to have the urge to procrastinate. You can't get rid of that completely, but you can develop effective strategies to deal with that urge. In the note, I reflect on acceptance and commitment therapy, where we talk about the happiness trap and the fact that it's a trap to think you're ever going to get rid of all of your procrastination, for example, not about getting rid of the urge to procrastinate. It's about stepping back, being able to hold that urge and then do what needs to get done anyway. Cal gives us five strategies to deal with that. I talk about each of the five in the note. A couple of my favorite ones. You got to feed the beast, he says. You got to be well fueled. You can't be tired. Feed the machine, he says. You got to be well rested and well fed if you want to be able to perform and move through any urges to procrastinate. And research says the exact same thing. We talk about it in habits 101 and willpower 101. That the fastest way to deplete your willpower and give in to procrastination is to be tired and or hungry. If you combine those two, you're tired and you're hungry. Good luck. You're going to procrastinate, so you need to conquer procrastination. Check out Conquering Procrastination 101 for more on that and the note, of course. And then Cal has three questions. When should we study, where should we study? And how long should we study? And the book has three parts, by the way. It's how to study, which is what I'm focused on right now. And then there's how to write papers, right? Research papers and critical essays, etc. And then three, how to perform in tests. It's awesome, right? So deep tools and practices in each of those. So these three questions, when should I study, where should I study, and how long? When? Cal says early, earlier the better. You're best, he says. Between the time you wake up, the time you have dinner, your energy is highest and you can control your schedule. Better as the day goes on, it gets closer to dinner or after dinner, other things might come up. What you want to do, he says, is use your best energy wisely. Find those pockets of time where you can put in the work consistently day in and day out over the period of the quarter or semester or whatever, and then enjoy your evenings. Be done by using your time wisely. Where, he says, and this goes back to our pseudo work, he says, in isolation is the short answer. Go find somewhere where no one's going to find you and turn everything off. Right? And go do some work. That's how you jack up the intensity. If you're sitting in your dorm, if you're a college student or in some area where you're going to get distracted all the time, your intensity level is going to be three. You're going to have to put in a ton of time to get the same amount of work done. Not a winning equation. And then how long? Cal says don't work for longer than an hour in one stretch. Again, what we want to focus on is intensity here. You can grind at three, but we want to be focused and intense and not waste time. And you can only be focused and intense for a certain period of time. So he says work for a max of one hour at a time, then take a break, whether it's five minutes or 10 minutes and obviously come back to it and hit it. But five or ten minute break, max, an hour. Remember our ultradian rhythms, right? You've got to be on, then you got to be off in order to have optimal energy. Then the fourth big idea here is our number one tip. So if you want to study effectively, what's the best thing to do? Think about that for a moment. What's the best way you can study and prepare yourself to truly master a subject so you can perform well on a test and obviously learn it in general. What's your guess? Well, first I will tell you what it is, not what it is. The worst thing you can do to think that you're actually studying effectively, which is what these people do, is to read and reread your highlights and your notes. Just reading them again and rereading your notes gives you what the research scientists in this field called the fluency illusion. You have the illusion of fluency, the illusion that you've actually mastered it. You're re reading your notes and you're saying to yourself, yeah, yeah, yeah, I totally get that. Yep. Yeah, that's exactly that. Okay. Yeah, cool. I'm ready for this test. Awesome. Boom. You Go to the test that fluency, the mastery was an illusion. Cal says, shut your book. Get a piece of blank paper out. Whether you're studying philosophy or calculus, you need to test yourself. Quiz and recall is what he calls it. And his is based on these interviews with these top performing students. But the science says exactly the same thing. The best way you can study is to quiz yourself. Self testing yourself is awesome. So anytime you want to master anything, quit rereading your notes, review them and then shut your book or shut your notes and then see if you can tell yourself, say it out loud from scratch, what the basic theory is you're trying to learn. Or explain it to somebody else like they're five, as Barbara Oakley says, Right? Or write it down. Solving a math problem or other thing that you need to contemplate, blank piece of paper, boom, write the challenge and solve it right there without any references. Then you know whether you actually have mastery or not. And if you can do those things, you're ready to move on to the next thing. But your number one tip here is to quiz yourself. Don't fall into the fluency illusion. This is going to be big idea number one in learning 101. As we unpack that some more. And then the fifth big idea, you will notice that this is very spaced out. Space out. Now I don't want you to space out. You need to be focused at a 10. But you need to space out your studying time. Doesn't matter what you're doing, whether you're writing a paper and preparing that or memorizing facts. Cal says, look, your mind can only work so hard, so long and memorizing stuff. He says never try to do more than an hour block at a time. You can't memorize stuff for eight hours at a time. You need a fresh mind. Do it for a max one hour block, max two hours a day. You're much better off to take that time that you're going to spend memorizing something and split it up. We talked about this in Benedict Carey's How We Learn. He says it's kind of like watering your lawn in LA. It's much better to turn the sprinklers on for 30 minutes three times a week than it is for an hour and a half once a week. Brown grass. If you do that right, your mind works best in the same exact way. It works best with frequent check ins. Right? Researchers call this distributed learning where you space it out or the spacing effect. So keep that in mind and basically show up consistently. His whole Thing and why I would have loved it as an undergrad was I was a big crammer. Now I spaced out my finals, right? And I made sure I never had two finals on one day, which is very helpful for me as a bit of a crammer. But the basic idea is let's be smart, let's get ahead. Let's do intense real work consistently throughout the process so that we're never cramming at the last minute or at least not doing so habitually and able to perform at the top without grinding through the process. So space out your efforts. Remember, the number one tip is to quiz yourself. Quiz and recall. Reading notes is what everybody does. Everybody rereads their highlights and rereads their notes and calls that the effect of studying. It's not. So remember that fluency illusion in your number one tip. The questions when, where and how long early in isolation max one hour Procrastination. You want to conquer it. But remember, you're never going to get rid of the urge and you're never going to get rid of procrastination entirely. We all procrastinate at different times. We just don't want it to be a chronic keystone bad habit that drives us down. And then we have our pseudo work. Swap that out with real work with deep work. Remember our equation here. It's all about the intensity. If you show up with intensity focused, you can get a ton done in a lot less time. That is a super quick look at how to become a straight A student. Cal Newport. Thank you Cal and I'm looking forward to sharing more in learning 101. Hope you enjoyed what was your favorite big idea. Think about it, reflect on it, explain it to yourself. Write it down if you're feeling inspired and go share it with somebody else. And most importantly, make it a part of your life more starting today. And make today another awesome day. See you. Isn't it a bit odd that we went from math to science to history but somehow missed the class on how to live from? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course it's too late to go back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up yet. If you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life and actualizing your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on optimal living and pulling out the big ideas that can truly change your life. You know those sections you asterisk and underline and mark all up. Then Imagine that guy me connecting those ideas to other great books and helping you apply them to your life today. Well, that's what I do with something we call Philosopher's Notes where I break down each great book into a simple 6 page PDF, 20 minute MP3 and 10 minute Philosopher's Notes TV episode. Then imagine me taking the absolute best big ideas from those great books and sharing them with you in fun, inspiring, super practical optimal living 101 classes on stuff like purpose 101, confidence 101, business 101, meditation 101, that sort of thing. You've got a personal trainer? I'm kind of like your personal philosopher. Ancient wisdom plus Modern Science plus Common Sense plus Virtue plus Mastery plus Fun. That's what our optimized membership program is all about. We'd love to have you join us. Check us out at BrianJohnson. Me join.