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

You're listening to optimize with bryan johnson. More wisdom in less time.

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, 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 you 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 is 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, right, Work, unit of whatever, 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. 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, 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, you can't have your Internet on and your smartphone blowing up at you notifications. That's pseudo work. And you're gonna 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. The 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. 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 going to be boring or.

As Cal says, suck.

And it's just not going to 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. So these three questions. When should I study, where should I study, and how long? When? Cal says early, earlier the better. Your best, he says. Between the Time you wake up and the time you have dinner, your energy is highest and you can control your schedule better. As the day goes on, he 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, you, 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 old trading rhythms, right? You 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 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 in 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's you're rereading 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. 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 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 Showing 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.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optymyze with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me.

Hey guys, this is Bry. Hope you enjoyed that. We have a lot of people ask us what Optymyze is all about. So I just wanted to give you a super quick tour of our site. Tell you what we do. We do two primary things. We have an Optimize core membership and we have an Optimize coach certification program for people that want to go from theory to practice to mastery. So the core membership is basically 10 bucks a month, depending on whether you do monthly or annual. And you get instant access to over 500 philosopher's notes, the six page PDF, you know, 25 minute or so MP3 recordings of these great books. And then you get over a thousand optimized plus ones, 50 optimal living 101 masterclasses, et cetera. And we have a free trial the team set up, get it, you know, free for 14 days and then go from there if you like it. So we're blessed to have a lot of people who subscribe to this, including some of my friends who happen to be some world class peak performance gurus like Tal Ben Shahar, who taught the two of the largest classes in Harvard's history. Starts every day with Optimize. Ben Greenfield, friend and coach optimizes, bar none. My go to source for taking a deep, efficient dive into some of the world's best books via the Philosopher's Notes. It's an indispensable resource. Thank you, Ben. Marcy Shimoff loves philosopher's notes. Mark Devine, retired US Navy SEAL commander, dear friend who starts his days with Optimized plus one winning win in the mind routine to charge him up for the day's battle. If you're serious about leading heroically, I recommend you use them too. Huya.

Thank you.

And 10,000 plus other awesome humans around the world. That's the core membership. Then we have, and I should say we have apps. Excuse me, you can get apps, iOS and Android. You know, we feel pretty proud and blessed to have basically a 4.9 ranking and people saying some great things. You can check that at Optimize Me Apps. And then our coach program is all about helping you master yourself so you can serve heroically, so you can empower others to do the same. We have trained over a thousand optimized coaches from over 50 countries and yeah, really excited about this. This, this is one of the core levers for us to fulfill our mission to change the world one person at a time together, starting with you and us today. We've been told that here's one little thought and we have hundreds of testimonials you can check out about how it's transformed people's lives. And if you want to be a coach, your coaching practice. Now, half the people who do this want to be coaches. The other half just want to master their lives. But Barb, a coach of ours, says I already had two coaching certifications but optimized coach was indisputably the most valuable I have taken. Thank you, Barb. Honored to be part of your life. You can learn more about what we're doing with Optimize Coach at Optimize Me Coach. There you go. Hope you're doing great. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have an awesome day. See ya.