Rethinking Remarkable

A collection of recent articles dissecting the idea of remarkableness…

• Ben Casnocha has a pair of fascinating posts on building a remarkable life. His first points out the contradictions in Steve Jobs’ famous Stanford commencement speech, while the second takes issue with “attitudinal” self-help.
• Scott Young weighs in with an interesting take on whether the good life is chosen or earned.
• Chris Guillebeau has an insightful profile of a Tsilli Pines, who quit a corporate job to run her own hand-crafted ketubah (Jewish marriage contract) business. What strikes me about about Tsilli is that she avoided the conventional entrepreneurial wisdom to “start as soon as possible,” instead spending three years tuning and testing her idea until she could make the leap with confidence.
• I just finished reading an advance copy of David Shenk’s The Genius In All of Us. I’m excited for this book’s release. It covers much of the same ground as Outliers, but Shenk is more optimistic than Gladwell, aligning more with my own philosophy that once you understand what generates remarkable achievement you can harness it better in your own life. In the meantime, if you’re not reading Shenk’s blog, you should start. (See, for example, his recent post on the myth of the meritocracy.)

My Next Post

I’m in the process of writing a real humdinger of a post. It’s the next entry in my series on applying deliberate practice in everyday life. The focus is how star graduate students become stars (it’s built around an interview I conducted with James McLurkin, the famous MIT roboticist who just got hired at Rice.) The strategy I highlight, however, is wildly applicable to a lot of different fields.

Stay tuned. I hope to have it up soon…

My New Book is Available!

As you know, I have a new book coming out this summer. It’s called How to Be a High School Superstar, and it introduces the zen valedictorian concept to the students who arguably need it most: those suffering through the college admissions process. (See this article for more details.)

Though its primary audience is high school students, it also provides a general look inside the fascinating science of what makes interesting people interesting; so it will hopefully find a home with an even wider readership.

If you like my writing and are interested in this book, you should consider pre-ordering a copy on Amazon. (Fans of my red and yellow books know that I’m perennially understocked at bookstores — a large number of pre-orders will inspire the big chains to take my titles more seriously.)

The Admissions Outliers

Olivia shouldn’t have been accepted to the University of Virginia. At least, not according to the conventional wisdom on college admissions.

Olivia attended a small private school near Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She had good grades and test scores, but nothing phenomenal. More striking, she maintained a minimal extracurricular schedule. During the school year, she was a member of the dance team, which satisfied her school’s athletic requirement. She also joined the tech crew for the school musical and was the co-chair of her senior class’s community service organization.

Combined, her school year activities required only seven to eight hours of effort per week.

During the summer, she worked in a marine zoology laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, studying lobsters and horseshoe crabs with a research group run by her neighbor, a professor at the university. She started as a part-time, unpaid volunteer, but the position  morphed into a full time summer job when the professor discovered extra money in his grant.

“It was not a big commitment at all,” Olivia told me, reflecting on her high school obligations.

Students familiar with competitive college admissions tend to have the same reaction to Olivia: she’s a solid applicant, but certainly not good enough to earn a spot at a top-twenty school like UVA. Research involvement has become a standard item on modern applications — the 21st century equivalent of becoming student council president –  and her school-year activities are nearly non-existent by the standards of most competitive applications.

Olivia, however, defied this reaction.  Not only was she accepted at UVA, she also won the hyper-competitive Jefferson Scholarship – a merit-based award, given out by UVA alumni, that covers the full cost of attending the school.

Most high school senior classes have a student like Olivia – someone who defies our understanding of who should get accepted to competitive colleges. We tend to attribute these outliers to the “randomness” of the admissions process. Indeed, even Olivia was surprised by her own success: “I wasn’t stressed like the other students at my school, because I wasn’t interested in trying to impress colleges,” she told me. “I still don’t understand how I got into UVA.”

In this article, by contrast, I argue that the success of students like Olivia is not the result of randomness. It instead points to a surprising possibility: perhaps our understanding of extracurricular activities and their role in the college process is all wrong.

Beyond the List Quality Hypothesis

We’re surprised by admissions outliers like Olivia because their accomplishments fall short of the quality we expect from top applicants. This surprise, of course, requires the belief that the role of extracurricular activities is to signal important qualities about the applicant. It’s common, for example, to hear students talk about an activity demonstrating their “leadership potential” or “passionate commitment.”

I call this understanding the list quality hypothesis, and if you subscribe to this belief, Olivia remains a mystery; her activities don’t signal enough outstanding things to make her competitive at a top school.

Having spent the last three years researching outliers, like Olivia, for my new book, I’ve noticed a surprising trend: the greatest asset of these relaxed superstars is not the quality of their activities, but the fact that they’re genuinely interesting people. This trait, which I call interestingness, permeates their application – from their essay to recommendations – and has a profoundly positive impact on their admissions chances.

For these students, extracurricular activities play a different role than for their peers.  They don’t use activities to signal their qualities, they use them instead to transform themselves into more interesting people. In other words, what’s important about an activity is not its impressiveness, but its impact on your personality.

I call this idea the interestingness hypothesis, and it upends conventional wisdom on how to get accepted at a competitive college.

How Olivia Got Into UVA

In March 2008, when Olivia sat down for her final interview with the Jefferson Scholarship Committee, she was plagued by nerves.

“At the time, I felt really insecure,” she recalls. “Maybe I should have played varsity soccer and lacrosse, and you know, become student council president.”

Then one of the committee members turned to her. “So, tell me about these horseshoe crabs,” he asked.

Olivia began to talk about her research from the past summer, where she helped the graduate students in her lab try to match the movement of horseshoe crabs in New Hampshire’s Great Bay to the movement of the tides. They were pursuing the hypothesis that crabs use the tides to coordinate their migrations.

It soon became clear that over the past three years, Olivia had developed a deep interest in this work. It had started, perhaps, during the  daily commute to campus, which she made with her neighbor – the professor who ran the research lab. His enthusiasm for marine zoology infused their conversations.

“One morning — to give you an example — the professor began going on about a paper on some neurotransmitter in the brain of lobsters,” Olivia told me. “It wasn’t his area of research, but he was fascinated anyway.”

This enthusiasm, evidently, proved contagious, as Olivia began to pursue the subject on her own time.

The conversation with the scholarship committee shifted. Olivia began talking about the book Emergence, by Steven Johnson, which describes how simple small-scale decisions can aggregate into complex large-scale behavior (for example, dumb ants creating smart colonies).

Olivia had read the book for fun, and started riffing with the committee about how Johnson’s ideas might apply to marine zoology. “Was it possible,” she wondered out loud, “that the complex migrations of horseshoe crabs might also be an emergent trait?”

Most students, when faced with a similar interview situation, fall back on emphasizing their activities and the traits they signal. “Running my church youth group,” they might say, “is another example of my leadership ability.”

Olivia followed a different path. She didn’t emphasize her activities (which, in isolation, weren’t all that impressive) or the qualities they supposedly signaled, instead she let her natural interestingness come through – and her interviewers were entranced.

Put another way: she rejected the list quality hypothesis, embraced the interestingness hypothesis, and won a full-ride scholarship for her efforts.

Students Aren’t Born Interesting, They Earn It

The interestingness hypothesis is appealing — using a small number of activities to transform yourself into an interesting person is much less demanding than trying to build a long list of time-consuming commitments. But when I tell the story of relaxed superstars like Olivia, most high schools students balk.

“That’s great for her,” they say. “But there’s nothing in my life that I’m that interested about!”

They then go join the Key Club.

This reaction is based on the common belief that only a few lucky students are born naturally interesting, while everyone else has to prove their worth the hard way – one demanding extracurricular commitment at a time.

But is this true?

In 2001, a research team led by Professor Linda Caldwell of Penn State University, conducted an experiment that effectively put the idea of the naturally interesting student to the test.  They gathered a group of middle school students from four rural Pennsylvania school districts. A subset of these students were randomly selected to receive a six-week training course called TimeWise. The goal of the course was to teach the students to make better use of their free time (their theory was that less bored students are less likely to fall into dangerous behaviors, such as drug use).

One of the lessons, for example, taught students how to balance what they “have to do” with what they “want to do,” while another provided strategies for following up on an idea that seemed interesting.

After the course finished, all of the students were subjected to a battery of tests to assess their interestingness. As Caldwell described the results in a 2004 paper, the group that received the training showed “higher levels of interest (and thus lower levels of boredom) than the [control] group,” they also “scored higher…on initiative…the ability to restructure boring situations…and the ability to plan and make decisions [about their] free time.” They participated in more new and interesting activities than the students in the control group and were overall more happy.

This is an astonishing result.

We tend to think about interestingness as an innate trait possessed by a lucky few, but Caldwell and her team revealed that a half-dozen common-sense lessons were enough to make a significant difference in the measured interestingness of randomly-selected middle school students.

If these basic lessons had such an impact on bored middle schoolers, imagine the change possible for someone committed to the goal of becoming more interesting.

How to Become Interesting

Intrigued by Caldwell’s results, I called her to ask if she could distill some lessons from her research. I wanted her advice for a student hoping to become more interesting.

“You need to be exposed to many things – you should expose yourself even though you might not know if you’ll be interested,” she told me.

“You need some time when you turn off the phone and the instant messenger and take a walk to appreciate the world without something in your ear.”

(This should sound familiar to fans of Ben Casnocha, one of the most interesting people I know.)

In other words, to become more interesting…

1. Do fewer structured activities.
2. Spend more time exploring, thinking, and exposing yourself to potentially interesting things.
3. If something catches your attention, use the abundant free time generated by rule 1 to quickly follow up.

Olivia’s story follows this structure. As a sophomore, she was a believer in rules 1 and 2; she kept her obligations light and maintained an addiction to interesting things. After getting a good grade on a chemistry project on nitrogen in marine habitats, she e-mailed her neighbor on a whim (demonstrating rule 3 in action). “I knew he did something with lobsters,” she recalls, “and thought ‘maybe he would want an unpaid volunteer over the summer.’”

He did. And two years later she won the Jefferson Scholarship.

Pulling The Pieces Together

My argument is simple:

• High school students place too much emphasis on the qualities demonstrated by their activities. In a quest to demonstrate as many good qualities as possible, they end up stressing themselves with unwieldy lists of time-consuming commitments.
• Students like Olivia highlight a different approach. They show that that being interesting can go farther than being widely accomplished. With this in mind, they use activities to build their interestingness – not their credentials – and therefore enjoy happier lives.
• The research of Linda Caldwell supports a powerful corollary: any student can become more interesting – it’s not an innate trait possessed only by a lucky few. The key, roughly speaking, is to allow yourself more time to stare at the clouds, and then be prepared to follow-up when you spot something cool.

These ideas are so important that I dedicate the first half of my new book arguing their validity. I’ll also be returning to this territory over the next few months, as I continue this series on what really makes impressive students impressive. In the meantime, however, you can ease your mind into this counterintuitive conversation with a simple thought: Just because most students follow the same stressful strategy for becoming a standout, doesn’t mean that it’s the only strategy for reaching this goal.

Just ask Olivia, who quipped, when reflecting on her path into UVA: “I feel like I’m the luckiest person in the world.”

(Photo by Greenmonster.)

Study Hacks is switching to an advertising firm that specializes in my type of audience. They want you to consider filling out this short survey to develop a better idea of who you are. Here are two reasons why you should fill out the survey:

1. I’ll give away a free signed book to a randomly selected respondent (the survey asks for your e-mail address expressly and only for the purpose of this drawing).
2.  I give 50% of my ad revenue to charity, and this survey will increase the quality of my ads. Ergo, you’ll be helping charity.

That’s it. Back to our regularly scheduled programming…

Predicting Greatness

The impact of teachers is profound. If you rank the world’s countries by their students’ academic performance, the US is somewhere in the middle. In a 2009 New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell notes that replacing “the bottom six percent to ten percent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality” could be enough to close the gap between our current position and the top ranked countries.

“[Y]our child is actually better off in a ‘bad’ school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher,” Gladwell concludes.

But there’s a problem: “No one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like.”

Or at least, according to Gladwell.

Teach for America, a non-profit that recruits outstanding college graduates to teach in low-income school districts, disagrees. This organization is fanatical about data.  For the past 20 years, they’ve gathered massive amounts of statistics on their teachers in an attempt to figure out why some succeed in the classroom and some fail. They then work backwards from these results to identify what traits best predict a potential recruit’s success.

As Amanda Ripley reports in a comprehensive look inside the Teach For America process, published in the Atlantic Monthly, the results of this outcome-based approach to hiring are “humbling.”

“I came into this with a bunch of theories,” the former head of admissions at Teach for America told Ripley. “I was proven wrong at least as many times as I was validated.”

When Teach for America first started 20 years ago, applicants were subjectively scored by interviewers on 12 general traits, like “communication” ability. (A sample interview question: “What is wind?”)  By contrast, if you were one of the 35,000 students who applied in 2009 (a pool that included 11% of Ivy League seniors), 30 data points, gathered from a combination of questionnaires, demonstrations, and interviews were fed into a detailed quantitative model that returned a hiring recommendation.

This data-driven approach seems to work.  As Ripley reports, in 2007, 24% of Teach for America teachers advanced their students at least one and a half grade levels or more. Two years later, as the organization’s models continued to evolve, this number has almost doubled to 44%.

I’m fascinated by Teach For America for a simple reason: the traits they discovered at the core of great teaching are unmistakably a variant of deliberate practice — not the pure, coach-driven practice of professional athletes and chess grandmasters, but a hearty, adaptable strain that’s applicable to almost any field.

Put another way, these outstanding teachers may have unwittingly cracked the code for generating a remarkable life…

Inside the Classroom of an Outstanding Teacher

In her Atlantic piece, Ripley recounts an afternoon spent in the math classroom of William Taylor, a teacher in southeast Washington D.C. who ranks in the top 5% of all math teachers in the district.

When Taylor enters the classroom his students fall into a strictly-choreographed interaction.

“Good morning,” he calls. “Good morning!” the students answer.

The period begins with Mental Math. Taylor calls out problems which the students answer in their heads. They then write their solutions on orange index cards which they all hold up at the same time.

“If some kids get it wrong, they have not embarrassed themselves,” Ripley notes. But Taylor now knows who needs more attention.

After Mental Math, Taylor teaches the class a new method for long division. The students try the strategy in groups of four, each led by a “team leader” that rotates on a regular basis. (Taylor found that students were more receptive to help from their fellow students.) After having the students try the method on their own, Taylor begins calling them up to the board, selecting names at random to ensure no one is overlooked.

“I try, but I can’t find a child who isn’t talking about math,” Ripley recalls about her afternoon in the classroom,

The class continues with a spirited game of Multiplication Bingo. Before the students leave, they have to answer a final problem on a slip of paper that they hand to Taylor at the door — another method for him to assess who is still struggling with the day’s material.

What Makes Great Teachers Great?

“Strong teachers insist that effective teaching is neither mysterious nor magical,” says Ripley. “It is neither a function of dynamic personality nor dramatic performance.”

Instead, Teach for America has identified the following traits as the most important for high-performing teachers such as Taylor:

1. They set big goals for their students and are perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness.
   (In the Atlantic article, Teach for America’s in-house professor, Steve Farr, noted that when he sets up visits with superstar teachers they often say something like: “You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you — I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure…because I think it’s not working as well as it could.” )
2. They’re obsessed about focusing every minute of classroom time toward student learning.
3. They plan exhaustively and purposefully, “working backward from the desired outcome.”
4. They work “relentlessly”…”refusing to surrender.”
5. They keep students and their families involved in the process.

An expert quoted in the article summarized the findings: “At the end of the day…it’s the mind-set that teachers need — a kind of relentless approach to the problem.”

The first four traits above should sound familiar. Setting big goals, working backwards from results to process, perpetually trying to improve, relentless focus — these sound a lot like the traits of deliberate practice.

Indeed, when selecting teachers for their program, Teach for America’s complex recruiting model identifies graduates who show evidence of having mastered this skill. Two effective predictors of a recruit’s classroom success, for example, are improving a GPA from low to high and demonstrating meaningful “leadership achievement.” That is, improving a 2.0 to a 4.0 is more important then maintaining a 4.0, and doubling a club’s membership is more important than simply being elected president. Teach for America wants signs that you can take a difficult goal and then find a way to make it happen.

A Different Kind of Deliberate Practice

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal estimated that it takes around 500,000 hours of deliberate practice for an NFL team to make it through a season. To put that in perspective, that’s about 32 hours of hard work for each foot the ball moves down the field. This effort, of course, is carefully controlled and coached — for example, the article quotes the Colt’s defensive end, Keyunta Dawson, talking about the intense training needed to make split second decisions based on subtle positioning of the head or foot of the opposing lineman.

“I thought college was a grind,”  said Dawson. “But this is a job.”

When we think about deliberate practice, we tend to think about examples like Dawson, or chess grandmasters, or piano virtuosos being painstakingly coached through a difficult, but well-established, path to mastery.

The examples of this process playing out in classrooms, however, have a different feel. William Taylor doesn’t have a coach or decades of well-established training methodology to draw on.

His approach is more free-form. He started with a clear goal — when he presented a concept, he wanted every student to understand it — and then became obsessed with its achievement. His Mental Math exercise, his random selection of students to do problems at the board, the “exit slips” he collected at the end of the period — these activities evolved from a drive to constantly assess his classes’ comprehension.

Over time, the extraneous was excised from his classroom schedule (he developed hand signals for the students to use to indicate a need for the bathroom — a way to eliminate the wasted time and distraction of calling on them). He exhaustively plans his lessons, and then ruthlessly culls or modifies any piece that isn’t effective.

“I found that the kids were not hard…[i]t was explaining the information to them that was hard,” Taylor recalls about his first year. He kept working until he cracked that hard puzzle.

Freestyle Deliberate Practice

Here are the main components of Taylor’s approach to deliberate practice:

1. Build an obsession with a clear goal.
2. Work backwards from the goal to plan your attack.
3. Expend hard focus toward this goal every day.
4. Ruthlessly evaluate and modify your approach to remove what doesn’t work and improve what does.

Let’s call this approach freestyle deliberate practice to differentiate it from the more structured strain written about in the research literature. Here’s my argument: for most fields, freestyle deliberate practice is the key to building a rare and valuable skill. 

Most people fall short of this standard — even those who are highly-motivated to get better. From my experience, two obstacles trap people at an “acceptable plateau” of performance. First, we’re uncomfortable blowing up our assumptions and ruthlessly evaluating our approach. It’s much easier to choose a plan that feels right, and then follow it blindly. Second, exhaustive focus, on a daily basis, is hard. It’s not necessarily hard to do — we’re only talking a couple hours out of the day — but in an age of constant electronic distraction, many have lost their ability for hard focus.

Freestyle deliberate practice is not a clearly-structured system that you can plug into your schedule and follow mechanically toward results. It’s demanding and personal — touching upon the deepest levels of your character. It requires you to get down in the sweaty trenches of effort and attack short-term projects with an almost animalistic passion.

“Damnit,” you’ll cry, “good is not good enough…if I can’t make this so excellent you’ll weep, than it’s not worth even trying.”

Fortunately, this process also feels great. Not the weak, squirt of dopamine from an interesting Twitter exchange, type of pleasure, but the deep down in your bones, captial-Q, Pirsig-esque appreciation of Quality experienced by master craftsmen throughout history.

I’ll end with a simple question: If you’re interested in building a remarkable life — be it as a student or industry veteran — what would it mean to integrate freestyle deliberate practice into your life? This is a question I’ll certainly be thinking (and writing) about in the weeks to follow.

(Photo by Daniel Greene)

Deliberate Practice in Unconventional Places

I’m not the only one with deliberate practice on my mind. A variety of bloggers have been exploring this powerful idea…

• Justine Musk published a fascinating two-part series on deliberate practice and the art of fiction writing. (If you’re one of the millions who dream of writing a novel one day, you must subscribe to Justine’s Tribal Writer blog.)
• Penelope Trunk posted on the role of deliberate practice in entrepreneurship. As a former professional athlete, she knows what she’s talking about when it comes to hard practice.
• Jonah Lehrer discusses Magnus Carlsen, who, at the age of 15, is the youngest chess player to reach a number one world ranking. Does Carlsen debunk our assumption that practice trumps innate ability? Not so, responds Lehrer. Carlsen uses computer chess programs to increase the rate at which he accumulates deliberate practice.
• Scott Young describes an interesting philosophy for keeping deliberate practice central to your daily experience: live on the edge of incompetence.
• Dan Pink points out Harrison Ford’s surprising obsession with mastery.

Do You Love What You Do? If So, I Want to Talk with You.

You may have noticed by now my infatuation with the science of career satisfaction. I want to temper all this fancy lab learning with some good ‘ole fashioned on the ground reporting.

With this in mind, if you’re someone who loves what you do — the type of person people point to and say “that’s what I want my life to be like” — please consider sending me an e-mail at author [at] calnewport.com.

I want to hear your story.

Use the Comment Thread of this Post to Ask Me Anything!

Speaking of e-mail, if you have a question, comment, or devastating insult to hurl my direction, and you don’t want to wait the 1 - 2 weeks it can sometimes take me to get through my blog e-mails, leave it as a comment on this post. For the next few days I’ll check and respond to these comments regularly.

(Photo by envios)

A Bold Decision

At the end of his first semester at Penn, a student whom I’ll call Daniel was disappointed to learn that his GPA was a lackluster 2.95. Following the Study Hacks orthodoxy that study habits should be based on evidence — not random decisions or peer pressure — Daniel asked himself a crucial question: What are the better students doing that I’m not?

When he surveyed his classmates, he noted something interesting: “the high-scoring kids weren’t on Facebook.”

Emboldened by this observation, Daniel decided to do the unthinkable: he deactivated his Facebook account.

His GPA jumped to an exceptional 3.95.

In this post, I want to share the details of Daniel’s story — revealing what actually happens when you quit one of the most ubiquitous technologies of your generation. I’ll then make the argument that although most students don’t need to leave Facebook, every student should at least give the idea serious consideration.

The Reality of a Post-Facebook Existence

Daniel’s decision to leave Facebook wasn’t easy.

“I was worried that I would be out of the loop,” he admits. “That I would miss event invitations, not know what was going on with my friends, or be able to effectively lead the organizations I run.”

What really happened?

“Well, as expected, I did miss some invitations to events,” Daniel recalls. “But my friends would forward me invites, and I never missed anything crucial.”

“I also didn’t lose any friends, or even really lose touch with anyone. I still had e-mail and a phone, and I see these people every day.”

Daniel’s mom, not surprisingly, was “ecstatic” about the decision, while many of his friends were shocked. “After my deactivation,” he recalls, “I started getting texts that demanded: WHY DID YOU DEFRIEND ME!? WHERE IS YOUR FACEBOOK!?”

But pretty soon people stopped caring. They had their own lives to lead.

The Monastic Pleasure of Post-Facebook Studying

In contrast to the mild negative effects to his social life, the benefits to Daniel’s academic life were significant.

He was initially worried about “symptom substitution” — the idea that with Facebook gone he would simply find another online distraction to fuel his procrastination.

But this didn’t happen.

“After clicking around the web for a bit, I would become incredibly bored,” Daniel recalls. There’s something about the “endless trickle of messages” served up by Facebook that proves especially addictive. Without that steady supply of attention crack, it became easy for Daniel to “swear off the Internet.”

Consider, for example, a calculus final he faced during his first Facebook-free semester.

“With the time and concentration I regained, I was able to hunt down and complete problems from 20 different practice final exams, and then get tutoring on any issues that remained.”

The average grade on the exam was a 34. Daniel scored an 80.

He has since persuaded several friends to follow his lead in deactivating their accounts, and they’re enjoying similar boosts to their performance.

A Different Way to Think About the Technology in Your Life

I recently received an e-mail from a high school student who estimated that her Internet-obsession was slowing down her work by “a factor of 5.” When I suggested that she ask her parents to unplug the modem until her homework was done, she balked.

“I can’t do that,” she exclaimed. “I have to hand in assignments for one of my classes online, and there are really good web-based dictionaries I use for my Spanish homework.”

Take a moment to ponder this reaction.

This student was experiencing extreme suffering and poor performance because of the Internet. Yet, she judged the trivial inconvenience of plugging in a modem before submitting a completed assignment, or using a slightly less effective paper dictionary for her Spanish homework, as outweighing the exceptional benefits that would be yielded by going offline.

To me, this reaction captures the problem with ubiquitous technologies, like Facebook, that make claims on your attention. To many people, the burden of proof falls on the Luddite — you better have a pretty damn good reason for eschewing this technology! Like the girl from above, or Daniel’s shocked classmates, any inconvenience generated by opting out of a popular technology can be a sufficient argument for maintaining the status quo.

I argue the you should reverse this logic: before adopting a technology that can make a regular claim on your attention,  insist that its benefits unambiguously outweigh its negatives.

It’s important that I’m clear: for many students, this assessment would lead them to keep Facebook in their lives — they get social and entertainment benefits from the service, and because they have no problem turning it off while working, they suffer few negative consequences.

For students like Daniel, however, who discover that the technology is wreaking serious havoc, there should be no hesitation to quit.

This same philosophy led many professional thinkers and writers, including Alan Lightman,  Donald Knuth,  Neal Stephenson, and Leo Babauta to quit e-mail. In their line of work, the benefits of e-mail were swamped by the negative effects. Their criteria was not, “is there anything bad that would happen if I quit e-mail?”, it was, instead, “do the benefits outweigh the negatives?”

My bottom line here is simple: Technologies are great, but if you want to keep control of your time and attention have the self-confidence to insist that they earn their keep before you make them a regular part of your life.

(Image by Etienne)

The Great Career

Laura loves what she does. To many people, myself included (I’ve known her for the past five years), she represents the Platonic ideal of  a great career.

Laura  is a database whiz. Companies hire her to wrangle their most gnarly data into streamlined structures. If you’re lucky enough to engage Laura, she’ll assemble a handpicked team of programmers and descend on your office for up to six months. She’ll then take your generous check back to her charming Jamaica Plain bungalow and set about finding novel ways to spend it.

She allows months to pass between projects — the paydays being ample enough to buy her as much downtime as she wants. She has used this time, among other pursuits, to earn a pilots license, learn to scuba dive, and travel through Asia.

In several earlier posts, I argued that mastering a rare and valuable skill is the key to generating a remarkable life — much more important than following your “passions” or matching your career (or academic major) to your personality.  It occurred to me, however, that to continue this discussion, we need to better understand our goal; that is, we need to figure out what exactly makes a remarkable life remarkable.

In this post, I’m going to tackle this question, using Laura as our running example of someone who has achieved the end result we have in mind…

The Introspection Principle

If you want to quickly assess how Americans think about the search for the “right” job, spend a few minutes browsing the career guide bestseller list at Amazon.com. For example, when I last checked…

• The number two bestselling guide was a book titled Career Fitness Program. The first step of its three step program was a “personal assessment.”
• The number three bestselling guide was Nicholas Lore’s Pathfinder, which “leads readers though the process of deciding exactly what they want to do for a living and finding a way to make it happen.”
• The book in the number five slot, Career Match, notes in its description that those “whose careers fit their passions and personalities” find them to be a “source of great satisfaction and success.”

Sense a pattern?

These bestsellers are founded on the belief that matching your work to personality traits and interests is the key to finding a job you love. I call this the introspection principle because it elevates the act of self-reflection to be the important for making big life decisions.

This principle extends beyond career issues. It’s also at the core of popular advice for new college students. For example:

• The description for Patrick Combs’ ubiquitous Major in Success (he’s sold over 120,000 copies) emphasizes that students should choose a major that “suits their interests.”
• The cover of Lind Andrew’s canonical How to Choose a College Major instructs students to “use your own interests and talents to find the perfect major.”

The introspection principle is so ingrained that we forget to think of it as a hypothesis that needs to be tested. If you’ll indulge my heretical-side, however, I think it’s worth taking this idea out for a spin.

My question is simple: when we study people like Laura who love what they do, is an introspection-driven match between their work and their personality the explanation for their happiness? And if it’s not, what is?

To answer this question, we can turn to 30 years of cutting-edge scientific research…

The Surprising Science of Human Motivation

As Dan Pink recounts in the introduction to Drive, his new book about workplace motivation, our understanding of what compels people to action was upended in the late 1940s. Before this point, conventional wisdom said that we’re motivated by rewards (think B.F. Skinner and his rats). The more we are rewarded, the more fired up we get about our work.

Then Harry Harlow, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, began giving puzzles to the rhesus monkeys in his primate laboratory.  He noticed a curious effect: when he rewarded the monkeys for solving the puzzle, they became slower at the task.

Twenty years later, Edward Deci, then a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon, tested this effect in humans, and found a similar result: the presence of cash made them worse at solving creative puzzles.

This kicked off three decades of intense research into the sources of human motivation.

Eventually, Deci, working with his longtime collaborator Richard Ryan, corralled the diversity of (sometimes contradictory) research on the topic into a single, over-arching model called Self-Determination Theory (SDT). This model has been extensively validated and summarizes, to the best of our current understanding, what can make someone love what they do. (See this 2000 paper by Ryan and Deci, from the journal Psychological Inquiry, for a good overview).

At a high level, SDT makes a simple claim:

To be happy, your work must fulfill three universal psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

In more detail…

• Autonomy refers to control over how you fill your time. As Deci puts it, if you have a high degree of autonomy, then “you endorse [your] actions at the highest level of reflection.”
• Competence refers to mastering unambiguously useful things. As the psychologist Robert White opines, in the wonderfully formal speak of the 1950s academic, humans have a “propensity to have an effect on the environment as well as to attain valued outcomes within it.”
• Relatedness refers to a feeling of connection to others. As Deci pithily summarizes: “to love and care, and to be loved and cared for.”

SDT explains why Laura’s career resonates with us. She clearly has autonomy (she handpicks projects and runs them on her own schedule) and competence (she’s highly regarded and compensated for her expert ability). She also has relatedness, both from her close-knit teams and her ability to build a schedule that dedicates extended amounts of time to friends and family.

Falsifying the Introspection Principle

SDT answers our original question: Is the introspection principle correct? They key feature of the three SDT need are their universality — they span both differing career fields and cultures. Put another way: three decades of research has shown that the traits that make us happy with our work have little to do with our personality or so-called “passions.”

Similar conclusions apply to related decisions, such as choosing your college major. Forget trying to divine some perfect match, and instead choose a major for your own reasons — not pressure from your parents or a misguided view on what’s “practical” — and then strive to become excellent at it. As I argued before, your love of the subject will grow with your sense of autonomy and competence.

For those who sweat this style of decision, this research should provide relief. There’s no reason to lose sleep over whether you’re “passionate” about your major, or if your job is what you really want to be doing with your life. Working right trumps finding the right work.

It’s to this new goal, “working right,” that we turn our attention next…

Working Right

Research reveals that autonomy, competence, and relatedness are the key to loving what you do. So how do you get them? There are different answers to this question, but the strategy that I keep emphasizing on Study Hacks has two clear steps:

1. Master a skill that is rare and valuable.
2. Cash in the career capital this generates for the right rewards. 

The world doesn’t owe you happiness. Your boss has no reason to let you choose your own projects, or spend one week out of every four writing a novel at your beach house. These rewards are valuable. To earn them, you must accumulate your own career capital by mastering a skill that’s equally rare and valuable.

It’s important, however, that you cash in this capital, once accumulated, for the right rewards. The word “right,” in this context, is defined by the traits of SDT. In other words, once you have something valuable to offer, use it to gain as much autonomy, competence, and relatedness as you can possibly cram into your life.

This explains, for example, why there are so many CEOs in the world who are excellent at what they do, but also stressed, anxious, and unhappy. They generated career capital by becoming excellent at management, but instead of cashing it in to satisfy the needs that we know would make them happy, they instead bartered for increased prestige and income. The strict demands of the job sap their felling of autonomy, while their sense of relatedness dissipates with the late night work binges.

When we return to Laura, we see that she’s a perfect example of the Study Hacks system in action. In the 1990s, she started working for a major technology company. She noticed that the giant databases at the core of the company’s business were increasingly crucial to its success. She focused on mastering these systems. As the technology boom continued, her skill became increasingly rare and valuable. Instead of cashing in the capital this generated to become an overworked VP, she instead exchanged it for her freelance venture — an approach designed to maximize the autonomy, competence, and relatedness in her life.

Back to the Grandmasters

Now that we’ve established how a rare and valuable skill can be used to generate a remarkable life, we can return, in the next articles in this series, to the topic promised at the end of my recent post on deliberate practice: the details of building this mastery.

Stay tuned…

(Photo by dio5)

Over 50 of you responded to my call to donate money to earthquake relief in Haiti. We ended up raising over $4700.  As I mentioned in my replies to the contributors, I’m lucky to have such an exceptional group of readers.

Here are the results of the signed book giveaway contest:

• Allen won a signed copy of the rare yellow-covered version of the red book for donating $500 — the most out of all of the contributors.
• Shruti won a signed copy for having her name drawn at random.

(Both winners have been notified by e-mail.)

We’ll return later this week back to our regularly-scheduled programming (I’m working on the next post in my series on the mechanics of constructing a remarkable life), but I want to thank you one last time for your support.

Update: As of 8:30 EST we’ve raised over $2500! You guys are amazing.

“What I’ve seen here in Haiti, I’ve never seen before.”

This is from the Twitter feed of Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medial correspondent, who is reporting from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He’s seen a lot of tough situations in his career, so this statement means something.

This morning I donated $137, the amount of my most recent advertising check for Study Hacks,  to Partners in Health, a Boston-based aid organization that has a strong presence in Haiti.

Here’s a screenshot of the confirmation e-mail:

I’m asking you to also donate to this organization.

They have great infrastructure in place in Haiti, including over 120 doctors and 500 nurses, longterm relationships with the Haitian people, and an obsession with results. A donation to Partners in Health will have an immediate impact on real people who are really suffering right now.

Click on this link to give.

If you do donate, consider forwarding me a copy of your confirmation e-mail. There are two reasons for this request. First, keeping a running total will help me convince more Study Hacks readers to follow your example. Second, I’m giving away two signed copies of the rare yellow-covered version of my red book. One copy will go to the reader who donates the most money, and the other will go to a reader chosen at random.

And I’ll leave it at that.

(Photo by Damon Winter/The New York Times)

From 30 Minutes of Studying to a 4.0

I recently received an e-mail from Ricardo, a sophomore majoring in computer science at the University of Maryland.  For the past three semesters he has maintained a 4.0 GPA — a feat he accomplished “without stressing at all.” At the core of his success is an unconventional technique that makes use of a wiki, his iPhone, and my infamous stealth studying philosophy. This technique is so effective that he dedicates only 30 minutes to review on the day before his computer science exams — yet still aces them.

In this post, I detail Ricardo’s method, including step by step instructions and screenshots…

Stealth Studying 2.0

Back in the early days of Study Hacks, I published a popular article titled The Art of Stealth Studying: How to Earn a 4.0 With Only 1.0 Hours of Work.  At its core was a simple idea:

If you can…slice and dice [test preparation] into a large number of small, 5-10 minute chunks, integrated naturally into your daily routine…it will feel to you as if you are doing no studying at all.

In researching the red book, I met a pair of straight-A students who used this approach to eliminate “studying” (i.e., large amounts of review in the days leading up to an exam) from their schedule altogether. The stealth studying article was my attempt to bring this wildly unconventional take on academic work to the attention of a wider audience.

I recommended that students immediately process their lecture notes into small, question-based study guides, and then study from these while walking between classes. These quick bursts, I argued, when spread out over an entire semester, can eliminate the need for long study sessions.

Ricardo took this basic idea, and then added a high-tech twist.

In more detail, he did the following:

1. He created a free wiki using PBworks.
2. For each course, he created a page on the wiki for the next exam.
3. After each lecture, he put aside time to add the relevant notes to his wiki.  To do so, he would create a subpage for each topic, and then list the main points, add snippets of sample code, or summarize any other information relevant for the exam.
4. Following the stealth studying philosophy, he would then access his wiki using his iPhone while walking to class and waiting for the lecture to begin, doing quick bursts of review. (PBworks plays nicely with iPhones, making it easy to browse the wiki on the run.)

These quick bursts of review, conducted throughout the term, prevented the need for long stretches of studying. Ricardo admits that on the day before an exam, he might take “30 minutes to look over my wiki, do a few sample problems that the professor posted, and then get a good night’s rest.”

His 4.0 over three semesters testifies to the surprising reality that this approach can really work.

In More Detail…

Let’s fill in some more details of what this strategy looks like in practice. I asked Ricardo to send me some screenshots of his system as used to study for CS 131, a class in object-oriented programming.

Below is the page he setup for the first midterm in the course (click here for a larger version):

There’s nothing flashy going on here. He links to a subpage for each topic that might be covered on the midterm. On average, his professor covers one topic per class, so Ricardo was adding pages at the rate of one or two per week.

Below is one of these topic subpages (click here for a larger version):

Notice that Ricardo uses basic formatting to keep the pages readable when accessed on his iPhone.

To study from the subpage above, he would convert each line into a question on the fly. For example, seeing the term “Binary Search Algorithm” on his screen, he would turn away from the screen and try to recreate the bullet points that follow from memory.

And that’s it.

This procedure assumes, of course, that you’ve already mastered the fundamentals of being an efficient student. For example, that you’re trying to really understand the information as its presented in class — raising your hand to ask questions when confused. (If you daydream through lecture, you won’t be able to create an effective study guide.) And that you have enough control over your schedule to ensure that these pages get made right away. (For students who deploy an autopilot schedule — or something similar — this should pose no problem.)

Beyond Computer Science

What strikes me about Ricardo’s approach to computer science was his willingness to start from scratch. The details of his system might not work for you, but the big idea of reducing a problem to its basics, and then coming up with an original strategy, is applicable to many situations.

Next time you face an energy-sapping academic, extracurricular, or even professional challenge, take a step back to ask two simple questions:

What do I really need to accomplish here to succeed? Ignoring the conventional approaches, what would be the least painful, most effective possible way to get this done?