Earlier this week, I stumbled across the following letter to the editor, published in the New York Times. It was written in response to an editorial, printed on June 30th, about tackling the binge drinking problem on college campuses.

To the Editor:

The solution to binge drinking problems on campuses is simple: college curriculums need to be more rigorous. If college programs required their students to put in a significant number of hours per week doing work related to their classes, campus drinking would soon find itself limited to one or two nights a week.

Furthermore, those few nights a week would be more moderate, since the students would drink knowing that they needed to get up in the morning and keep hacking away at that thermodynamics problem set.

I suspect that one of the main reasons students who aren’t in college drink less than college students is that they have to get up in the morning and go to work at a real job, where they are accountable for their behavior.

Caroline Figgatt
Munich, July 1, 2009

The writer is a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

What caught my attention, of course, was the biographical sentence at the end of the letter. Only an MIT student would think that the answer to a social problem is to work people too hard to have time to develop the problem.

At first, I found this note amusing, but this soon gave away to a darker thought: why do schools like MIT allow this type of mindset to not only exist, but become the norm? If a large percentage of the student population here were becoming physically injured in unsafe campus buildings, or falling ill due to a disease outbreak, the administration would rush to stamp out the problem. But the issues of the mind that are common here — unhappiness, detachment, chronic stress — are viewed with a tinge of nostalgia, or, secretly, approved as part of what makes MIT unique.

Based on the daily e-mails I receive from students across the country, it seems like this indifference is endemic. Campuses might invest in mental health programs to catch the worst of the sufferers when they make their fall, but there’s little effort to prevent these falls in the first place, or, more importantly, impede the slide into tolerable unhappiness that many students silently accept.

I’m curious about your thoughts. What’s your experience with stress on your college campus, and how your school handles the issue?

In Praise of Grittiness

While on vacation, I read two books. The first was Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, which has been causing an idealistic stir among the usually cynical intelligentsia. The second was Winifred Gallagher’s Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. Both intrigued me, though I’ll admit that I’m still processing the ideas. You’ll probably hear more about them from me at some point in the future.

Today, however, I want to briefly mention one piece of social psychology research, described by Gallagher in Rapt, that resonates well with our conversation here at Study Hacks.

Gallagher cites the research of Angela Duckworth, a psychologist from Penn. Since 2005, Duckworth has been studying a trait called “grit,” which she describes as follows:

Grit entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress. The gritty individual approaches achievement as a marathon…

She maintains that grit is “essential to high achievement.”

Quoted by Gallagher, Duckworth also notes: “We don’t give enough attention to the ‘effort’ and ‘duration’ pieces of accomplishment…Life is relatively short, so don’t labor under the delusion that you can keep switching your focus from goal to goal and get anywhere.”

But what if you’re not sure what goal is right for you?

“[Eventually] perhaps you should settle down with the best thing you’ve found, and focus on it,” she concludes.

As usual, there’s also a nice selection of peer-reviewed research to back up these ideas. In a 2007 paper, for example, titled Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals, Duckworth, along with collaborators from the University of Michigan and West Point, demonstrate that grit plays an important role in achievements spanning from becoming spelling bee champion, to Ivy League GPA, to overall educational attainment in life.

Grit vs. Grind

The idea of grit is not new to Study Hacks readers. With sufficient squinting of the eyes, it can be found at the core of the Steve Martin Method, my pleas for more boredom tolerance, the A* strategy, and, most recently, my coronation of hard focus, just to name the most obvious examples. In short, I’ve informally observed this trait to be important for achievement for quite a while. It’s only now, however, that I’ve learned that (at least some) researchers agree.

That being said, I must admit that reading Duckworth’s articles, with their straightforward praise of gutting it out (”his or her advantage is stamina,” she said, describing a gritty personality), inspired a tinge of doubt: What separates the lauding of grit from the lauding of the grind lifestyle? This question is crucial to our mission here, as, of course, being happy and low-stressed is one of the key pillars of my philosophy.

After some thought, I arrived at an answer:

• The grind lifestyle involves filling most days with an unhealthily large amount of work. It treats the overwork itself as the goal, not its results. This chronic overwork, in turn, generates stress and deep procrastination.
• Grit, on the other hand, is about persistently accomplishing a reasonable amount of hard work. For example, consider my book writing. I spend 1 - 3 hours a day, most days, on this task. I’ve been doing this off and on for six years now. These are hard hours, requiring real hard focus. But they’re not many hours — so they’re not a source of overwork or stress in my life.

A Familiar Mantra

This distinction highlights the central message of the grit philosophy: maintain a small number of things that you return to, and do hard work on, again and again, over a long period of time. Choose things that actually interest you, but don’t obsesses over choosing the perfect things — as perfect goals, like perfect majors, probably don’t exist. Keep this hard work quarantined to a reasonable number of focused hours each day, and harness the rest of the time to recharge, relax, and, in general, enjoy life. Or, to put it in a more familar wording: Do Less. Do Better. Know Why.

Sounds about right to me…

Graduation Wisdom

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

The Diligence Hypothesis

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

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

When you dig deeper, the answers often turns on some vague belief that the more hard things they do, the more impressive they’ll be to potential employers. I call this the diligence hypothesis. At its core is the idea that proving you can handle difficult workloads is a desirable trait.

Here’s the problem, I’ve never met someone in a position to making hiring decisions who is particularly interested in this trait. Almost without exception, they say they are most concerned with:

• Where you went to school.
• Your grades.
• Your relevant work experience.

Employers don’t see your academic schedule and aren’t particularly interested in your extracurricular activities. With this in mind, the bulk of the pain suffered by students with absurd course loads, three majors, and ten club memberships, is unnecessary.

The Ability Hypothesis

This doesn’t mean that there’s nothing you can do outside of your grades and summer internships to help your employment chances. It’s just that surviving a large volume of commitments is not a particular effective choice to help you stand out. I want to propose a different approach for adding distinction to your resume: becoming exceptionally good at something.

Here’s the important part: what you become exceptionally good at does not have to be directly related to your desired job. People are impressed by a general capacity to be exceptional. We’re drawn to stars. We admire stars. We believe they can replicate this feat in other areas.

I call this the ability hypothesis. It tells us, for example, that being a star in your major, and winning tons of awards and grants, can really help your job prospects, even if your major is unrelated to the job. Likewise, if you’ve written a book or built up a large organization, people will respond positively. This makes you seem like the type of person who can make big things happen once employed.

Surviving a tough double major, or taking chemistry, bio, and calculus in the same semester, on the other hand, just confirms that you’re a hard worker. This is less rare. And the reward to effort ratio is probably not worth it.

The good news, of course, is that putting in an A* effort is much more rewarding and much less stressful than difficulty-centric achievement. You’ve heard this message time and again here at Study Hacks. I’m just hoping to more directly connect this crucial concept to your prospects beyond college graduation.

I recently began reading Haruki Murakami’s excellent mini-memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. If your life requires a non-trivial amount of creative work, I highly recommend this quick read.

Today, I wanted to focus on a few quotes that resonated with my thinking. On page 77, Murakami remarks:

If I’m asked what the next most important quality is for a novelist, that’s easy too: focus — the ability to concentrate all your limited talents on whatever’s critical at the moment. Without that you can’t accomplish anything of value.

You’ve heard me make this argument before. But Murakami takes the idea somewhere interesting when he then notes:

Fortunately [sustaining focus for a long period of time] can be acquired and sharpened through training.

His suggestion is to “sit down every day at your desk and train yourself to focus on one point.” To Marukami, training to write for four to five hours each morning was no different than training for the marathon that he’s run every year for the past two decades.

From Murakami to the Classroom

These quotes popped to mind when I received an e-mail this morning from a worried student.

“I’m in an environment that I love, doing what I want to be doing for the rest of my life,” she began.

“But I’m struggling to stay afloat…I try to stay engaged…I schedule time blocks in my day planner, but just ignore them and do other things.”

“I’m having a really, really hard time not putting everything off until the last minute before their due.”

To me, this student is like Murakami’s untrained novelist. School work, like any work that requires demanding thinking, is tiring. After a grace period of maybe 20 - 30 minutes, your mind starts to disengage. In the red book, I compare the sensation to a weight descending inside your skull. Your energy fades and you begin to experience a desperate craving for novel stimulation. Nothing in the world seems more tempting than to go seek such stimulation — to check your e-mail, or sift through your Facebook feed like a hyper-extroverted gold prospector.

Hard Focus

To succeed as a student (or a novelist) you have to fight that feeling and keep working. I call this ability hard focus.

Our student from above probably lacks hard focus muscles. She has no training in keeping her concentration locked even after resistance builds. And because of this, she’s collapsing well short of the finish line in the mental marathons she needs to run as an upper-level student.

Fortunately, as Marukami explained, this deficiency can be remedied in the same way that a runner builds his endurance: you have to try to push yourself, each day, a little farther than is comfortable. Over time, your threshold raises.

My Marathon Training

Consider my own example. I’m in the middle of a challenge that might scare most students in my position: I’m writing a doctoral dissertation and a book simultaneously. (Literally: my thesis and manuscript are due within a week of each other.)

This requires, on average, 4 - 6 hours of hard focus (split about evenly between the two projects) per day, five days per week.

I could not have pulled this off five years ago. But in the intervening half decade, I’ve been pushing hard to expand my hard focus capacity. As my graduate student experience progressed, I systematically increased the amount of time I would force myself to work continuously without a break to seek unrelated stimulation. This culminated in my current schedule in which I write for 2 - 3 hours, take a break for lunch, e-mail, and exercise, and then work on my thesis for 2 - 3 hours, before finishing for the day.

My life right now is not easy. And you’ll have to ask me in September if my training was sufficient to get me all the way to the finish line. (I don’t like to mention my challenges publicly because I’m superstitious and feel like its taunting the Gods. I made a reluctant exception for this article because I think the bigger point is so important.) But for now, it’s not overwhelming. Like the well-trained marathoner at the 19th mile marker, I’ve built up the required muscle mass to keep moving at a good pace.

Conclusion

These thoughts all lead to a simple conclusion. When assessing your progress on producing things of real value (the best path to building a rewarding and well-rewarded life), consider your own capacity for hard focus. Most important accomplishments boil down to this single, often overlooked ability.

Academic Hell

Last December, I received an urgent e-mail from a reader whom I’ll call Alice. At the time, she was halfway through her sophomore year at one of the country’s best known public universities.

“I definitely need advice about switching to a zen valedictorian lifestyle,” she began.

As the e-mail continued, I learned that Alice had entered college as a pre-med major because, in her words: “I considered it a ‘difficult,’ technical major and thought it would be a safe option.”

As Study Hacks readers know, such a poor justification for your major is a recipe for deep procrastination. Sure enough, Alice was soon struggling. To compensate, she decided to switch majors. This time she chose a double concentration in business administration and economics — once again driven by her quest for something that was “difficult” and “safe.”

Not surprisingly, she fared no better with this new direction. By the first semester of her sophomore year, life became grim.

“I would go to the main library on campus and find myself unable to focus,” she recalled. “I would read passively for about 2 hours, check Facebook numerous times, check my cellphone for text messages, or stare at a study guide until I thought I ‘knew it’. ”

“Everything was basically going downhill.”

Alice eventually fell “far, far behind” in her classes.

“I was taking 17 units and felt like I was in academic hell,” she recalls.

Eventually, things got so bad that Alice had to withdraw for the remainder of the semester. When she wrote me, a few weeks before the new semester began, she was worried about her impending return. She didn’t want to repeat her past mistakes.

My Advice to Alice

I didn’t want to overwhelm Alice, so I extracted from the Study Hacks philosophy a few simple suggestions

1. Choose a major you really like. There’s no such thing as a “safe” major. You’re always better off sparkling in a major you love than forcing yourself through an econ major because it impresses your dad.
2. Choose courses you really like. Keep a normal to light course load, and use the abundant free time this generates to kick ass (i.e., become an A* student).
3. Limit your extracurriculars to one or two things. Make them things you love. Focus on them exclusively for the remainder of your time at college.
4. Use efficient, tested study strategies. Refuse to simply “work” until you feel done.

“Thank you so much for your advice,” she responded. “I can’t wait to implement it.”

A couple weeks ago, near the end of her first semester back on campus, Alice wrote me to report on how things had gone…

Alice’s Turnaround

Returning to campus this past winter, Alice tackled her deep procrastination head on. Her first step was to drop her hated business and economics major. She replaced it, instead, with something chosen purely for its intrinsic interest: a double-major in political economy and political science.

(I would have preferred a single major, but at least these two majors are highly correlated and therefore overlap in course requirements. Heeding my advice, she did drop the ethnic studies minor she had briefly considered adding.)

She also revamped her academic schedule.

“I spent a great deal of time picking what I considered to be the easiest possible course schedule,” she said. “Three history courses and a physical science course.”

The light course load immediately reduced her stress and gave her the opportunity to try out the A* approach to academics.

“It ended up working out really well,” she reports. “I was interested in my courses and forced myself to speak out in lecture, even if it was in front of 200 people.”

“Asking questions was nerve-wracking as hell, but my professors remembered me. My African American history professor, for example, told me I was the only student in his class who was ‘really that engaged and very on top of things’ and my American history professor told me I was one of her brightest students.”

Alice received an A and an A- in those classes, respectively, and she did it without hating her work.

Aiding those efforts was a renewed commitment to the straight-A method.

“I employed your ESS method and began my papers ridiculously early,” she said “I also used a paper research database for two research papers and received solid A’s on both.”

“I hate to admit it but I didn’t feel bad when my classmates were complaining about getting B+’s on those papers”.

“I employed the morse code method for my readings, the textbook method to simplify my studying for my physical science course, and even took the time to create those 3-minute outlines inside my blue books.”

“Small changes that had an incredible impact.”

On the extracurricular front, she promptly quit the IM soccer team and resigned her position with a campus fashion magazine. (”I would never have done this before,” she told me.)

This left her extracurricular time free to focus on the squash team and her job as a writing tutor. As predicted, the increased focus on a small number of activities not only reduced stress but also increased her impressiveness.

“Having more time to spend on squash meant I was able to run the team better and I ended up organizing the team’s first trip to Nationals,” she reported.

“And having more time to spend on tutoring meant I was better able to help my tutees and devise strategies to help them overcome their writing woes. Many of them who had started the semester with C’s in their writing courses ended the semester with A’s.”

These results didn’t go unrewarded.

“My supervisor noticed the impact I had on my students,” she said. “He called me one of their ‘best and brightest’ and offered me a paid position in the fall — an honor given only to the top 5 to 10% of all campus tutors.”

Conclusion

Not everything is perfect for Alice. She did much better this semester, but did not score the perfect straight A’s she desired (the science course, she now admits, was a mistake). Her recent e-mail included a collection fresh questions about how to continue polishing her student skills (it addressed, for example, some issues with her autopilot schedule).

But the big picture gains cannot be ignored. Alice did so poorly during the fall that she had to withdraw. She hated her major and could barely force herself to work — often waiting until the last possible minute. She was constantly behind and always stressed.

By embracing all three components of our philosophy to do less, do better, and know why, she experienced an amazing turnaround — transitioning from academic hell to the life of a happy campus star.

If you’re really suffering through your college experience, consider Alice’s example. She’s proof that major improvements to both quality of life and performance can be achieved fast.

(Photo by laughlin)

Here’s what happens, without exception, at the end of my normal work day.

First, I make sure my master task lists are up to date. During the day I tend to collect todos in a text file on my computer desktop because it’s fast and easy. I also have a small spiral notebook that I use to capture things when I’m away from my desk. (I always have this with me!) I transfer everything new from these collection bins into my master task lists.

I then read over these lists in their entirety. If something pops out as being somewhat urgent, I set its due date for the near future. Because I use Google Tasks, this means it will show up on my calendar as well. I do this review every day so that I trust that if I put something on a task list, it won’t be forgotten. Without this trust, the tasks would still percolate around my brain.

Next, I review my calendar for the next two weeks. I confirm what appointments and deadlines are coming up.

Then, I review my plan.txt file where I keep my unstructured plan for the week. I often add a little annotation about what got done that day and how I will revise the weekly plan for the remaining days (if needed).

Finally — and I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit this — I close down my computer and say the magic phrase: “schedule shutdown, complete.”

Here’s my rule: After I’ve uttered the magic phrase, if a work-related worry pops to mind, I always answer it with the following thought process:

1. I said the termination phrase.
2. I wouldn’t have said this phrase if I hadn’t checked over all of my tasks, my calendar, and my weekly plan and decided that everything was captured and I was on top of everything.
3. Therefore, there is no need to worry.

What I don’t do is think through the specific worry. Thinking through a specific worry can trigger stress. The above thoughts do not trigger stress. They’re also pretty damn convincing, and thus tend to banish the original thought. (After a while, my mind has learned to trust this system, so I rarely have such thoughts arise now.)

I call these actions my work shutdown ritual. I initiated it as a New Years Resolutions this past winter. I didn’t have a lot of work related stress at the time, but I liked the idea of getting the absolute most out of my relaxation time.

I’m happy to report that it has worked better than I imagined. I’ve basically eliminated stressful work-related thoughts from my evenings and weekends. As you might expect, this has really improved my ability to relax and focus on other things.

I’m not sure that my particular ritual is right for everyone. But I urge you to consider the general concept. To form a good ritual you just need three things:

1. A quick series of steps for getting back on top of what’s going on in your student or working life; something you can do in 5 minutes at the end of each day.
2. A phrase you say when you complete the ritual.
3. An agreement with yourself that after you’ve said the magic words, the only acceptable response to a work-related thought is to think through the steps required for you to say the termination phrase.

It’s a simple idea that generates big returns. Consider giving it a try.

In early May, I received an interesting e-mail from a reader. After the standard introductions, he said:

Though I’m progressing towards my goal to become a physicist, I’m also very interested in writing a novel.

He noted that before diving into a novel he would probably have to first “write a short story or two.” He wanted my advice for how to kick off this project in time for summer.

“This sounds like a great idea for a Grand Project,” I replied. “But I would first be definite that this is an important goal in your life, because I predict you’d need at least five years of focused work before landing a book deal becomes a possibility.”

My answer reflects an observation that plays an increasingly important role in my understanding of the world: if you want to do something interesting and rewarding — be it writing a novel, becoming a professor, or growing a successful business — you have to first become exceptional. As Study Hacks readers know, I think Steve Martin put it best when he noted that the key to breaking into a competitive and desirable field is to “become so good, they can’t ignore you.”

In other words, there’s no shortcut. If you want the world to pay attention to you, you have to provide a compelling reason. It doesn’t care about your life goals.

In this post, I want to discuss a simple method with a complicated back-story. It’s a technique that can help you move efficiently down the road toward becoming exceptionally good.

The story behind this advice starts with an old friend who possessed an unlikely talent.

The Saga of Sickabod Sane

Around high school, my longtime friend, Chris, began to show a natural ability for rap music. This was somewhat unexpected considering that we lived in a sleepy, 2000 person town, not far outside Princeton, New Jersey. But this didn’t seem to deter Chris.

By the time he arrived at NYU, the novelty-song ethos that drove his high school creations began to wear away. He developed, in its place, a mature ear for crafting brain-burrowing hooks and complex beats. By the time he graduated, in 2004, his friends agreed: a professional music career lay in Chris’s future.

Let’s jump ahead to the fall of 2006.

At this point, Chris’s catalog had grown, as had the quality and inventiveness of his music. A steady stream of small-time players had emerged with promises to help Chris achieve his destined break, and the best of his songs had earned cult followings. But he hadn’t yet received any attention from the industry heavyweights.

Around this time, Chris and I had a phone conversation that would change the way we both thought about the art of becoming good.

In the month or so leading up to the call, Chris had made his first tentative stage appearances at a series of open mike nights. The last of these performances had been at the infamous Tuesday night bootcamp, held at the Pyramid Club, a popular underground rap venue in midtown Manhattan (see the picture to the right).

Anyone could sign up to perform during the bootcamp open mike. But it was a decision few made lightly. Pyramid attracted aspiring rap talent from all five of New York’s boroughs — birthplace to some of the industry’s most talented (and hardest) performers.

Not an easy audience.

In addition the open mike, the club’s emcee, an industry veteran with the stage name Mental Supreme, also hosted a semi-regular rap showcase. It cost $100 to enter, and the winner went home with $1000. It was judged by industry insiders, and was considered to be a place to spot upcoming East Coast talent. Anyone brave enough to face the demanding crowd could sign-up for the open mike. But only the best of these performers were invited to grace the showcase stage.

As I learned during our phone call, Chris’s first performance at Pyramid had been shaky. But something about the club seemed right.

“This feels like the place to be,” he said.

We soon hatched a plan. He would forget the random advice he’d been receiving from various friends and hangers-on — the suggestions to hand out demo CDs in front of radio stations or network to meet the right executives. Instead, he would turn his focus solely onto the Pyramid Club. He would return to the open mike again and again until he was able to win over that crowd. After that, he would progress to the showcase and play to win.

Our logic was simple: if he couldn’t become good enough to win over the Pyramid Club crowd, he couldn’t become good enough to attract industry attention. So why waste energy doing anything else?

I’m going Pyramid it up,” he said at the end of the call.

“Yep,” I replied. “Time to Pyramid it up.”

As the months passed, Chris got better. His early halting performances gave way to the occasional not bad performance. He worked harder on his songs, trying, week after week, to craft that one beat or lyrical turn that could impress his skeptical crowd.

Eventually, he scored his first Pyramid hit; an avalanche of improbably complex flows that he dubbed Mixtape. During his first performance of the song he received one of the highest honors you can achieve in New York’s underground rap scene: audience members touched his sneakers after a few of the more particularly tight lines.

Chris was invited to perform Mixtape at the next $1000 showcase. He earned third place. Afterwards, talking to the judges, he learned that he lost on his stage presence scores.

He returned to the studio, working late into the night, as was his habit, to craft ever-catchier hooks. Before his open mike performances, he now also took to incessant practice — going over every beat of his on-stage movements.

The rate of Pyramid hits began to increase. Soon the audience was singing along to their favorite songs.

He entered the $1000 showcase again, this time wielding an unapologetically original track called Top 8 — an homage to MySpace that somehow integrates three different rhythm changes with a Broadway-style musical chorus.

This time, he won first place.

He entered the contest three more times, winning twice more and tieing for first place on the other occasion. The club retired him from competition — no one else had a chance when he performed. He was only the second rapper to ever achieve this distinction.

More recently, he heard about another club that hosted a $1000 rap showcase. On a whim, he entered it. He won that contest, too.

At this point, Chris had finally become so good that the industry couldn’t ignore him. Natural talent hadn’t been enough. He needed the focus of the Pyramid challenge to drive him to develop his skills as far as they could possibly go.

After his string of showcase victories, he signed with a serious manager. Since then, his life has changed. He’s been flown to L.A. and Miami to record with well-known producers. He has meetings with high-level record company executives. It’s clear that the pieces of a professional career are careening into place.

The Pyramid Method

The difference between the first two years after Chris’s graduation, and the two years that followed our fateful phone call, couldn’t be starker. The key to his transformation was two-fold: (1) Chris focused his attention on improving his standing at a single venue; and (2) this venue provided clear metrics, so he could track his progress and use this to tweak his practice to be as effective as possible.

I call this general technique the Pyramid Method. I claim that it’s a powerful approach for anyone looking to transform an interest or natural talent into an expertise that cannot be ignored. Regardless of the pursuit in question, if you want to take it someplace serious, follow Chris’s example. This means:

1. Pick a single relevant venue to join at the entry level and work to increase your standing.
2. Make sure the venue offers clear metrics on your progress; use these metrics to guide your efforts to get better.
3. Forget all the other bullshit advice and mini-strategies people offer for getting ahead in your pursuit. If you can’t master this one venue, then you don’t yet deserve the world’s respect.
4. Put your head down, and get it done.

The Novelist

Let’s return to our aspiring novelist from above. What venue could he choose to apply the Pyramid Method? I suggest his college’s literary journal. The entry level for this venue is getting a piece published. The higher levels include getting a story featured on the cover and being invited to join the editorial board.

If he can’t conquer this venue then he certainly can’t expect a book deal. So instead of wasting time reading about tricks for getting an agent, or diving straight into a novel manuscript, he should consider pouring all of his writerly focus into this Pyramid.

My Pyramid

To give another example, when I wanted to improve my non-fiction chops before pitching my third book, I picked a respected online magazine as my own personal Pyramid. This publication had an approachable entry-level because it encouraged submissions. Its best staff writers, however, were professionals with good reputations. I set my goal to become a staff writer with recognized talent.

I began by trying to get any piece accepted. Two years later, I was a staff writer, and I had one of my feature articles chosen to be included in a book of the magazine’s best writing of the past decade. (Ironically, it was a piece about Chris.)

This required a huge amount of work. But my effort was focused like a laser beam. As a result, the quality of my writing made huge leaps during this time.

Conclusion

This method doesn’t provide shortcuts. Becoming exceptional requires an exceptional amount of work. Trust me, you can’t avoid this. But not all work is made equal. And the Pyramid Method focuses your attention exactly where it needs to be.

I receive a lot of e-mails asking about my new book. I realize that I’ve only given a few vague details on the project to date, so I thought I would rectify that today by bringing you up to speed.

Synopsis

The book focuses on a group of high school students I call relaxed superstars. These are students who live low-stress, under-scheduled, relaxed high school lives yet still do phenomenally well in college admissions. In the book I tell their stories and deconstruct how they pull this off.

To date I’ve interviewed around 20 such students. I can guarantee that their stories will change the way you think about college admissions. You’ll encounter students who enjoyed abundant free time (due to reasonable course loads and minimal junk extracurriculars), yet still breezed into schools like Stanford, Princeton, and MIT. Their secret almost always involves focused attention on an innovative project they loved.

Consider, for example, Michael. As a high school student in Arizona he focused his attention on a series of projects involving sustainability. He didn’t do them all at once, but, instead, one after the other, each building on the last. During his junior year, he took only 1 AP course. He participated in no other extracurricular activities. His schedule was so flexible that he adopted the habit of going on a 1 - 2 hour hike, immediately following school, four days out of five every week.

Michael loved his life.

He’s currently a student at Stanford.

Most people have a sense that students like Michael exist. Almost every senior class has that one happy, laid back guy who surprises everyone when he gets accepted to Harvard. My book is simply the first to track them down, interview them, and figure out how the hell they made this happen.

I want to offer talented high school students a path to academic success that doesn’t involve living a terrible, stress-saturated life.

Format

The book is divided into three parts, one for each of the three major “laws” followed by these students: underschedule, focus, and innovate. Fans of Study Hacks will recognize these as the three laws of the zen valedictorian. (In fact, in my original proposal I called these students zen valedictorians, but my publishers, rightly so, thought the word “zen” was overused.)

Each of the three parts is divided into two halves. The first half explains the law and why it’s true. It also provides examples of real relaxed superstars putting the law into action. The second half provides concrete advice for the reader to integrate the insights into his or her own student life.

Progress

I’m on track to finish a rough draft of the entire manuscript by the end of next week. (Whew!) That leaves me a summer to edit before I submit the first draft to my publisher in September. I think this adds up to a spring of 2010 publication date, but I’m not definite about that.

My System

People often ask how I juggle book writing with other obligations. For example, while writing this manuscript I’m also writing my PhD dissertation and keeping up a fast-paced research publishing schedule.

My method is the same I used for my previous two books (and is shared by many other professional writers). I write first thing in the morning most weekdays and occasionally on the weekend. Usually for 1 - 2 hours. Rarely more. Because it’s first thing in the morning, nothing else can hijack my time. And because I insist on long publishing contracts, these small pushes are enough to build to a quality final result.

More Soon…

As I shift into the editing phase, I’ll share more updates about the project. It’s been really hard to keep silent about all of the exceptional content I’ve been working through in my monkish isolation. Expect me to start leaking more details soon.

In the meantime, if you have a good idea for a title, let me know! I’m stumped…

It’s almost June. For high school seniors, this means two important milestones have passed: college admission decisions and graduation. You know where you’re headed next year and have nothing to do until you get there.

In this post, I want to offer you some friendly advice for how to best use this final summer to prepare for the new world you’ll soon face. If you want my general thoughts on how you should tackle college, read last year’s open letter to students awaiting their admissions decisions. Today, by contrast, I want to get more specific.

Below I’ve listed three suggestions for how to prepare for college …

Suggestion #1: Refuse to choose a major.

I know, your instinct is to immediately nail down the path you’ll follow at college. Did you like math class? Declare your intention to become a math major! Were you good in science? Then become a bio major with the the plan of going to grad school! Are you smart and ambitious, but can’t identify a specific academic interest? Go pre-med!

And so on…

I’m letting you off the hook. I want you to refuse to even consider your major until after your freshman year of college. When your aunts and uncles and family friends ask you this summer what you will study, proudly reveal your pledge of refusal.

Here’s the thing, before you arrive on campus and take some classes and learn about the college world, you’ll have no idea what options you actually have. Therefore, a choice at this point is essentially random. This has a big chance of coming back to haunt to you when you realize, down the line, that it was essentially arbitrary — a reality which can propel you into burnout.

Suggestion #2: Read about big ideas.

Dedicate significant portions of this summer to exposing yourself to smart people proposing, arguing, and defending big, intellectual ideas. Subscribe to the Arts & Letters Daily feed. Read Harpers and The Atlantic. Haunt the non-fiction tables at Barnes & Nobles, then pick up what looks interesting and spend serious time reading your selections at the in-store Starbucks.

Students that arrive at college fired up by the power of big ideas tend to thrive. This provides the filter through which they encounter their academic training. Reading assignments stop becoming chores and turn, instead, into sources of inspiration. Papers turn from dreaded foe into opportunities to express something new. These students seek out interesting speakers on campus and get involved with interesting activities. They also tend to produce A* work which generates huge advantages.

If you start a big idea addiction this summer, you can set the tone for your entire college career to follow.

Suggestion #3: Learn to drink like a normal person.

My drinking advice always seems to upset some portion of my audience, but I have to remain honest. If you arrive at college completely obsessed with the novelty of unrestricted alcohol consumption, you’ll likely make a fool of yourself — and perhaps something even worse.

Unless you plan to go dry your entire college career, sneak outside of your parents watchful gaze this summer and acquaint yourself with booze. Kill the novelty factor. Learn how to drink enough that you’re having fun, but no so much that you’re booting like a fountain. Wield this experience to blunt that edginess, possessed by so many 17-year-olds, that makes access to beer feel like the world’s most important possible endeavor.

If you’re already a drinker, learn how to stop doing it like an idiot. Again, I’m going to get yelled at for this, but if you look old, try to sneak into a bar — there’s no better way to learn some adult decorum surrounding your consumption.

Trust me, 22-year-old you will thank 18-year-old you for figuring out how to handle alcohol with some grace before your arrival at your first, packed frat party. The frat brothers at that party, by contrast, are probably hoping you’ll ignore this advice, as it eliminates their preferred entertainment — drunken freshmen fools.

(Photo by Joe Shlabotnik)

Eric’s Literate Concerns

A reader named Eric recently sent me an interesting question. Next semester, he’s facing an English Lit course.

“My concern is that the best grade I ever got in high school English was a ‘B’,” Eric explained.

He wanted some feedback on his plan for the course.

“I read about Q/E/C notetaking in the red book, but I’m not quite sure how to apply it to these courses,” he said. “Would it help if this summer I picked some novels and practiced the technique? Or would it help me more to just read some novels for pleasure in preparation?”

From Clusters to Deep Thinking

I’m pleased to see a student planning ahead for an academic challenge. As I’ve said before, if you don’t constantly question your study habits, you’re in danger of falling into a rut.

When it comes to the specific challenge posed by English Lit, however, Eric needs some guidance. Sounds like a job for the grade whisperer.

Here was my advice:

• For an English class, Q/E/C notes on your assignments won’t help. Novels can’t be reduced to an orderly collection of big ideas.
• Instead, take zero notes on the novel as you read. That’s right, none. Instead, focus on really paying attention and enjoying the intellectual experience. Location will really matter. Find some place quite and contemplative to do this work. Drink strong coffee.
• You’re not completely off the hook, however, when it comes to notetaking. During class discussion, take the best possible Q/E/C notes possible. Pay particular attention to the points made by the professor.
• These notes won’t come easy. The ideas discussed in an English lit class can be messy and complicated. My suggestion would be to set aside 1 -2 hours each week to wield the notebook method. Use it to help work through some of your thoughts on what you just read and what you heard in the most recent discussions.
• When it comes time to write a paper — even if it is a small critical essay — expect to spend serious time with the notebook method before you even think about writing. I’m talking at least 3 - 5 hours.

This is a crucial point. For a course like English Lit, the ideas produced by deep thinking are your main preparatory currency. The time you spend contemplating, somewhere quiet, with your notebook, is equivalent to the time a pre-med spends memorizing triglycerides. If you don’t invest some serious effort you cannot expect to do well.

With this mindset, however, our friend Eric should be prepared to turn in an A* effort while many of his frustrated classmates switch to a business major in shame.

(Photo by laughlin)