Getting $50 For An A: On The Floppiness of Stakes

Image Source

It’s an education classic hit. Some students are lucky enough to have parents willing to pay them a certain sum of money for each good grade they get. Ultimately, it’s using stakes to, ideally, encourage the student to actually work to earn a better grade.

Since grades are typically considered a longer term investment. It can be difficult for people to discipline themselves into putting in the necessary work in the short term. That parent  offering a payment for the grade is supposed to help the student by shortening up the return on investment. It tends to work well but it comes with some consequences.

As much as I would have loved a system like this through my high school years, my parents would barely say good job for an A. (They weren’t bad but they didn’t make it a big issue.) Getting stakes like this would have definitely encouraged me to focus on my grades even earlier in my education. As a student though, you don’t have control over the offers your parents make to improve your grades. You only have access to yourself.

It’s the sticky world of stakes. Many students believe setting up stakes is one of the better ways to improve their study discipline. By finding a way to make your wins feel better and your losses feel worse, you can bring more options into the pot. Instead of trying to get an A+ because it feels good, you try to get an A+ for some other carnal pleasure (money perhaps.) This is a strategy that works but you need to keep one thing in mind.

Marshmallow Test

Image Source

You may have heard of this study before. Children were left alone in a room with a single marshmallow on a plate. Someone then told the child, if the child could wait 5 minutes without eating the marshmallow, they would give the child a second marshmallow. The person then left the room. The poor kids would squirm around in their seat. They’d stare at the marshmallow like a lion staring at a gazelle. They virtually ate their tongues. Some of the children gave up and ate the marshmallow. Some didn’t.

The children were kept track of later in life. The children that didn’t eat that marshmallow ended up significantly more successful than the children that did eat the marshmallow. The implication suggested that delayed gratification is one of the surest signs of success.

If this is true then I like to link this to setting up stakes for school. Schools like to suggest the benefits of school come a long time into the future. The students may not be all that different than before the school year but 20 years later they’re going to be glad they learned this stuff. (I don’t believe it in most cases but let’s assume it’s true for now.)

Using stakes is like throwing an extra marshmallow into the equation. It’s like if the scientists said, “if you make it two and a half minutes in without eating it, I’ll give you a marshmallow to eat.” With that, I can virtually guarantee a much larger percentage of the children would succeed but the correlation with success in life would be less clear between successes and failures.

My point is this: If getting good grades is important for the future then you shouldn’t need a short term incentive to encourage it. Adding the short term incentive may be a benefit in the short term to the individual student but it take the focus off of the long term incentive. It doesn’t teach the student how to look at the long term implications. That could come with long term consequences.

But… I happen to believe that getting good grades isn’t all that important for most students future. Sure, it can theoretically be important. If you get good grades because you love learning, or you know how to suck up well, or you are naturally gifted, or you come from a good family, or any other correlation then it matters. The actual process of getting those grades, seems to me, of minimal importance. (Some of the most successful people I know did horrible in school. Some of the least successful people I know did great. Sure, it’s not scientific but neither are their weak correlations.)

Assuming grades don’t particularly matter (just assume it for a moment, even if you don’t buy it,) then adding prize to the good grades received is a great method. It is the long term marshmallow encouraging students to suffer in the short term for long term benefits.

This makes it a great potential benefit. That being said, many students (and adults in other matters) assume that they can add these same stakes to themselves to improve their own behavior.

Self-Imposed Tyranny

Image Source

Assuming you believe that stakes work, you might want to try to implement them in your own study routine. If you can convince your parents to give you cash then good for you. I wouldn’t count on that though. Instead, you might try self-imposed stakes. You might say, “I’m not going to use Facebook again unless I have an A in this class.”

On the surface, this can look similar to the previous stakes. If you get the good grade, you benefit. If you fail to get the good grade you lose out. There are a number of problems with that kind of a stake though.

First of all, you’re not using a purely positive stake. You’re taking something that you care about away. It’s kind of like you’re holding something you love hostage.That’s not exactly the most pleasant way to try and learn discipline. In fact, it’s setting yourself up for a rather painful fall.

The next problem is that it’s completely self imposed and enforced. Your success at following through with your stakes is completely dependent on your remaining discipline. If you’re disciplined enough not to cheat then I’d be willing to bet you’re disciplined enough not to need to take things you love hostage.

Ultimately, you’re just setting yourself up to suffer. The better you set up the stakes, the more you’re going to end up suffering. That means you may not be quite as rational as you should be in your decision making processes. Considering the whole point of this is to learn something, I think forcing yourself into these emotional hostage situations is just going to make it harder.

You may be able to get someone else to enforce these rules on you but ultimately, you’ll always be stuck knowing that you imposed it on yourself. You’re still just delaying the day you learn the amount of discipline you should have. Instead of stakes being a benefit, they become a crutch.

So, I believe stakes can help in school but I wouldn’t waste any time trying to work out the details for a healthy kind of stakes. It seems like an unnecessarily complicated subject.

School Is Important?

What they teach you in school may or may not be important. I personally haven’t found much of it all that useful (until college then I had one or two really good teachers.) School is important for another reason though. There is an old line I heard before that explains why well. It’s from Martin Luther King Jr.

What I’m saying to you this morning, my friends, even if it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, go on out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures; sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed music; sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry; (Go ahead) sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, "Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well."

You’re stuck going to high school. There are very few practical occasions that it’s worth fighting that. If you’re stuck going to school then just learn to do what you do well. Sure, what you learn may be unimportant but just learning to control your body and mind in unpleasant situations will do you more good than any stakes could provide you.

Do you want to learn how to study in less time than you’ve ever imagined? (15 minutes a night max.) That’s what this blog is all about. Be sure to follow it and check out the archives. Also, if you enjoy the content then check out the three ebooks in the sidebar.) 

6 Things To Ask Yourself Before Going To College

Image Source

Too many students underestimate the importance of the decision to go to college. The vast majority of students (particularly the more gifted ones) are poked and prodded from their childhood with the idea of going to college. Considering the statistics, it’s virtually inevitable that an average or above average student is going to end up in college. Hell, some students are even required to apply to colleges to graduate from high school. It’s hardly even considered a choice anymore.

That being said, college is a choice. The question that’s virtually never asked is, “is it the right choice?” Sure, statistics show a correlation between income and education. That correlation, doesn’t necessarily mean much. It could just mean people “destined” to make more money tend to go to college. (By destined, I mean any of a million possible factors. Students that go to college could be smarter than average. That means they’d probably make more money with or without college. Students that go to college could be richer. That means, again, they’d probably make more money with or without college.) Of course, even considering that correlation matters assumes income is a more important goal than happiness. My point is just that it’s more complicated than it looks.

I think college can be one of the best decisions of a persons life. A college education can open a ton of doors. That being said, you need to think about what’s behind those doors and whether or not you really want to open them. (There are plenty of doors you can open without college too. Maybe you’ll like those better.)

Here are some questions to ask yourself before going to college:

1. Do You Want To Go?

Image Source

This is a more important question than most students consider it. Your decision to go to college is going to cause you to spend tens of thousands of dollars. That makes it a pretty big risk to be playing around with.

If a year into college, you change your mind about wanting to go, you’re still going to have to pay for that year of college. More importantly, you’re probably going to have to pay for that year of college with a non-college graduates job. Sure, plenty of students end up surviving that mistake but it could easily take years of your life just to start back at zero again.

That dynamic leads many students into graduating just because of the costs they’ve already lost. They’re committed to four years because they can’t afford to switch to doing what they want to do. That, usually, just leads to the college graduate getting a job he or she hates in the field he or she graduated from (and wanted to leave.)

Going to college when you don’t want to go is a terrible mistake in most cases.

2. Is It An Investment?

Virtually every teacher and parent would tell you college is an investment. No, they won’t ask what degree you’re getting first. They’ll just blindly tell you that college is an investment. Mostly because, they have absolutely no idea what an investment is.

An investment is something that you’re putting money into to, ideally, make more money. When you take out loans for college, you need to make a considerable amount of income more than you would have if you didn’t take out those loans. If you don’t have very clear job prospects that can pay off those loans in a reasonable amount of time then you’re not investing.

Many college degrees are not investments. They’re luxuries. Sure, there is nothing wrong with a luxury but don’t go spending money that you don’t have on luxuries. If it’s not an obvious investment, pay for college in cash. That’s the only way to make play it safe. (If you do happen to get a good job from your luxury degree then consider it a bonus. You never have to pay interest from your loans.)

3. Is It Better To Wait?

For many students, it’s actually a smarter financial decision to wait a few years before going to college.

One of the most obvious reasons a student should consider that is loan favorability. If your parents income disqualifies you from federal loans then it may be smarter to wait a few years until your parents are off your forms. That could save you thousands of dollars and a significant amount of private student loan stress.

I remember being told, “If you don’t go to college right after high school then you’ll never go!” I didn’t listen. I ended up going to college years later. I’d argue that time off schooling taught me more than college ever could. I ended up having no student loans and had plenty of fun. Of course, if I graduated high school started sleeping around, binge drinking, and spending every penny I earned, there would be a real chance I wouldn’t end up in college. It’s all about making smart decisions. If you make smart decisions, you can put college off safely. Even after a few mistakes, it’s usually still reasonable with a little extra work.

Some other advantages of waiting: You don’t end up the average new college student that can’t even do their own laundry. You actually care about schooling because you saw the world without it and chose it rationally instead of emotionally. You have time to learn how to deal with money before taking thousands of dollars in loans.

4. Do you need it for your dreams?

Image Source

If you’ve dreamed of being a doctor since you were a child then you damn well should be doing to college for it. Many fields are regulated so that a degree is required. If that degree is absolutely required to do what you want to do (even if it’s not the greatest investment) then it’s usually a good decision.

Sure, bad investments aren’t usually a good idea but if this is about chasing a dream then investing has virtually nothing to do with it.

If you want to be a writer or something, you don’t need a college degree. You can pursue that field and become successful without ever graduating from college. In fact, instead of getting the college required liberal arts education you could spend 9-5 everyday learning how to write. You’ll end up miles ahead of the average student.

5. Do you have a solid career plan?

If your career plan consists of only, get a job, then you’re making a bad mistake. There is so much information that you should consider first.

First of all, what jobs does your degree qualify you for?

Next, which of those jobs pay enough to pay off your debt (unless it’s your dream job?)

Next, how many of those jobs are available?

How many students are going to be graduating and competing for those jobs?

“I’ll become a college professor on the subject!” NO NO NO! Really… that is usually a horrible mistake. In fields where your best job options include teaching the subject you’re getting your degree in, you’re limiting your options significantly. Look at the data. Are there really that many jobs available when considering how many people are graduating? Usually they’re not.

6. Why Are You Going?

This is one of the most important questions to ask yourself.

What is motivating you to go to college? If it’s your dream job then awesome. That’s a good motivation to have.

The sad truth is that most students pretend that it’s for the job. They lie to themselves and say that when the truth is something a bit more embarrassing.

Are you just trying to get away from your parents? Are you trying to get people off your back? Are you scared that you’ll fail outside of college? Do you just want to drink and party (you can do that a lot cheaper outside of college)?

These are all motivations that you need to question the value of. Is it really worth the price it’s going to cost? Are there cheaper alternative ways to do them. Of course, if you have a few million dollars in the bank, perhaps they’re cheap enough to pay for willy nilly but if you’re the average person, you need to seriously worry about that price.

The ideal motivation to go to college is the joy of learning. Of course, if it’s the joy of learning that’s pushing you then you’re stupid to take out student loans for it.

The second best motivation is an investment.

Don’t end up at 25 living in your parents house with a crappy job trying to pay down your student loans. By paying attention to the consequences, and risks, of every option you can make a smarter decision.

Do you want to know how to study faster than ever? That’s what this blog is all about. Be sure to follow and check out the archives if you’d like to learn more. Also, there are some ebooks in the sidebar that you might want to take a look at. 

The Pursuit Of Knowledge Versus "Grades"

Image Source

Knowledge and good grades are not the same goal. They aren’t completely opposed to one another but they’re definitely skewed a little away from each other. Just because you have a ton of knowledge on a subject, it doesn’t mean you’ll get good grades in a class about it. Just because you get good grades it doesn’t mean you have a ton of knowledge on the subject. You need to keep that in mind with every decision you make in school.

Factors come into play that virtually no one discusses. You can get grades best on showing up to class, dumb luck, concentrated studying, smart memorization tricks, sleeping with the teacher, or cheating. Grades are not knowledge. Grades mean virtually nothing when you don’t factor in the methods used to achieve those grades.

You can’t become knowledgeable by cheating the system. Well… maybe you can. Using cheap memory tricks can help things lock in your brain easier than ever but hacking your brain chemistry isn’t exactly a problem in most cases. Knowledge is the end. Grades are just one slightly related means to achieve that end.

In Pursuit Of Grades

Image Source

I recommend focusing on grades for students. Forget about acquiring significant amounts of knowledge. Students are judged based on the grades they get. Not based on the knowledge they have. By making intelligent study decisions, a student can learn everything required for a course in relatively no time at all.

Using prioritization methods a student can focus their energy on the information that really matters and spend very little energy to do it. Energy doesn’t have to be wasted on low value projects.

Teachers are constantly benefiting the students that chose this path through school. Many teachers virtually hand the questions of the tests to their students before the test in test prep material. Virtually every teacher focuses their class time significantly on the testing material. Teachers encourage this focus because it helps them too. (Who cares if you know more than the average student in a subject if you don’t get a good grades on the test? The teachers will look bad in that situation.) The whole system is designed to focus around grades.

Is that a good thing? Who cares!? That’s irrelevant to your success or failure. Using these biases in teachers you can study for minutes every night and get a good grade in virtually any course. Sure, the system may be stupid but at no point do you have the reasonable option to not participate in it (until college but college the system tends to be slightly less stupid too.)

By focusing on grades you get one less obvious advantage over other students.

In Pursuit Of Knowledge

Knowledge is something that requires emotional investment. In school, going after good grades is your emotional investment. Parents and teachers guilt and scare you into getting good grades. “What are you gonna grow up to be a bum?” “I’m so disappointed in you!”

Sure, it works to some extent but as you can imagine, it’s not the most motivational way to go on the pursuit of knowledge. It’s just emotional blackmail. By pursuing good grades without the knowledge goal, it offers you a significant amount of extra time. Suddenly, you won’t have to study for hours a night because you’ll have great grades already. Any extra studying would be the pursuit of knowledge.

Image Source

After you free that extra time out you can do virtually anything with your time. You can slack. You can watch a movie. You can talk to friends. All that is an option but there is a problem with those decisions. They’re a bit shallow and boring after a while. If you’re the kind of student that would study hours a night to get good grades, you’re probably going to pull your hair out slacking off. This is the perfect time to spend actually pursuing knowledge.

I know… Why pursue knowledge when you can veg out? That’s your natural thought but once you free this time up for a while, you’re going to feel slightly differently. You’ll likely find yourself curious about certain things. That means you’ll look them up. You might even start to study a few subjects completely unrelated to school.

The great thing about this pursuit is that it’s your curiosity driving you instead of your fear and guilt. You’re looking to learn things that you actually care about. That is how you actually try to learn something effectively. Instead of fighting to force yourself to remember something, you’ll find yourself just not forgetting it.

Making Your Distinction

The dreamer in me says, “never sacrifice knowledge for grades.” I believe that is probably the preferable way to leave. I sometimes wonder if I chose to drop out and focus on my own studies if I’d be better off. The practical part of me says, “You’re F’in nuts. Get good grades and play the game dumbass!”

If you’re the kind of student that focuses on actually learning the information your classes teach you then this can be an awfully strange distinction to make. It can take you a very long time to completely accept it. It can feel like knowledge and grades are linked but it’s a much looser connection than most students even imagine.

In fact, just look at some of the syllabuses for your class. Look for the section that shows a percentage of your grade for each aspect of the course (for example, 10% homework, 40% tests, etc.) Get a little creative and see if you can find any little tricks for improving your grades without increasing your effort. Or, at the very least, not affect your grade while decreasing your effort.

Think about the example I gave where 10% of your grade is based on homework. In that case, you could skip all your homework assignments and still get an A- in the course (90, depending on grading style.) Is that smart? I don’t know. Does the teacher give hundreds of hours of homework, maybe? That’s a class specific question. Usually the smart decision is a simple balance with most of your energy going towards the valuable factors. (If you’re going to skip anything in that example, homework probably is one of the better things to skip.)

Prioritization like that is one of the most powerful ways you can focus on improving your grades without increasing your knowledge.

Once you learn that skill remember this though. School doesn’t value knowledge. It values grades. Life (past college) doesn’t value grades, it values knowledge. Sure, getting good grades without more studying is a skill in itself but it has limited value outside of fields dealing with the government and contracts. (“Oh look… if we reallocate funds here it will be tax deductible.”) You want to have knowledge.

You don’t have to learn what school is teaching you but be damn sure to learn a little about something.

Do you want to know how to get good grades without the effort? That’s what this blog is about. Be sure to follow and check out the archives to learn more. Also, there are three ebooks in the sidebar that you might be interested in reading.

You Won't Believe How Much Speed Can Improve Your Studying

Image Source

The slow and steady approach is the most common approach to studying. People are taught from childhood to sit down with their textbooks and really try to digest the information. To this day, many teachers recommend you study hours a night for all of your classes. This insanity has been disproved time and time again empirically but they still insist it's the best way to study.

First of all, studying for long sessions of time is an instant killer of results. The efficiency of your studying decreases consistently over that period of time. By the end of your hour plus study session, your brain isn't going to be retaining a bit of information.

Second of all, no one wants to study for hours straight. That instantly means that 95% of people won't actually follow through with their studying. Sure, studying hours a night may work okay but it's not going to end up actually being hours a night. It's going to end up hours of studying whenever you can work up the discipline to actually start.

Third of all: Really, even if you sit down to study for hours. Your brain is not going to be thinking about studying 90% of that time. You'll spend a minute studying before getting distracted with stupid pointless thoughts like, “Ughhh I've gotta' be here another hour...” Actually, that's best case scenario. Worst case scenario you're going to end up daydreaming the study session away thinking about the person with the dreamy eyes in math class. You'll barely even read a page for hours.

Fourth of all: Phew... Maybe I should just move onto the better alternative.

How To Do Something “Impossible”

Image Source

There is a basic concept that's not true but I give it a whole lot of respect. It's the idea that you can't control your emotions. For the most part, it's true. You can, however, easily steer your emotions in the direction you want them to go. Your brain is a complex organ with more going on than you could possibly control. That's where focus and attention comes in. You may not control your focus completely but you can steer it in the right direction.

Just about every student struggles with focus at some point in their studying. Not being able to focus on studying is just as bad as not being able to discipline yourself to start studying. Hell, what's the point of pretending to study with a textbook in front of you (learning nothing) when you could be having fun (still learning nothing).

Focus is fundamentally based on emotions.

Your brain focuses on what is most important to it. Usually emotions define what is most important to the brain. Like I said before, for the most part, you can't control your emotions. You can only steer them.

When it comes to focus on studying, how can you steer your brain in that direction?

Speed Demon

Image Source

Have you ever watched the Winter Olympic sport called Skeleton?

It's pretty much a death wish where athletes ride head first down a iced path at over 80 mph. Imagine you're an athlete about to do the skeleton. (Or if you have a fast paced sport you love, imagine that.) In this situation, you don't have to come up with tricks to force yourself into focusing. You're going to focus. If you don't focus then there will be some serious consequences. Your brain isn't stupid. You're not going to be thinking about wanting a bagel or something while about to descend down the hill. You're going to put all of your attention on what you need to do.

Studying should be done kind of like that.

No, you don't need to go sledding with your textbook. My point is, you've got to change the way you think about studying. It is not a long and boring session. It is a quick and powerful moment. How do you do that?

Study fast. Read the words on the page faster than you're comfortable. Test yourself faster than you're comfortable. Answer questions so fast that you do it on instinct more than thinking. Set the goal of learning more information than you think you're capable of learning in a single short session.

Instantly, you can finagle your brain into a state of near complete focus on what you need to do. That is, as long as you don't blatantly cheat this system.

After you finish studying fast, you can't let yourself have a do over. Let's say you set a fifteen minute study session. If, after that fifteen minutes of high speed studying , you feel like you didn't get it all, DO NOT TRY TO STUDY MORE that night. It's over.

That's what makes this study strategy so powerful. At first, this is going to be painful because you're intentionally going to be failing to learn information but it's going to train your brain to focus better and better over time because, like in skeleton, you have only one chance to succeed or fail. Your brain will learn how to succeed after a while.

The Other Advantages

Speed's number one advantage in studying is focus. It's an effect that can improve your grades dramatically. That being said, speed has a whole slew of other advantages for studying.

First of all, you suddenly have much fewer excuses not to study. Since you're studying faster, you can study for less time. I often recommend less than 15 minutes a night. That means it's easier to start studying in the first place. You can tell yourself, “It's only 15 minutes.” It also means you're less likely to skip is based on other obligations. That means a more consistent and effective study session.

Since you'll no longer dread studying quite as much, it's also a more enjoyable experience.

The best part of all is that you'll have more time to do the things you enjoy. You'll spend less time worrying about getting good grades in your classes. That extra time can be used to improve your grades more or maybe just to slack off and enjoy your life a little.

Do you want to know how to study in less than 15 minutes a night? That's what this blog is all about. Check out the archives for a ton of tricks to help you out. Also, be sure to check out the books if you own a kindle.