tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-76645855605743871572024-03-13T13:29:09.247-04:00How To Study FasterYour Time Is Your Life. Don't Waste It Banging Your Head Against The Wall.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comBlogger78125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-69871427713269376802015-06-29T15:01:00.000-04:002015-06-29T15:01:00.228-04:00How To Memorize Insane Amounts Of Information (Quickly)<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">This article is my response to request I received from a student. That student was looking for a way to memorize a list of words for a foreign language. Now, I would normally recommend using my typical study strategies outlined through this blog, one thing changed that. This student didn’t want to memorize the list for class. She wanted to memorize the list for her own personal scholarship. Since grades aren’t the primary concern anymore, a ton of details in learning change. To really memorize a set of information and make it stick, I recommend a different set of strategies. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The basic layout to think about when trying to memorize a large amount of information is as follows. First of all, you need a standard method of memorization. You need to have a strategy that you plan on using through the whole process. Flash cards are going to be used as the example in this articles. There are alternatives but flash cards are usually the most accessible method. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Second, you need to set up a cycle of sessions for studying based on the amount of information you need to remember, the time you have to study them, and the accuracy rate you want to achieve. The faster, the better, and the more, you want to learn, the more sessions and cycles you’re going to want.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Third, you need to adjust the information to be palatable on flash cards. For foreign languages, this should require no work at all. If you’re applying this strategy to biological processes or something complicated, it’s essential that you scale back complex details and only force yourself to memorize the macro details at first.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Throughout this article, I’ll go over how to make sure this basic layout turns into something practical, easy, and quick. Most of the information provided so far can get you into an effective study strategy but without the details you may end up wasting a ton of unrequired study time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Method</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you don’t have any better ideas, don’t feel the slightest bit bad using flash cards as your go to method. I’ve practiced similar strategies for years and they’re my go to method. Sure, flash cards suck but they provide more versatility and effectiveness than 95% of methods. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">There are other options if you get creative though. For foreign languages, there has been one particular strategy around for years. To memorize a language just put post it notes on everything that you own and write the foreign languages word for it on the post it note. This is a powerful strategy for languages but unfortunately, you need to combine it with another method to include parts of speech other than nouns.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">There are a ton of game methods as well. There are boatloads of websites that create games based on learning. Using those games instead of flashcards is reasonable. Of course, it comes with the risk of not learning the exact words you need. (No game was specifically designed for your learning needs.) Also, you need a computer to use them. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">See the complexities I’m talking about? Flash cards are usually way easier. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Cycled Sessions</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Don’t use those flash cards in the typical “study for an hour” style method. Sure, it will work better than some things but that’s one of the least efficient ways to learn. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Use your flash cards in sessions under 15 minutes long. It’s much better to require extra short study sessions than increase the time you sit and study. The human brain learns best early in the study session. By doing multiple study sessions, you learn best for more time than using just a single study session. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you need to learn a ton of information then increase the number of sessions you use per day. If your motivation is for school then I don’t recommend more than 6 ten minute sessions per day. (Ideally, don’t use this method for school though. Use my other strategies outlined in this blog.) To the student that asked the question: Since your motivation is personal, you can add in virtually as many sessions as you want every single day. (Max perhaps around 1 per hour. You don’t really need that many in most cases though.) If you ever feel drained then just cut back on the sessions.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Lets say you have 1000 words you’re trying to memorize. It would be absolutely insane to try and cycle randomly through 1000 different flash cards. That’s why you should break up the flash cards into sets of 10-30. Then design a schedule to go over all of the different sets of flash cards. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">So, if you’re studying 50 sets of 20 flash cards, you may schedule them one after another with 5 sessions per day. That would take 10 days to get through. That comes with some problems though. By day 10, you won’t remember most of the information from day 1. So try to cycle day 1 flashcards in on day 3, then day 2 flashcards on day 4, and so on. Notice how complicated this is getting? Yea. Write down the schedule to make it work. (Also don’t feel bad about combining sets into fewer larger sets of flashcards as you get through memorizing them. So, instead of two sets of 20 you can make one set of forty to be memorized in a couple days.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">You need to be really damn motivated to make this work. I’ve personally done it but I wouldn’t judge anyone that struggles at this. If it’s too much then cut back somewhere until it’s reasonable for you.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Macro VS Micro</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Throughout school, I got in the bad habit of studying almost anything with flash cards. I would write one word on one side of the flash card, then on the other side I’d have a wall of text that I’m trying to remember. That doesn’t work too well.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Some information is not designed well for flash cards. That doesn’t mean that you can’t use flash cards though. It means you should probably adjust the information into something that’s more accessible with flash cards. Let’s say you have this monster of information for your flash card:</span></div>
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<b>Required Information:</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Metazoa: </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.38;">Heterotrophic and motile multicellular organisms. (Some have adopted a sessile lifestyle.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Yikes! Do you have any idea what that means? Well… I don’t but that shouldn’t be an issue for my point. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The easiest flash card to make would be “Metazoa” on one side, and then the line after that on the other side. That wouldn’t be a miserable flash card but it’s definitely not an ideal one. There are ways to make this easier though.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">First of all, if you have any flash cards explaining what “heterotrophic,” “motile,” and “sessile” mean, then learn those flashcards first. Put this flash card into a set you study after those other words are learned.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Second, don’t be afraid to lop off a semi-essential piece of information like “(Some have adopted a sessile lifestyle.)” At least, be willing to lop it off early in your study session. Maybe write it on your flashcard but don’t force yourself to remember it to get through that flash card until the second or third time through the set of flash cards. (Write it in blue or something to make it obvious.) Using a strategy like that you can include unbelievably complex concepts on a single flash card and not feel like banging your head against a wall.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">By using a cycled sessions strategy like this one, you should be able to memorize virtually anything you’re looking to memorize. It requires significantly more motivation than many of my methods but for personal use, it can be absolutely ideal. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Do you want to know how to study in less than fifteen minutes a night? That’s what this blog is all about. Be sure to check out the articles in the archive and follow to learn more. Also, please check out the ebooks in the sidebar.</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-73372789887434527662015-06-22T15:02:00.000-04:002015-06-22T15:02:00.198-04:00How To Permanently Improve Your Study Strategies With One Unusual Trick<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">“My grades were miserable,” he was telling me. “But that was the time I started playing basketball. The funny thing is that I didn’t really change my studying all that much. I just spent hours and hours a day watching basketball, learning basketball, and even reading books about it. Virtually everything I focused on, for a while at least, was basketball. Somehow though… my grades popped right up.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">This isn’t all that unusual a story. Sure, the specific activities change but it’s actually rather typical. I’m not just talking about sports here though. Sure, study after study has confirmed that students participating in sports tend to get higher grades but it’s more than that. (Also, those studies often just show a strong correlation. Correlations aren’t all that useful alone.) No matter what “growable” activity a student gets themselves caught up into their grades will regularly improve.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">What do I mean by growable? I mean they can improve at it. For example, no one person can watch TV better than another person (well, maybe they can but it’s not something people practice and try to get better at.) Basketball, on the other hand, offers tons of options of gaining new skills. That makes it a “growable” activity. Anything that you consciously try to improve at can work. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Once a student finds an activity that they can grow at, they have the chance to learn something about learning that many students never do. Learning is a process that works best at peak levels of focus. Student’s that enjoy learning something can understand that most of all. By getting significant amounts of practice at serious studying and training, every time they study or train anything they end up farther ahead.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Don’t Give A Hoot</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Here’s the sad truth. Most students (probably not you because you’re reading this) care only the slightest bit about school. Sure, they’ll show up because they’ll get scolded if they don’t but their minds are consciously focusing on other things in their life. Occasionally their brain drifts back for a while but to call it focus would be exaggerated. They pretty much just show up.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Who can blame them though? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Every person has different interests and skills. It seems impossible for any school to offer enough methods of teaching to stimulate every students interests. Schools these days hardly even try. (Really, so many schools have plenty of duds for teachers that haven’t got fired in over 20 years of poor teaching. It’s one of my major pet peeves.) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Over those years, if a student happens to come in contact with something they actually care about, it’s usually due to dumb luck. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">How To Work This Into Your Life</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">For many students, this is a purely lucky coincidence. They never consciously set out to improve themselves by studying something that they care about. It just happens naturally. In some ways that’s a good thing. In other ways it’s much better to consciously focus on it. Using these three steps you can start from zero and end up learning more about studying than you could have ever imagined before.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">It’s a slow process, by the way. It could end up taking months to complete every step. It won’t be months of work but it will require a lot of thinking about what you’re doing. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">1. Find Something You Love To Study</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">This can be the most painful part of the process. Or… ideally… it can be the easiest part. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Do you have any activity that you love to do virtually all the time? Next, ask yourself if there is a clear way to get better or worse at it? As offered before, tv is something you might love to do but can never improve all that much at. (If you find a way to improve at it significantly, perhaps it could still work but I won’t be recommending it.) If you can’t improve at the activity then you need to change your approach.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you find out you don’t have any activity like that, it’s time you invested a significant portion of your time into looking for it. That’s the time to look at things you wish you could do. Look at everything you admire and spend your time on. Then experiment with those things until you find something you love and can improve at. (By love, I don’t mean you want a career for the rest of your life. I mean, you’re genuinely curious enough to waste a few weeks on it.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">One activity that you might not have considered is video games. They often offer a huge amount of improvement potential. Sure, it’s not the most productive hobby in the world but if you enjoy it then perhaps you can spend your time learning the in and outs of a single game. (Heck, look into some video games and you’ll find thousands of pages of strategy and analysis. They’re often more accessible for improvement than sports.) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">2. Study It and Keep Track</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Once you find that activity that you can bury yourself in. Bury yourself into it. Start reading books on the subject. Start practicing it. Start listening to podcasts about it. Start trying to plot and scheme your own strategies. All these activities, when focused on improvement, can seriously improve your grades. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Notice the phrase, when focused on improvement. If you just happen to go to the court to shoot hoops with some friends, you can’t say you’re seriously focused on improvement unless your brain is really invested in it. If you’re telling jokes on the court and not thinking about your screw ups then you’re probably not invested in it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">After you start to see yourself get better at the activity you’re doing, you’re likely going to find your learning gravitating towards a single learning activity. Maybe you’ll find yourself reading a ton of books on the subject. Once you find yourself gravitating towards that one activity. Start taking note of all the important factors surrounding that studying. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">For example, where do you study? Is there background noise? How long do you need to study before you feel like you got something? How are you studying? This information is preparing you for the third step.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">3. Implement What You’ve Learned</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"> Using the strategy you enjoyed learning what you love, start trying to learn school related subjects. So, if you read biographies outside to learn about basketball, perhaps you should read biographies to learn about history? Perhaps not, you will never know unless you try. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Sometimes, implementing a study strategy that school doesn’t approve of will lead you into studying slightly different material than you’d study for school. In most cases, you shouldn’t worry too much about that. (If you’re an A+ student fighting to get into a top university in the country then worry about that. If you’re happy hitting A’s then I wouldn’t be too concerned.) It’s often better to study slightly off track in a way that you enjoy than to study right on track with something you don’t enjoy. (Because you’re more likely to study off track enjoying yourself longer.) Naturally though, it’s ideal to study school materials directly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Some of these study strategies will easily fit into your study routine. Others won’t really work. The key is to try them and see what clicks. You’ll never know until you try.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">More importantly than all that conscious effort. Your brain is going to be learning how to focus more effectively. That extra focus will offer improvements to your studying whether you use a strategy you learned from this exercise or not. That’s the real secret.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Do you want to study faster than ever? That’s what this blog is all about. Be sure to follow and check out the archives to keep up. Also, check out the ebooks in the sidebar.</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-19303978923099182422015-06-15T11:03:00.000-04:002015-06-15T11:03:00.476-04:00Busy VS Productive Studying<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">This is a concept that’s been noted time and time again through the business world but it’s rarely brought up in a studying context. Even though it’s hardly ever brought up, it’s one of the most common problems that students struggle with. By learning the difference between busy studying and productive studying, you can dramatically reduce the studying time required to get the same grades. It can also be used to seriously increase your grades with little to no extra time investment. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The average student is well trained in busy studying. It’s the kind of studying that most teachers recommend. Busy studying is studying that requires your full attention but doesn’t necessarily give you any good results. One common style of studying that fits this category is reading the textbook. Some students spend hours reading their textbook hoping that the information will stick, usually, hardly any of the information sticks. That just means they have to read the textbook more and more. That’s busy studying.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Productive studying usually requires your full attention but it actually provides you with significant results. It’s not just wasting your time repeating yourself in hopes to get something to stick, it’s actually using a sticky method to go over the information in the first place. This is the kind of studying that most students should do but unfortunately, most students don’t do. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Why Not Study Better</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">From a young age, children are encouraged to study like an idiot. Studying isn’t an easy concept for a young child to get their head around. Honestly, scientists have spent careers trying to learn how people can study well. It’s a complicated subject. So… instead of trying to teach young children a complicated study session, teachers and parents usually just teach children the good old repetition study strategies at first. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The good old repetition study strategy is one of the worst culprits of busy studying. It’s hard to memorize something. You need to be focused. You need to have motivation to learn it. You need to understand it to some extent. These all are complicated study requirements to understand at a young age. That being said, with a repetition study strategy, eventually, you will stumble into the right position to learn information. It will just take a little extra time. (Young children tend to have plenty of that time to invest.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Good studying doesn’t require short term repetition if you’re doing it right. If you’re trained with a good study strategy, you shouldn’t need to go over the same information more than once (at least most of the information you’re studying.) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Eventually, most students are taught some effective study strategies. They’re taught things like flash cards and mnemonics. Some may be crazy enough to work with mind maps. That being said, they never learn the intimate details that actually make them effective. (Things like focus aren’t treated seriously.) That tends to make students fall back on their old repetitive study strategies.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Why Don’t Students Stay Productive</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Productive studying is painful.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Yes… I used the word painful. It requires a large investment of energy. You need to invest focus, motivation, and planning into making productive studying work. It will save you a ton of time but it is not something that comes naturally for school work.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">I use flash card examples a lot throughout this blog but I feel like it’s one of the few study strategies that everyone is already familiar with. That means I don’t have to re-explain simple details to make my point.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Flash cards are difficult to use correctly. If you’re working really hard with a set of flash cards, you’ll become completely exhausted mentally. By the 30 or 40th flashcard you’re going to be a little bit stressed out. That’s understandable. That’s to be expected. That’s why most students using productive study strategies quit and decide to use a more simple study strategy like repetition. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Is Productive Studying Worth It?</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Many students decide that productive studying isn’t worth the cost in energy but from my experience, I think the energy is well worth it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">You only have so much time to spend studying. Since you’re limited on the amount of time you can study, you are also limited in the grades you can get using repetitive study strategies. Since they’re so inefficient, you may not even be able to get your grades up to the level you want. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Using productive studying, you can easily reduce your required study time investment by 50%. I’ve personally been able to cut my study time by 80-90% (depending on how you wanted to calculate it.) Since it requires less time investment, your grades aren’t as limited by the time you can invest. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">More important than those two point though: You have only so much time in your life. Sure, studying can be good for you but I imagine there are much more enjoyable things you could be doing with your time. For every hour you save on studying, you get to spend an hour doing things that you actually care about. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Productive Studying In A Busy World</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Sadly, one of the most common reasons students avoid productive studying is family and teacher pressures. Teachers and parents will assume you’re not studying well if you only spend 20 minutes studying every night. That means, they often pressure students (or downright force them) to study longer.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Considering how painful productive studying can be, it’s hard to blame anyone for not using it if they aren’t allowed to benefit from the extra time. That being said, I don’t think giving up is the right solution here.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">There are plenty of other ways you can work with productive study strategies. With a little creativity, all restrictions can provide wonderful loopholes to enjoy. Perhaps if you’re in a really tough situation you can look up some studies done on studying and show the evidence to people restricting you. (The longer someone is studying, the less efficient they get at studying.) Of course, having to beg permission to study effectively is one of the biggest problems with education these days.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Get creative and solve your study problems. It’s difficult at first but it’s well worth it in the long run.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Do you want to study in less than 15 minutes a night while still killing on the tests? That’s what this blog is all about. Be sure to follow and check out the archives for all the details. Oh… and have a kindle? Be sure to check out the books in the sidebar.</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-22737190990091137032015-06-08T15:01:00.000-04:002015-06-08T15:01:00.089-04:00Stand Up Studying<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gO2BgltlfzQ/VUJBLvtu9LI/AAAAAAAAA2c/sn2_gDD-cPk/s1600/6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gO2BgltlfzQ/VUJBLvtu9LI/AAAAAAAAA2c/sn2_gDD-cPk/s1600/6.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">What I’m going to be going over, on the surface, looks an awful lot like a minor point. It, alone, won’t dramatically improve your grades. Yes, it can have a positive impact on them but the real point of this article will come later on. I’m going to be telling this in a bit of a unique way in hopes that it helps the most important concepts sink in. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">What if I told you that you could improve your grades by studying while you’re standing up?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">It probably sounds a little ridiculous on the surface. It seems like one of those micromanagement things that I’ve discussed in the past. By that I mean, it’s a minor detail that you could waste hours experimenting with just to find a weak correlation with better memory. A weak correlation is hardly worth the extra effort involved. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">It might seem that way but I’d make the argument that it’s not.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Study Experiments</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">I’ve done hundreds of memory and study experiments in my life. I’ve constantly tried to find the most efficient way to learn the things that I had to learn. One of those experiments I did was with standing while studying. Of course, one semi-controlled experiment on an individual doesn’t mean all that much. That being said, considering I wasn’t trying to solve the problem for the world, I was just trying to solve the problem for myself, it was all I really needed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">By standing up while studying I increased by average memory test scores (long term and short term) by 5-10%. That is a relatively dramatic result for my average testing. The vast majority of my testing methods resulted in virtually no discernable data. This was an experiment that I was actually pretty confident in before starting because I had a theory.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">I’d done a number of experiments using physical activity while studying. I had the theory that muscle activation helps improve memory.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">This wild theory was repeatedly proven in my own experimentation. I hopped on one leg while studying. I used sign language. I did all kinds of bodily triggers for memories. Each one of my experiments showed a small memory increase when muscles were activated. That got me thinking that my theory was right.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Muscle Activation And Memory</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">My theory was originally based on wild and unscientific evolutionary theory. I thought, memory was required for hunting, gathering, and running from dinosaurs (okay… I know that last one’s not true,) so perhaps, memory is designed to work better in physical situations. Physical situations were more life and death than non-physical ones.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">My experimentation was able to prove (well-enough for my own personal use. It wouldn’t be nearly enough proof for a serious theory,) that unscientific theory. To some extent, science has already proved this theory with it’s on experiments.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Have you ever heard of muscle memory? Muscle memory is “riding a bike.” It’s the idea that, even with decades in between the last time someone rode a bike, they can still remember exactly how they need to move their muscles in order to not fall over. That’s actually an unbelievably complicated muscular movement that takes virtually no time to stick in the permanent memory.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Many experiments have gone even deeper with that memory and muscle connection though. Experiments have been done with subvocalization, sign language, and many other physical activities that show similar results. By activating your muscles while you’re studying, you introduce something else into your memory. Your brain is treating the situation with a higher priority than sitting on the couch with some flash cards. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">What I Want You To Take From This</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Studying is a full body experience.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Now, I can’t promise that statement is 100% true. Perhaps there is some part of your body that doesn’t participate in the acquisition of memory. That being said, I recommend you imagine my statement is completely true. Study as if, studying is a full body experience.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">What do I mean by a full body experience?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">I have a friend that’s an artist. If we were to watch a movie together, he’d always pull out his sketch pad and draw while the movie was playing. At first, I found this awfully irritating. I thought, there is absolutely no way this guy is enjoying this movie. That’s when I tested my theory by quizzing him. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">I asked him questions about the movie we were watching. With my first 10 questions, I couldn’t even tell he wasn’t watching the movie with all his energy. He constantly answered my questions right. (That was until I got into downright stupid questions like “what color shirt was this character wearing last scene?” I couldn’t have answered that one despite watching it.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">I asked him about this after that movie. He told me something like, “it may look like I’m not paying attention but I draw with almost none of my attention. It’s just doodling to help me focus.” (Naturally, his doodling makes my 100% focused drawing look like crap but that’s beyond the point.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Not all things require all your attention to do. You can probably chew gum and walk at the same time. Many students try to treat studying as if it’s chewing gum and walking. Instead of giving their studying all of their attention, they spread their attention between as many things as possible. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Distractions are deadly to focus while studying. This may seem wierd based on how I presented the information so far. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"> As much as you like to think texting your friend while studying won’t devastate your studyings effectiveness, you’re wrong. Unless you can objectively prove through your own personal experiments, that you’re the exception to the rule, you should not be letting yourself listen to music, talk to friends, or surfing the web while studying. Those offer physical and mental distractions that do miserable things for your studying. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Wouldn’t activating your muscles while studying be a distraction from actually studying? To some extent, I imagine it is. If you were, for example, trying to learn to ride a bike, I have a feeling you would suck at memorizing anything else. What if you’ve already mastered riding a bike? Then I’d think memory would be improved. Instead of being distracted it would be a rhythmic muscle activation that virtually doesn’t distract you at all. (Unless you were, perhaps, in traffic or something.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Now, throughout this article I drove this train of concepts right off the tracks and brought it down a few different dirt roads. Here is where I’m going to be trying to bring it back onto the tracks I was hoping to introduce you to…</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">What if mental activity can work similarly to physical activity when it comes to studying? If you had a rhythmic study interruption that didn’t require any focus to deal with, could it offer similar improvements to your ability to study? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">What’s the answer? I don’t know. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>My point: Studying is an unbelievably complicated subject that no one has even scratched the surface on. Everything I write in this blog is my attempted interpretation of the things I’ve learned and experienced. </b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Science is a constant tunneling of vision. Newton’s theories allowed scientists to focus their vision better. Despite all the progress made, Newton was proven wrong (or at least not 100% right) by Einstein. Einstein allowed scientists to focus their vision better. Some theorists think they’ve proved Einstein wrong in certain ways. Whether that’s true or not is irrelevant but the idea that a scientific theory can’t be proven wrong is faith and completely unscientific.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Experiment to learn more. Sure, this blog can help you focus better based on what science has discovered but if you ever get the curiosity to test for yourself, that would give me more pleasure than any of the grades you could get from talking this blog as gospel.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Do you want to know how to study faster than ever? That’s what this blog and my books (in the sidebar) are all about. Be sure to follow this blog to keep up with all of the details.</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-10671597443664787172015-06-01T03:02:00.000-04:002015-06-01T03:02:00.138-04:007 Teachers You Don’t Want To Have<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SQpmm9j-hPI/VUI5fC6i9PI/AAAAAAAAA1s/48RyASNmHNw/s1600/7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SQpmm9j-hPI/VUI5fC6i9PI/AAAAAAAAA1s/48RyASNmHNw/s1600/7.jpg" height="320" width="214" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/albertogp123/" target="_blank">Image Source</a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">All the studying in the world doesn’t help if you have the wrong set of teachers. Actually… that’s not true. All the studying in the world is what you need if you’re stuck with a miserable teacher teaching the subject. A good teacher makes a huge difference on your final grade for a few different reasons. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The first reason is a reason I’ve mentioned a number of times on this blog. Some teachers give easy A’s and some teachers rarely ever give them. Every teachers makes their class a little bit different in difficulty. Sometimes, you can just switch teachers and see a dramatic improvement in your grades. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The second reason is a bad teacher can kill motivation. It’s tough enough to study most subjects. If you have a teacher that drives you nuts then you’re never going to be able to focus and learn as much during class. That means you’ll need to spend more time outside of class catching up. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The third reason is one that I rarely mention because it’s kind of a given. Some teachers are good at teaching. Others are bad. Some teachers are good at teaching people like you. Others are not. These differences completely change the dynamics of a classroom situation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Here are 7 teachers you don’t want to have teacher your class:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Complainer</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">I can remember a slew of these teachers during high school. There I was getting dragged into a class I didn’t want to have to go to (I hated high school) and some teachers still insisted on sharing how depressing their own life was.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"> If the class was a little noisy the teacher would go on a massive aggressive or passive aggressive rant about why the students should listen. Sure, the students should listen but when with 9 out of 10 teachers the students do listen, the teacher never considers they might be the one with the problem.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">It’s a teachers job to get the student to care about the material. If the students don’t care about the material, of course, they’re not going to listen. This is common sense. Perhaps instead of complaining about how tough your life is, you should learn from the evidence the students are presenting.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Of course, that’s not nearly as bad as the teachers that come into school complaining about their personal lives. “Oh! I don’t get paid enough!’ Then shut up and get a new job. Students don’t control your paycheck. In fact, it’s none of their damn business. “Oh… my wife and I were arguing,” You are paid to educate people; not talk about yourself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Monotone Lecturer</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">It’s like some teachers actively try to be as boring as possible. Really… I can’t talk as boring as a monotone lecturer even when I’m trying really hard. The natural intonations of my voice end up slipping through as I’m trying to sound as boring as these teachers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">When a teacher goes through his or her lesson with a monotone voice, you can make a few assumptions with a high degree of accuracy. First, they don’t care about the students. Everyone knows that monotone lecturing sucks. Second, they don’t care about the subject. Passion leaks through when you care about something. Third, they are likely bored to death with their own life. I imagine they must go full breaking bad during their free time just to stay sane. Fourth, they don’t update their lessons often. So much for improving the lesson plan every year, these folks tend to teach the same crap, year in and year out, whether it works well or not.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Avoid monotone lecturers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">PowerPoint Pros</span></h3>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VsVRRar3ZBw/VUI6Tajo98I/AAAAAAAAA18/R1O-lQYB0W4/s1600/7410458576_8c4c8d0c42_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VsVRRar3ZBw/VUI6Tajo98I/AAAAAAAAA18/R1O-lQYB0W4/s1600/7410458576_8c4c8d0c42_z.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">No… Put away that powerpoint. I know how attractive it looks but don’t do it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The sad truth is that 99% of people blow at powerpoint presentations. Sure, I’ve seen a couple good ones in my life but it’s such a subtle balance that most people would be miles better off by just lecturing the subject. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">There are a ton of mistakes that can be made on powerpoints. One of the most common is the walls of text. Really… what is the point of putting a wall of text on a powerpoint and reading it? Most people that read the text off the powerpoint would rather you shut up. Most people don’t actually read the text and just wait for you to finish reading it. So, what is the point of it?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">You have one of the most advanced technologies in history. You could build animations, show pictures, show graphs, and all kinds of other things but there you are building a book projected on a screen that’s so brightly lit that it’s a little painful to even read off of.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Sure, pointless animations are another common problem. If it’s not actually related to the subject then you’re just being weird.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Politicizer </span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Man… teachers should not bring politics into the classroom. People like to pretend classrooms are a place for free and open discussion of the topics but that’s a couple lie in 99% of the cases. For that reason, most teachers shouldn’t even pretend it’s a free open discussion. It’s better if they just stick tightly to the educational information.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you end up learning the political leanings of a teacher in a classroom during a class that isn’t related to politics heavily (history, political sciences, etc.) then you can almost instantly assume that teacher is an idiot. It doesn’t even matter if they agree or disagree with you. They’re stupid just to bring the subject up.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">When a teacher shares certain beliefs with you, it can affect the education in two ways. It can affect their treatment of you and it can affect your treatment of them. Either way, unless both parties are mature (No… they’re not) then this will lead to problems or perceived problems in the classroom.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Center Of Your Universe</span></h3>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bl6Xd6u8YgE/VUI6tjzRMNI/AAAAAAAAA2E/fx9LIM9sFNw/s1600/146115791_68ee462d20_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bl6Xd6u8YgE/VUI6tjzRMNI/AAAAAAAAA2E/fx9LIM9sFNw/s1600/146115791_68ee462d20_o.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Some teachers seem to think that their class happens to be what you dream about at night. They think that you go home and study the subject for three hours with a huge smile on your face. They think all their student’s lives are going to revolve around their subject in the future. That’s why they insist on giving you so much work on their subject so you have no time to spend on any other subject.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">These teachers are absolutely insane. Don’t take classes from them. They will make you waste hundreds of hours on pointless activities on the subject. Sure, you may learn a ton about that subject but you’ll be sacrificing sanity, other grades, and things that are actually important to your life for what will most likely be a relatively pointless grade.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Conform Or D(ie)</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Sometimes getting the right answer isn’t enough for a teacher. You have to use their specific methodology to get that answer. Sure, in some subjects like math, that’s actually kind of important. But even in subjects like that teachers can get insane. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">I remember having a math teacher deduct points for me not writing down a super easy addition problem that came right after a super tough algebra problem while following her specifications perfectly up to that point. “Oh… well… if you don’t write down the no-brainers then your not showing ALL your work.” Oh please… there is no productive value to excessive writing stuff down when it’s been locked in your brain for 10 years. Sure, it’s a little stupid but at least there is a little sanity to this.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Some teachers go as far as forcing subjective strategies on all of their students work. Despite it being their personal preference they’re willing to knock off points just for doing it the slightest bit differently. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Let’s face it. People don’t think the same way. People aren’t all the exact same. Some people require different strategies than others. A teacher forcing a strategy on you is also forcing you not to use a strategy that works well for you. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Grade Curvers</span></h3>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Y2LkuWnpABI/VUI7VCghO5I/AAAAAAAAA2M/iQ2-6HF1hTE/s1600/3570152750_30c2358149_o.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Y2LkuWnpABI/VUI7VCghO5I/AAAAAAAAA2M/iQ2-6HF1hTE/s1600/3570152750_30c2358149_o.gif" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">I know… I know.... Some students love grading on a curve. Some students hate it. It usually comes down to how much it has helped or hurt them in the past. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">If a teacher is insanely difficult then a grade curve can seriously improve the average students grade. If a teacher is easy then it can seriously hurt the average students grade. Of course, it gets more complex than that though. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">What about the students? If you have a classroom full of smarter students, you’re going to be in a bad position. You’d suddenly have to compete to get higher grades. If you have a classroom full of lazy students then you don’t have to compete as much.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">From most of what I suggested from my piles of articles on this blog, you might be thinking, “this sounds like an exploitable situation.” By getting in classes with grade curving teachers and a bunch of idiots, you could end up getting straight A’s without much work. In theory that’s wonderful but in practice, that’s impossible (at least as far as I’ve tried. I also caused the school to fix an exploit in their website allowing. Oops…) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Ultimately grading curves just introduce a ton of really hard to control variables into the equation. Avoid them as much as possible. You can’t control who you’re in a class with. You can only control your own success or failure and which situations you put yourself in.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Sure, some of these teachers may not be your pet peeves but this is a pretty good list of my major ones. It’s mostly to remind you: Don’t take classes without teachers you like. Honestly… it’s a huge factor. In fact, I would pick the hardest teacher of a subject if I truly liked the teacher. It helps during every second of the learning process. In the same respect, I would avoid a teacher I didn’t like even if they were an easy A. Is that productive for my grades? I don’t know but I just think life is too short to waste with people I don’t enjoy being around.</span></div>
<br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Do you want to know the secrets to studying in less than 15 minutes a night? That’s what this blog teaches. Check out the archives and follow along for all the updates. Also, if ebooks shake your maracas then be sure to check out the three listed in the sidebar on the right.</b></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-63624677491764430932015-05-25T15:00:00.000-04:002015-05-25T15:00:00.853-04:00Getting $50 For An A: On The Floppiness of Stakes<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-QT2-Znv-0Dk/VUI3pdYCqHI/AAAAAAAAA1Q/ZPFapu2xiIY/s1600/4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-QT2-Znv-0Dk/VUI3pdYCqHI/AAAAAAAAA1Q/ZPFapu2xiIY/s1600/4.jpg" height="222" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Marshmallow Test</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"> 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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Self-Imposed Tyranny</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">School Is Important?</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline;">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; (</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">Go ahead</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; vertical-align: baseline;">) 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."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
<br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>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.)</b> </span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-26155964496622034132015-05-18T03:04:00.000-04:002015-05-18T03:04:00.295-04:006 Things To Ask Yourself Before Going To College<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-57dEPgN4Bk8/VUI1-hPv0YI/AAAAAAAAA00/-b5Flshxx0k/s1600/3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-57dEPgN4Bk8/VUI1-hPv0YI/AAAAAAAAA00/-b5Flshxx0k/s1600/3.jpg" height="212" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Here are some questions to ask yourself before going to college:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">1. Do You Want To Go?</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Going to college when you don’t want to go is a terrible mistake in most cases. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">2. Is It An Investment?</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">3. Is It Better To Wait?</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">For many students, it’s actually a smarter financial decision to wait a few years before going to college.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">4. Do you need it for your dreams?</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">5. Do you have a solid career plan?</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">First of all, what jobs does your degree qualify you for?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Next, which of those jobs pay enough to pay off your debt (unless it’s your dream job?)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Next, how many of those jobs are available?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">How many students are going to be graduating and competing for those jobs?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">“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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">6. Why Are You Going?</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">This is one of the most important questions to ask yourself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">What is motivating you to go to college? If it’s your dream job then awesome. That’s a good motivation to have. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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)? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The second best motivation is an investment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>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.</b> </span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-87019677351514895892015-05-11T15:02:00.000-04:002015-05-11T15:02:00.042-04:00The Pursuit Of Knowledge Versus "Grades"<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">In Pursuit Of Grades</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">By focusing on grades you get one less obvious advantage over other students.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">In Pursuit Of Knowledge</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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!”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Making Your Distinction</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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!” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Prioritization like that is one of the most powerful ways you can focus on improving your grades without increasing your knowledge.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">You don’t have to learn what school is teaching you but be damn sure to learn a little about something.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>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.</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-42683572053830878562015-05-04T14:00:00.000-04:002015-05-04T14:00:00.412-04:00You Won't Believe How Much Speed Can Improve Your Studying<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Fourth of all: Phew... Maybe I should just move onto the better alternative.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">How To Do Something “Impossible”</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">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).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Focus is fundamentally based on emotions.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">When it comes to focus on studying, how can you steer your brain in that direction?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Speed Demon</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Have you ever watched the Winter Olympic sport called Skeleton?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Studying should be done kind of like that.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">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?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Other Advantages</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Since you'll no longer dread studying quite as much, it's also a more enjoyable experience.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>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.</b></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-42404446132039734832015-04-27T15:00:00.000-04:002015-04-27T15:00:00.311-04:00The Problem With 100% Dedication To School<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zq4paOz6Fnc/VOdyhYrIfhI/AAAAAAAAArk/bq1xpAbP0es/s1600/3209636742_05babf8896_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zq4paOz6Fnc/VOdyhYrIfhI/AAAAAAAAArk/bq1xpAbP0es/s1600/3209636742_05babf8896_z.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">I write this as someone lucky enough only to have suffered a little with this problem. That being said, I’ve repeatedly watched close friends of mine drag themselves through the mud trying to solve some of these problems. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Some students obsess over school. They make sure that school is, by far, the number one focus in their life. They get disappointed at anything lower than an A+. They spend hours and hours studying every night. If asked, they’ll probably tell you they study “for fun,” but that’s usually just their rationalization for focusing so much on one aspect of their life. Sound familiar? Maybe even someone you’re close to? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Well… in many ways, this can be a really good thing. This kind of an obsession will certainly get you farther than an obsession with partying or building popsicle stick bridges. That being said, many students that have this “dedication” to school end up suffering from a number of problems. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you ever find yourself obsessing over school then think about these problems and try to decide if it’s really worth it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Life Isn’t Like School</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Many students with this dedication end up graduating from college fine. Their problems don’t start until after they’ve developed their tens of thousands of dollars worth of student loan debt. Dedication to school is cool but as soon as you’re released into the real world you’re going to have to understand that most of what you used to survive won’t apply anymore. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">In life, you are not graded on your performance. Sure, you might get a performance evaluation every few months at work but they’re usually useless. Most of your life, you’re going to have to assess your success and failure on your own. You can’t use any external scale to make that judgement because no external scale will fit. (Sure, the traditional good paying job, finding a spouse, and settling down works for some people but will it work that easy for you?) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">It’s easy to try and grade yourself based on the evaluation of others (just like at school.) You can keep a close eye on how much your boss or lover or someone else appreciates you and try to grade yourself on that but you’re just going to run yourself in circles until you realize that their motivations aren’t necessarily your motivations. (There are some people that it would be good practice to not be liked by. If someone is lazy and only likes when you don’t outshine them then making them happy may make your life worse.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Perfection is impossible. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">You can’t get an A+ in life. You can only balance your priorities and hope that you end up getting what you’re going for. There is no right or wrong answer (most of the time.) It’s mostly subjective preferences. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Some students just can’t transition well into the real world. One particularly hard transition point comes around failure. In school, failure is something to be ashamed of. In life, if you’re doing anything really meaningful, you can expect failure virtually every time you try. It’s a process of failing your way forward. That can lead to many good students settling for a mediocre life. (Which is a particularly big shame because through school they showed just how exceptional they’re capable of being.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Missing Out</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">When you focus your time and energy on school, you’re missing out on some of the more important lessons you can learn in life. Sure, you might just happen to get them but you won’t have the time or energy to immerse yourself into them completely.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The first, and probably, most important aspect that many students miss out on is social interaction. No, I’m not just referring to study buddies. They’re not the kind of social interactions that help most. The most important social interactions that you have in life will probably not come from business transactions, they’ll come from times when people are having fun. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">One of the most powerful tools you can have in life is a good network of people. Good networks don’t come from you being a good study buddy. They come from you being a charismatic and interesting person. If you happen to be a natural then great. If not, then this is a skill that you have to invest significant amounts of time into. If you’re at home studying, you can’t be at that social gathering making new friends. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Sure, you network at school can be good but it’s completely inbred and weak for that reason. At your school, the other students you meet will be more like you than different. It’s better to make friends in many different positions in life. Particularly important are friends of different ages. When you graduate college, it’s your older friends that can be hiring managers (or at least influential.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">There is more that good students end up missing out on though. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Being 100% dedicated to school means you’re not going to have time and energy to master any trade or hobby. Learning a trade or hobby is important for a number of different reasons. First of all, learning something outside of school is great for understanding the learning process better. It’s also attractive to colleges that are sick of seeing good students without a single damn skill outside school. Another point worth mentioning is that many great networks are developed from shared skills and interests outside of school.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Most Important Risk</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The most dangerous risk for 100% dedicated students is one that I’ll use a rather broad term for: burnout. You’ll hear that term in a number of different contexts. It can come in many different ways but it’s all fundamentally the same thing. It’s the loss of motivation. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">After years of a student being unbelievably motivated, something happens, and that motivation disappears.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">One of the most important skills you can learn in life is to strategically take your foot off the accelerator. You can’t always be going faster and faster in life. You’re not a machine. Heck, even machines can’t always go faster and faster. Eventually you need to slow down for a while. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you’re 100% dedicated to school then you’re at a high risk of burning out. Burn outs aren’t always deadly but they can instantly ruin months of hard work. Really, what’s the point of fighting hours a night to get 99’s and 100’s just to get a 65 on a test later when you’re depressed? It would have been better just to get consistent 90’s. Burnouts can cost major points.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">It’s better to slow down consciously to avoid ever burning out in the first place.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Some students end up burning out right after college graduation. They fight for decades to get good grades then they’re stuck asking, “What was the point?” That can lead to tons of poor decision making in the future. Suddenly they’re required to get a boring job to pay piles of debt. Good luck getting the motivation to excel at work in that situation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Don’t get caught in the trap of thinking school is the most important part of your life by a landslide. It’s not. Sure, it may be significantly important (if you choose to make it that way,) but ultimately there are other areas of your life that you can be focusing on. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Does that mean screw grades, quit school, and join the circus? Probably not but seriously reassess if the difference between scoring a 95 and a 100 really matter to you. Your life is definitely worth more than 5 points. So, slow down on that stressing out and have a little fun.</span></div>
<br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Do you want to know how to study in less than 15 minutes a night and still get amazing grades? That’s what this blog is all about. Be sure to follow and check out the archives for all the details. Also, check out the books in the sidebar.</b></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-69778189229571147732015-04-20T12:35:00.000-04:002015-04-20T12:35:00.432-04:00Students Guide To Time Management<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">“That’s when I take 15 minutes to eat lunch before I get back to studying Spanish until 1:30 when I head to class…” At this point I realized my little task of trying to help him study better was becoming something a whole lot bigger. It was something that I’ve seen a number of students doing and it makes it blatantly obvious the problem isn’t the student’s studying at all. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Some students get this time management bug. It causes them to schedule every minute of their day as closely as possible. While this can cause some short term gains in grades, and efficiency it’s usually a long term mistake. The students that end up creating these impossible to follow schedules usually end up driving themselves crazy until they give up on their schedule.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Schedules are okay. A loose schedule that says, “I’ll do this, then this around this time, and then this if I have time,” is reasonable. A schedule that requires you to stop and start tasks on a particular minute (or even with a 5 minute window,) is ridiculous. Sure, they help manage your time. The problem is that they completely limit your ability to manage your own life.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Problems With Schedules</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">You probably already know that “time management” is a popular subject in adult non-fiction. Thousands of books are written on the subject every year. Each one of those books has hundreds of interesting ideas to improve a person’s ability to manage their time. I’ve spent way too many hours reading books on that subject. Despite all the time I invested, I never could feel comfortable on a schedule. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Schedules are impossible to follow while keeping life in order. If you only have 15 minutes to work on something that requires 20 minutes then you’re given a choice, to keep your schedule and not complete it or to complete it and ignore your schedule. If you ignore your schedule, what’s the point of having the schedule? If you don’t complete what you need to complete then you’re going to have to pay the consequences for keeping your schedule. It’s a painful decision that virtually every major scheduling system requires you to make. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">To some extent, it is possible to “kind of” follow your schedule. By nudging and adjusting your schedule daily, you can keep everything in order while adjusting your schedule to fit. That being said, a good portion of your day becomes a process of Frankenstein monstering your schedule from the dead. (“Oh I chopped 15 minutes here so I better plop 15 minutes here later in the day.”)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">After a few weeks of following a schedule in that way, most people are driven completely nuts. It’s a mechanical, boring, and painful experience after a few weeks. Humans are not machines. We can’t continuously do the same thing over and over again without some major consequences on our mind. We need variety. We need spontaneity. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">When it comes to time management, schedules are not the way to go. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Do You Even Need Time Management?</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">This is a question I consider fundamental. Time management is useful when you have a whole lot of important things going on in your life. It is significantly less valuable (and possibly harmful) when you only have a few things in your life because instead of letting spontaneity spark productivity, you end up forcing productivity into little time slots.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"> More often than not, a person looking for time management advice doesn’t need time management advice, he or she needs elimination advice. If you’re worked to the point that you’re unable to manage your time automatically and without stress then you’d do better just giving up doing the things you really don’t care about. Before proceeding with time management, make a list of the big things you need to manage. If you could eliminate one or two of them then time management is not the best solution.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Also, time management is usually a short term solution. Sure, you can learn lessons that can be used throughout your life but strong time management can usually only be held in cycles of high productivity. This comes back to the schedule problem, the longer you keep the schedule, the more difficult it becomes to follow it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Ensure that any time management you use is temporary to keep yourself motivated. For example, manage your time closely until you get your grades back up to B’s, or manage your time just for the month of finals. These are practical time management goals.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">How To Manage Your Time?</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Schedule.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Yes. After all that hatred of scheduling I discussed, it’s still the most powerful way to manage your time. That being said, by the previous discussion on time management, I’m hoping you’ll realize you don’t even need time management. You just need what the next section in this article is about. Until then, for all those of you that really need time management:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Set up a schedule and eliminate the unproductive activities in your day or limit them to a small period of time in your day. Considering this schedule is temporary, don’t try and make it practical to follow long term. Instead make it at least a little bit uncomfortable sounding to follow. Cut out as much pleasure time as possible. (Trust me, pleasure time sucks when it’s scheduled anyway.) The less time you spend enjoying yourself, the less time you need to keep the schedule.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">For studying, make sure you don’t invest more than a half hour during each study session. The efficiency of learning decreases the longer you’re studying. It’s better to do 2 half hour sessions than 1 full hour session. If you’re studying by the recommendations in this blog regularly, an hour of studying is usually excessive in any number of sessions. That being said, it can be useful if you haven’t been keeping up with a class. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Better Than Time Management</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">I hope you choose not to manage your time. It can work short term but it’s kind of like a drug. Eventually, you’re going to hit rock bottom and hate everything about your life. That can easily lead to significantly worse problems than not following a schedule in the first place. There is a much better alternative to most time management problems: Passion management.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Passion management is focusing your life on the things that really matter to you. Instead of trying to make time for everything. Make time for the things that are most important to you. Then let as much of the other stuff as possible go. Instead of trying to get perfect grades in every class, fight to get great grades in the classes you love and okay grades in everything else. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">That idea can scare a good percentage of the students thinking about college. It’s usually an irrational fear though. If you’re competing to get into Harvard or MIT then you’re probably right to be concerned. The difference between a top notch, big name college and an average college is a big deal. If you’re worried about not getting into a particular smaller named college then it’s probably a waste of your time. (Most employers don’t know the difference between average universities.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Anyways, grades are an almost impossible to compete with standard. Points often come down to impossible subjective standards and teacher quirks. Sure, it’s good to get good grades but great and top notch grades require an absurd and usually excessive amount of time investment for the return.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Instead of managing your time. Manage the things you care about. Whenever you realize you don’t really care about something (and you don’t have an objective reason to worry about it,) slide it down on your priorities and spend less time worrying about it. That leaves you with more time to think about the things that matter.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Doing this, you can virtually live your whole life without “managing your time.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Do you want to know how to study in 15 minutes or less a night? That’s what this blog is about. Be sure to follow and check out the archives. Also, be sure to check out the ebooks for a crash course.</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-52202473466922865432015-04-13T14:30:00.000-04:002015-04-13T14:30:00.294-04:00Mastering An Overloaded College Schedule<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FmVEDUuoUcI/VOdpd74eteI/AAAAAAAAAqY/5a5o3dgkhLE/s1600/8226911299_555aaeb00e_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FmVEDUuoUcI/VOdpd74eteI/AAAAAAAAAqY/5a5o3dgkhLE/s1600/8226911299_555aaeb00e_z.jpg" height="320" width="316" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">It's a story I'm not completely sure I went over in any detail on this blog so far. I was a couple semesters into college. I had studying down to a fine art by that time. I was able to get most of my studying done in less than 20 minutes a day. (I hadn't made it quite into the perfect habit I would have liked. I took some days off completely.) Suddenly, I had plenty of extra time in my day.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">At that time, I had a part time job for a little under 20 hours a week. I had a full load of classes in college too. To make it a little tougher, I had to bike or walk 5 miles in each direction to get to class and work. (I also ate crappy. It's amazing how resilient the body is to complete collapse.) After getting my studying down to less than 20 minutes a day, I realized that I still had a good 2 or 3 hours free everyday. I, being the maniac I am, decided that would be the perfect time to double my course load.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Yes, I ended up taking another class or two every single day in a relatively pointless effort to finish college a semester or two early. That, obviously, introduced a few new challenges that I got to learn from.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">After a question from a reader. I thought it would be a good opportunity to share what I learned from that experience.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Teacher Lottery</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">One of the most important factors in surviving, thriving, or failing in any class is the teacher.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">There are some teachers that you can show up to class for and virtually always pass the class. They're so generous with points that the slightest bit of effort will make you a successful student. There are some teachers that require you put hours of studying and working in every night. These are teachers that give highly weighted busy work that makes loading up your schedule almost impossible.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">In college, try to learn about teachers for classes before you actually sign up for the class. You can ask friends about the teachers or even look online for some colleges. While you can't always pick the winners, this should increase your odds significantly. One of the best things about college is that you get to try your teachers out for a few days before getting stuck with them for the semester. It's usually blatantly obvious whether a teacher is going to require loads of busy work.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Specifically, just look at the syllabus for a general idea. If the teacher provides the formula used to calculate grades (f/e 10% homework, 80% test, etc.) then look for obvious opportunities. Also, in the first class, you can usually ask the teacher how much homework (excluding studying, add that to clarify, and make it sound like you study. Teachers like that,) is assigned.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you're planning on adding more than the usual class load or concerned about how difficult your class load will be then this it is absolutely fundamental. If you get a bad teacher or two, to look for better ones and switch classes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">After a few classes, you can even find students in other teachers first classes. Then ask them if you can check out their syllabus. You can quickly rule out some of your options. Pick the right teacher and most of the rest of your problems will solve themselves.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Prioritization Comes First</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">For the most part, I was able to keep up with a double course load relatively easily. It was busy but it didn't offer any serious challenges. That being said, I did struggle during finals. Suddenly, every class was offering it's hardest (and often slowest) work at the same time and studying was essential. That meant that I had to make some sacrifices.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">When you have a ton of work that needs to get done, you need to accept that some of it might not get done. Instead of staying up all night trying to prevent that, plan in advance to make it as small a problem as possible.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Some classes have work that almost completely doesn't affect your final grade. (If homework is 10% of your grade but you have tons of homework, skipping one day will barely change your final grade.) Use this to your advantage. While it can feel a little weird at first, getting comfortable with skipping work will help all your grades.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Sure, you could probably rush everything you have to get done but all of it will be crappy quality (including the things that really matter for your grade.) That means you may be sacrificing final grade points in exchange for not skipping a paper. It can be a tough choice but make the right one.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">I survived finals only because I got comfortable ignoring busy work until I wasn't actually busy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Effective Studying</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">You need to have your study habit in pretty good shape to survive an overloaded schedule. If you don't then you're either going to get it in shape at that point, or you’ll fail miserably.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you spend an hour a night studying for your classes then you're going to be getting miserable results for your time invested. By learning how to study as outlined in this blog, (or plenty of other resources) you can study in less than 15 minutes a night getting similar results. It's all a matter of perfecting the little things and ensuring your studying becomes a strong habit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Unless you're particularly gifted or lucky, you're not going to be able to study for finals in extra classes effectively without managing this.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">While I can't give you the information outlined throughout the pages of articles on this blog, here are the key concepts to consider in your study routine:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Short study sessions significantly increase your recall percentage.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Focus significantly increases your recall.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Habits can help you keep your study sessions short and increase your focus daily.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Learn these and you'll be able to handle just about any schedule you're stuck with. For more details be sure to read the archives of this blog.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Do you want to study in less than 15 minutes a night (while scoring higher than ever?) That's what this blog is all about. Be sure to follow and check out the archives. Also, there are some ebooks in the sidebar that might help.</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-13596211303848725512015-04-06T14:00:00.000-04:002015-04-06T14:00:00.517-04:00How To Pick College Courses<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-b2mb0IHsOD8/VOdkcNJjcdI/AAAAAAAAAps/iVWda92toW8/s1600/11055987884_2e3a892c55_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-b2mb0IHsOD8/VOdkcNJjcdI/AAAAAAAAAps/iVWda92toW8/s1600/11055987884_2e3a892c55_z.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">“How am I supposed to know that?” he told me. His eyebrow was lifted. He was looking at me like I’m an idiot.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Fortunately, I was returning the look at him. “How much are you spending on college every semester?”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">“About 10 thousand.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">“And you’re telling me that you’ll pay a teacher 2k or almost 2k to teach you without looking them up first and asking a few questions.... By the way, I totally can teach you...” It took him a minute to get my point. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">I tell this story because too many students forget this unbelievably important factor. In college, you could be paying thousands of dollars on every one of your courses. Maybe less, or maybe a whole lot more. You’re being absolutely stupid not to pick your college courses and teachers carefully. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">When it comes to courses, many students end up spending an extra 10 grand on classes they’ll never enjoy or use. (This is particularly true for liberal arts students. Unless you’ve got that kind of money lying around, that’s sure as hell not an investment.) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">What’s even crazier in my mind is just hoping you’re picking good teachers. A good teacher makes or breaks any course that you take. Most students have experienced this plenty throughout high school. Some teachers require you to invest hundreds of hours out of class just to pass the course. Other teachers require you to show up and occasionally do something to get an A+. Why wouldn’t you aim to pick that teacher? (I can think of a couple situations but those are rare circumstances.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">How do you pick the right course and teacher lineup?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Picking The Specific Courses</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Is the course required to get a specific technical degree that you’re trying to obtain? If yes, the answer should be obvious. If no, then it should be obvious but sometimes isn’t. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Don’t waste your money taking unrequired courses unless you have some VERY specific plan with it. You should virtually never consider it as an investment because any financial reward from it is tricky to predict. A degree has a clear financial reward. Extra classes, do not.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you’re crazy enough to take an unrequired course then treat it as the luxury it is. Earn the money to pay for it and don’t pay for it with student loans. Student loans are a good when they’re an investment, they’re just another credit card debt for unrequired courses.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Picking The Time</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Rarely pick a course in the time of day that you won’t enjoy. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you’re not a morning person then don’t sign up for early morning classes. There is no reason to try and fight the person you are right now. Maybe, with a little work, you could be a morning person but when you’re in college is absolutely not the time to try and find out. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you like to hang out with friends in the evening, you might want to avoid nighttime classes. You can usually get all of your classes in a time of day that you won’t feel as tempted to skip.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Of course, you can only be so picky and still get the courses you need. If required you can compromise a little on this point. How much you can compromise is essentially a balance you’re going to need to find yourself but with sleeping times in particular, many students overestimate their ability. (Sure, at 10pm you think getting up at 6am will be easy but at 6am you’re going to be thinking, nooooo way. Alarm off.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Picking The Teachers</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">This is one of the most important parts of selecting a course (for the strategies I teach.) If you want to spend very little time working outside of class then you’re going to need to pick a teacher that is very accommodating for that. Let’s face it, many teachers give boring slow busy work that no one can finish quickly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you want an A+ then you also better check out your teachers. Many teachers intentionally avoid giving really high grades. (Remember grading is subjective. One teacher’s B+ is another teacher’s A+. Find the one that will get you the A+.) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">This information is usually readily available around campus if you’re willing to look. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">First of all, check online professor review sites. They’re not great but they’re a good way to rule out some of the really bad teachers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The best resource you have is the students around you. If you’re looking for an easy course then ask someone who has taken that teacher’s course about it. Ask them if they found the teacher easy. Then ask more details about how well they did, how enjoyable the class was, and things like that.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">There will be some teachers that you can’t find out about. Sometimes you’ll have to sign up for their courses. This is okay because you always have your final option.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Final Corrections</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">After college classes start, you will often find out how wrong your estimated guesses actually were. Sure, you’ll have some really good courses but at least one or two of your classes are going to suck. The time to deal with sucky classes is early in the year. Switch out of them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Really… it can seem like a pain but do whatever it takes to switch because this is a huge decision. You’re going to invest tons of hours into your classes. You might as well not hate every second of them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The good thing about signing up for classes after the semester starts is that you can usually ask other students to look at other another teacher’s syllabus. When you can peek at a teacher’s syllabus, you get a great view of your time investment in the future. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">For example, if the teacher explains that 90% of your final grade comes from a couple tests, you can feel pretty confident you won’t spend much time doing homework. (It sounds scary but these are the kinds of courses that you can spend almost no time on if you’re confident with your study routine. If you’re not confident about your study routine then make sure to check this blog out for help.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"> Do not settle when it comes to picking classes. By spending a few hours researching, you can save yourself hundreds of hours over the semester. Take the time to look into your classes before you take them. Pick required classes at good times with good teachers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Do you want to know how to study in less than 15 minutes a night? That’s what this blog is all about. Be sure to follow and check out the archives for more details. Also, get one of the ebooks for a crash course.</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-14452134592627881452015-03-30T11:37:00.000-04:002015-03-30T11:37:00.400-04:00When Is It Alright To Skip A Study Session<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-iXEsbyvolmY/VOdkcxrldPI/AAAAAAAAAqA/iwyX0-4kch4/s1600/5432472223_0b59f66bc0_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-iXEsbyvolmY/VOdkcxrldPI/AAAAAAAAAqA/iwyX0-4kch4/s1600/5432472223_0b59f66bc0_z.jpg" height="214" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">On this blog I'm always tooting the horns of consistency. A good study routine is one that is as close to habitual as possible. At the same time, I've left a few comments in the mix that led to a little confusion among my readers. It's probably been a mistake not to have cleared this up earlier. Thanks to everyone asking the question about it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Study consistency is ideal and practically 100% required for the first few weeks of your study routine. Many people, that aren't completely committed, take takes off early in their attempted study routine and then end up giving up on the routine completely. So, for the first two or three weeks of any new study routine, buckled down and don't skip a session. Past that, you don't have to be perfectly consistent.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Bumps In Life</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">In an ideal world a person would be able to study at the same time, everyday, for the same length of time. Naturally, we live pretty far from that ideal world. That's particularly true for the busiest of students. It's a complaint I hear all the time, “I can't predict when I'm going to have time to study consistently.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Honestly, you just need to be 95% sure you can study at the same time consistently. (Do it when you wake up in the morning if you have to.) It doesn't really matter if you miss one or two study sessions a month. You'll still end up miles ahead of the less consistent studier.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">That being said, if you're missing study sessions regularly then you probably need to look deeper at yourself. Why can't you adjust your schedule to a consistent study time? You may unintentionally be trying to force yourself out of studying by putting that study session at a bad time. Then, when you have any excuse to cancel the study session you use the excuse.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">This is a serious motivation problem that you need to always be looking out for.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Sickness</span></h3>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nZmt_bOROwU/VOdkcW8IqKI/AAAAAAAAAp4/x8S3VcbaZ5w/s1600/4158475947_551be0a7a2_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nZmt_bOROwU/VOdkcW8IqKI/AAAAAAAAAp4/x8S3VcbaZ5w/s1600/4158475947_551be0a7a2_z.jpg" height="239" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Studying while you're sick can often be a waste of time. If you have the sniffles and aren't feeling that bad, it probably won't hurt to study. That's particularly true if you had already skipped some study sessions. That being said, you're going to be working at a lower efficiency than if you were feeling well.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you're seriously sick then you don't need to waste your time studying. Sure, you can get some results but for the most part, you are wasting time. It will be easier to spend more time studying when you're not sick to catch up (most of the time.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you're seriously sick for more than just a couple days then this changes slightly. One or two days of completely skipping your study routine for sickness won't hurt all that much. Once you skip a week or more you're putting your study routine (and ability to catch up) at risk. That being said, don't ever force yourself too much.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you're anything like me, you probably don't mind studying as much when you're bedridden and feeling like crap anyway. (Sure, it's not ideal but studying can help you fall asleep.) When you're sick for a long period of time, let yourself study if you feel like you're up for it. Ultimately, you're going to have to have a little discipline but you don't have too many better options.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Don't-Cares</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Ever start a study session and feel like quitting within five minutes?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Probably. That's usually a sign that you're doing something wrong with your study session. If you're completely immersed in your study session you won't start feeling the urge to stop for at least 15 to 20 minutes. That being said, even if you have the kind of study session I recommend in this blog, every once in a while you'll realize your brain is stuck in the off position for the night.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">It takes a lot of discipline to do the following but I absolutely stand behind it's effectiveness.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-TnUqbto3XHo/VOdkbyCcxkI/AAAAAAAAApo/7D-eyCvh0jY/s1600/3565221869_2a0c72185a_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-TnUqbto3XHo/VOdkbyCcxkI/AAAAAAAAApo/7D-eyCvh0jY/s1600/3565221869_2a0c72185a_z.jpg" height="160" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you normally don't have an issue studying but for some reason, you just don't feel like it this one day then feel free to quit. That being said, you should only be quitting after attempting to study for at least a third of your regular session.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">So, if you study 15 minutes (like I recommend in this blog. Check out the archives for the details,) then 5 minutes into your study session, if you still feel like quitting, you can quit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">After you quit studying, do not rush off to play a video game or do something fun. Instead just relax. This is to help prevent your brain from associating quitting studying with too much enjoyment. If you give it a few minutes before having fun, you'll be in a much better position to study the next day.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Of course, with all of these things I'm recommending, they come with a caution.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">!WARNING!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">I try to focus on consistency for a reason. Most people are too inconsistent with their studying. Whenever they see a post like this giving good reasons they shouldn't study, they'll use this as an excuse to keep studying inconsistently. (While I said it's okay to miss a couple sessions a month, they'll be missing 50% of their sessions and using this as an excuse.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">That's obviously not most of the regular readers of this blog because, lets face it, people that look up study strategies generally are much better at discipline than the general population.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Here is the way I recommend you keep an eye on yourself. If you ever feel like you're missing too many study sessions (and you miss more than 1 or 2 a month) then you're probably right. Heck, even if you're wrong, a little bit too much consistency wont hurt you all that much. For the most part, not studying because of these three things is for your pleasure. It's not because it would wildly hurt your study session. If you don't take a day off, don't.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Do you want to know how hundreds of readers are studying less than 15 minutes a night and still kicking ass? That's what this blog is all about. Be sure to follow and check out the archives. Also, look at the ebooks to get the crash course.</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-2476132514367660952015-03-23T11:30:00.000-04:002015-03-23T11:30:00.962-04:00Study One Page A Semester<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-obWlzTu9SME/VOdiHdjkzjI/AAAAAAAAApI/Ha51aAB1OTE/s1600/16473216041_a372d27abe_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-obWlzTu9SME/VOdiHdjkzjI/AAAAAAAAApI/Ha51aAB1OTE/s1600/16473216041_a372d27abe_z.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">What if you never needed to study more than a single page for your classes? How much easier do you think studying would be. It could save you hours and hours every single week. It would leave a ton of free time after studying. That is why I originally used this method in college. I was hoping it would have a dramatic impact on my final grade. Surprisingly, it did something much more interesting than that. I’ll get to that later.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you’ve read this blog at all then you’re probably familiar with the tons of experiments I’ve done around studying. I’ve studied in more methods than I could name and with each one I did semi-controlled experiments to find to the absolute most effective ones. When I heard someone describing this method I’m discussing here, I got a little excited. It seemed to coincide with some of the most important study factors I was finding. It sounded like a super powerful method. After the experimentation, I found out it was but not how I expected.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">So, without further ado, here is the study method:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Throughout each course, keep on extra sheet on lined paper. After each class, or chapter in your textbook, write down the absolute most important things on that single extra sheet of paper. Here’s the important part though: by the end of the semester, you cannot get a second sheet of paper to continue writing this. Just continue to add to this single sheet of paper. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">You can get creative to try and write more and more information on that single sheet of paper. That’s actually part of the fun. By the end of the semester, you’re going to have the most important points for the class written on a single sheet of paper. I, personally, was able to study exclusively off of that single sheet of paper without it causing any negative effect on my expected grade.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">This might sound a little crazy. I’ll get more into the details later but first, I think it’s worth going over why this method is awesome.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Why It Works</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">This study method is a false restriction on the amount of information you need to study. In the average textbook there are hundreds of thousands of potential facts to memorize but in reality, the class probably only requires you to know a handful of them. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">When you pick up the textbook to study, or your full class notes, you’re making the task of studying significantly more difficult than it has to be. You not only have to study the information but you’re forced to try and find the most important information to actually learn.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">When that most important information is already decided, you don’t have to go through a list of unrequired facts again. That means your studying goes much easier. That does something even more important though.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">When you reduce the information that you have to learn, you completely change the way you think about studying. When I was studying for that course, I never once felt overwhelmed having to learn the information on the page. That meant getting myself to study in the first place was unbelievably easy. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">This method involves false restrictions on the amount of information you have to learn. That makes it much easier to learn the important stuff. It also does one more super important thing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">It ensure that you actually think about the class outside of class. You’re required to spend at least a few minutes after class narrowing down any important information that you received. That process involves a bit of studying in itself. It’s no surprise this method works because it actually requires you to put in a little bit of studying regularly. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Some Important Tricks</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">This method of studying works very well. It can cause a very deep level of learning. While most of the study methods I recommend are quick fixes that don’t offer you “permanent stick-forever” learning. This is one of the methods that can really make information stick. Since you’re going over that same information regularly, it’s natural to remember it. Here is what you need to know and do to make the best of it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Information Capsules:</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">At the earliest chance you get, create boxes on that single sheet of paper. Create the number of boxes based on the number of times you plan on updating that single page. If you plan on updating it once a class then make one box per class. (In high school, you may need to focus on one box per week or something.) Make those boxes as big as you can while still fitting them all on the page. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Then, each class, or each time you fill it out, make sure not to require more than the single box. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">This ensures that late in the semester you’re not stuck using a tiny section of the paper for a large amount of information.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Single Sheet Is Variable:</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you’re taking an anatomy course or something ridiculously tedious, forget about the one sheet restriction. Some courses, mostly in college but not all college courses, have too much information to fit on a single sheet of paper. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Increase the number of sheets to something a little more reasonable. More reasonable means a couple more sheets, not a whole notebook. Personally, I couldn’t see a course requiring more than 4 sheets for a really good grade (as long as you’re filling in those margins well.) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">There is one important note though: Plan the number of sheets in advance and do everything in your power not to increase that amount. The false restriction doesn’t really exist if you don’t actually plan to follow that false restriction. You won’t get half the benefits if you don’t treat your selected page limit seriously.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Teacher’s Emphasis:</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">In most courses, teachers are virtually giving away the test questions. Teachers have a tendency to lecture for the specific tests. Remember that whenever a teacher spends a significant amount of time on any particular point. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Given the choice of focusing on the textbooks emphasized points and the teacher’s emphasized points, always put the teachers points first. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Results Of My Experiment</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Here is the most interesting thing about this method. It actually taught me the information in the course really really well. While I’m all about using cheap tricks to score high in courses, this study method ended up getting the information to stick really well. That is actually one of the reasons I don’t use this method particularly often…</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Here’s the deal: This is a great method for learning new information. That being said, it’s not the most efficient way to score high in a class. That means it doesn’t fit into my 15 minutes a night study strategy. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Are you looking to really understand the material in a course? Then this study method is absolutely great. If you’re looking to score high without investing much energy, this is an okay method. That being said, it requires a relatively large time investment when you add up all the single sheet updates.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Do you want to know how to study in less than 15 minutes a night? That’s what this blog is all about. Be sure to follow and check out the archives for the details. Also, check out the ebooks in the sidebar for a crash course.</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-77293872264306462712015-03-16T14:00:00.000-04:002015-03-16T14:00:00.950-04:00Maximize Your Grades With Focus Rotation<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1i_sp2_zG58/VOdgUp_ua5I/AAAAAAAAAo0/DKc33foD5fk/s1600/4737745296_e0917fa616_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1i_sp2_zG58/VOdgUp_ua5I/AAAAAAAAAo0/DKc33foD5fk/s1600/4737745296_e0917fa616_z.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">When you're working to study as efficiently as possible, you need to change the way you approach your study time. Theoretically, you could be studying all day. The average high school provides enough textbook pages to make it completely impossible to keep up in all the potential study material. There is no reason you couldn't be studying every free second you have but, of course, that's a complete waste of time when you could score similar grades studying less than an hour every night.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you've kept up on this blog then you'll know this by now. Studying longer usually just reduces the efficiency of your studying. By dramatically reducing your study time, you can usually get better results. Doing that introduces a few problems though. First of all, when you're taking 5 or 6 or more classes, how can you possibly study for all of them in a limited study period?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">The answer includes two different things. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">From my experience, a portion of the classes you're taking will require almost no studying. (That is, assuming you've kept up with your previous courses and aren't in a particularly challenging program.) That instantly knocks away a portion of your required studying.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">The next part of the solution is...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Focus Rotation</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Focus rotation is absolutely fundamentally to getting this study routine to work. (Quite frankly, I think it's fundamental to just about anything in life but that's a whole different subject.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Focus rotation is the strategy you use to decide which courses you're going to be putting your study time and focus into. If you're doing it well then you should be scoring high in virtually every class. If you're doing it poorly then you'll probably be falling behind massively in at least 1 class.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Focus rotation happens naturally in most cases. A student might see a test coming up the next day in one class and decide to study for that test. That being said, naturally (and haphazardly) hopping from study focus to study focus usually just causes more harm than good. Instead focus rotation should be a conscious and planned change between your potential focuses. By doing that, you can learn to actually maximize your results.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Basics</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Focus rotation isn't all that complicated a subject but it can be tempting to leave it up to chance. You've got set up a focus rotation plan AND actually follow it. The effect this can have on your grade can be dramatic (if you're not naturally good at it.) If you're naturally good at focus rotation then you'll still usually see a small boost.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">An example of a focus rotation plan might look like this:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Study for my lowest grade class 3 days a week. Study for my second lowest grade class 2 days a week. Study for my next two lowest grade classes 1 day a week each. Excluding the night before test days when I can study for the class with a test.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Simple. Right? Mostly at least. (I've personally used a study rotation strategy that took up a whole page. These strategies can get pretty complicated.) Notice the focus on lowest grade classes. That is not required but can work well (with a few challenges.) Everyone requires a different strategy. You'll need to play around a little to find yours.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">I recommend you come up with your own basic outline for your current classes. Think about it like creating a flow chart for your required studying. Make it so you know which courses you're required to study for every night (or at least most of them.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">There is one important point you need to focus on with your study rotation. Do not make it subjective. If you say something like, “study the course I need to study,” or something up to ridiculous interpretation then you're wasting your time. The key is making only one potential option that leads to the right choice. Objective factors would include class scores, homework scores, test scores, class difficulty (as rated by anything excluding your gut,) etc. The more objective your rotation, the more you're going to be able to adjust it for perfection.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Hardest (And Easiest) Part</span></h3>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nKXUdDWjvEY/VOdgUSng7MI/AAAAAAAAAow/kUAYf11M_cE/s1600/8354190215_b47b0550ea_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nKXUdDWjvEY/VOdgUSng7MI/AAAAAAAAAow/kUAYf11M_cE/s1600/8354190215_b47b0550ea_z.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">The hardest part about setting up a study focus rotation is being honest with yourself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">In designing this plan, you have some incentive to lie to yourself about which classes you need to study for most. That's because, usually, when you don't do well in a class, you also don't really enjoy studying for it. While you're designing this plan, you may want to undercut the required time you'll need to study for the class.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">The opposite incentive also exists. If you score well in a course then you probably enjoy studying it a little more. That means you might want to give yourself extra time studying it that you don't actually need.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">These incentives can be difficult to ignore completely. People have a tendency to either fall for these incentives or, instead, study the hard classes excessively to make up for those incentives. Do you want to know the secret to dealing with that and balancing the classes study time? Yea... Me too. That's just about figuring out your tendencies.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">The great part about that challenge is that when you figure out the solution, you never have to worry about it again.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Most students occasionally have hiccups in their unplanned focus rotations. They might not know which class they should study for. That can lead to five minutes of the student metaphorically (or physically) banging their head on their table trying to figure it out. When you have a focus rotation set in place, you don't need to waste time trying to balance your course load because the equation is already set.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Rebalancing</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Oftentimes, this study rotation routine will suddenly not work. Sometimes, courses can introduce piles of extra required studying. To make up for that, you may have to adjust your study focus rotation. That being said, try to update the rotation to include a clause to help you deal with that extra required studying (so you, hopefully, don't have to change your plan again in the future.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Over a few semesters, your study rotation should almost be set in stone.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Using your objective focus rotation you can maximize your grades in each and every class without wasting a significant among of your time studying things that you don't absolutely have to.</span></div>
<br /><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Do you want to know how to study for less than 15 minutes a night while scoring in the top of your class? That is what this blog is all about. Be sure to follow it and check out the archives to get all the secrets. Also, check out the ebooks for some crash courses in the subject.</b></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-41057592902106262512015-03-09T14:00:00.000-04:002015-03-09T14:00:00.981-04:00How To Survive The Most Difficult College Majors (15 Minute Study Strategy)<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">I’ve received a ton of questions from students asking how to use my study strategies in a “hard” major like Pre-Med or Engineering. I put hard in quotes because there needs to be an important note considered with that. I, generally, agree (not based on anything useful like experience, well one, not the other) that engineering and medical are the most difficult majors to score high in. There have been plenty of studies suggesting that. That being said, hard is a really difficult concept to pin down.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Every subject has its particular challenges. Those challenges shouldn’t be compared based on a single scale because every person has their own skills and weaknesses that ruin the simple scale considered. A person that loves and kicks ass at math might find engineering significantly easier than psychology or something. A person that hates math but is smart as hell can still suck in an engineering major.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Sure, maybe those scales are generally accurate but they mean almost nothing without including the students aptitude to learn certain things.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">When you’re looking to use the study strategies suggested in this blog, you may or may not have to adjust them a little. If the classes you’re taking are particularly difficult (TO YOU) then you definitely need to adjust these strategies in certain ways. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Here are the factors you need to work on:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Study VS School Work</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">I recommend not spending more than 15 minutes a day studying. As unbelievable as that number may seem, in almost every major it’s appropriate to score good. If you want to learn more about the 15 minutes of studying then be sure to check out the archives of this blog for details. I’ll go into the specific ways to adjust those 15 minutes later in this article. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Those 15 minutes are for studying. They are not for school work.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Schoolwork can dramatically change the amount of time you have to spend. If your teacher is a jerk and gives you two hours of boring school work every night then I can’t help you with that. (Other than possibly suggesting to check the value of completely skipping the homework and taking the loss.) Some teachers don’t provide homework. You can be finished with those teachers work in absolutely no time at all. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Engineering is one of the majors where more time for work is needed. Much of engineering is math. Math is usually best learned by working on it. It can’t be studied well with the traditional strategies. That usually means you have to give it more school work time. Of course, since engineering requires a lot less brute memorization, you may be able to get away with a significantly shorter study session. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Another major that requires a ton of outside school work is education. You may have to put in dozens of extra hours a week to complete all your required assignments. In general, they’re not pull your hair out challenging but I hear they can drive a person nuts. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">When To Increase That 15 Minutes</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Some majors require a seriously ridiculous amount of memorization. Most of them don’t. While I can’t go through every single major and list which ones need more than 15 minutes and which ones don’t, I can give you some basic guidelines. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">To start, assume you don’t need to study more than 15 minutes a night. As before, this may sound ridiculous but you’ll never know unless you try. That is the case with most students in most majors who aren’t already behind. The only exception to the 15 minutes a night studying to start, I would consider, is a student that missed out on significant portions of the basics or doesn’t speak the native language at their college.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you’ve used this strategy in high school then you’ll know within a week or two if you’re keeping up. If you’ve never used this strategy before, you may need to try it for a month. (Of course, if you’re already thinking “there is no way this will work.” It probably won’t work. You need to be committed to getting it to work.) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">There is one major that gets a ton of attention as a difficult major. Some medical major classes you enter are going to be particularly challenging when it comes to studying. Studying for a medical major is like studying in a new language. There are going to be thousands of new words to learn. Then you’re going to have to learn how they interact. I would not be surprised if you need to add more study time. Make sure you do it right though.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Do not add more than 10 minutes to your individual study sessions. You’ll just kill your efficiency past that. Add more short study sessions if you have to. Instead of doing a single 30 minute study session do two 15 minute study sessions. Keep your study sessions closer to 15 minutes than 25 minutes whenever possible. You should not need to add more than two 25 minute sessions unless you’re struggling, approaching finals, or taking an insane course load. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">As you increase your study time, you have to count on your efficiency lowering. Remember to control the length carefully. If more study sessions doesn’t work for you. Consider switching to the flash card strategy I discussed a few weeks ago. That strategy is particularly powerful for medical majors.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Adjusting On The Fly</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">To some extent, if you’re taking a really difficult major then you’re going to need to learn to adjust as you go along. Every single major in every single college offers wildly different experiences. While you may dominate in one college’s math major, you may completely bomb in another one. That means you need to be observant enough to know when you’re struggling and when you’re thriving.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">I’ve found most students (that read this blog) tend to assume they’re struggling even when they’re not. Try to force yourself to be honest about these kinds of things. If you can’t be objective then keep track of all your scores and set goals in advance for them. Then don’t trust the way you feel and only trust the results. Did you meet your goals or not?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">As you get deeper and deeper into a particular major, you should be able to find people to help you come up with good study strategies yourself. Remember to look for efficiency. You don’t have to waste your whole day studying just to survive a major. Heck, I can almost guarantee you, there is someone dumber than you, studying less, and still scoring higher than you without cheating. Figure out what that person would do. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Do you want to know how to study in less than 15 minutes a night (well… usually?) Well, that’s what this blog is all about. Be sure to check out the archives and maybe even get an ebook for a crash course in it.</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-76212075593982808212015-03-02T14:00:00.000-05:002015-03-02T14:00:00.847-05:005 Reasons Your Teachers Are Usually Horrible Resources For Study Advice<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.2;">Most students are horrible at studying. That's because the only education they ever got on how to study came from people that are also horrible at studying. Teachers typically give some of the worst study advice around. They often suggest ridiculous time periods to study every night. They often recommend reading the textbook (as if anyone ever learned from that.) This is the kind of advice you get for studying from a person that's never learned how to study themselves.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Why are your teachers usually such bad study resources?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">1. They Love The Subject</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Imagine you're a history teacher. You became a history teacher because you really enjoy learning about history. People don't become history teachers unless they're particularly fond of history (otherwise they'd become math or english or some other kind of teacher.) This history teacher probably thinks about history when he's not on the job. He enjoys it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">He probably reads books about history. (Not the crappy textbooks you're given but good learning resources.) Heck, reading a book about history may be considered a good time for him.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Now if you ask this guy for study advice, what's he going to think? “Well, I study about 1-2 hours a night.” Of course, his definition of studying includes him spending time doing the things he enjoys. At best, this study advice is heavily biased.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">2. They Chose This Life</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Teachers don't go into teaching because they think most of school is stupid.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">People that don't enjoy school don't typically become teachers (short of a few sociopaths that like to inflict suffering or something and a few radicals trying to change it.) To anyone that doesn't enjoy school, this may surprise you but some people actually enjoy the simplicity of school. It's a predictable day with friends for those people.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">If the vast majority of teachers enjoyed school growing up then they have a similar bias towards schooling. That means, when they tell you to study an hour a night, they're implicitly saying, “I enjoyed studying an hour a night,” not “This is what you should do.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">WAIT! Am I saying people that like school also like studying more? Yes. I am. Let's face it. When I took my textbooks out in early high school, I had to fight thoughts of killing myself (literally actually.) That instantly ruins any potential studying that takes place. If I were able to enjoy schooling, I'd be able to study much more efficiently.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">3. Education Is The Easiest Major</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Estimates regularly show that education is one of the easiest majors that you can go through in college. (It is the easiest of the major fields. By the way, I'm disgusted by that too.) People that would not survive an engineering degree, or a nursing degree, or a chemistry degree end up going into education. That lower pool of competition means you've got a clear set of people that aren't studying as well as the harder majors on average.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Remember, people with engineering degrees can get into teaching easily. (Then again, why would they?) People with teaching degrees can't easily get into engineering. That means the more intelligent degree to get is usually the more difficult.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">4. Learn VS Score Bias</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">When teachers give you study advice, they're usually not giving you advice to help you increase your score. They're usually giving you advice to help you learn the subject. Those are two unbelievably different things.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Learning a subject is always a challenge. There is virtually unlimited things you can learn about any subject. People often spend decades of their life learning about relatively small things like WW1 (not quite small) or Crawfish. After those decades of studying, they still end up learning new things.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Getting higher scores is actually pretty easy. There are tons of things you can do to increase your final score without learning a single new fact about the subject you're supposed to be learning. Increasing your scores is concentrating your study efforts on the things that actually matter to the class.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Most students looking for study advice are just looking to improve their grade. That means any study advice designed for learning can help but isn't nearly as efficient.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">This is one of the most prominent reasons teachers always overestimate the time required to study for a subject. You can study for most tests in less than 10 minutes a night. (15 minutes is what I usually say but 15 is really conservative for a single test.) Of course, studying for the test won't make you an expert on the subject. It will just get you to pass the test comfortably.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">5. They Rarely Know Any Of This...</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Sadly, teachers usually think they're one of the best resources for study advice without ever giving it any real thought.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">They're applauded by everyone as heroes all the time and most people aren't willing to say anything that's the slightest bit judgmental. They're coddled into thinking they're special (even if the ones that objectively suck at teaching.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Most teachers aren't actively trying to spread stupid advice. They're just spreading the same stupid advice that they were taught by their teachers. Maybe they'll change a few words to keep it interesting but in reality, most are just recommending the same old stuff.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">In the past 30 years there have been hundreds of empirical studies on “how to study.” Most of this data hasn't been dug through by these teachers. If you spend 20 minutes looking at these studies you'd learn that virtually all the advice those teachers give is horribly misguided.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Now that this has all been said, you can't keep blaming them for the bad advice anymore. Just because they give bad advice, it doesn't mean you have to listen. You have to take ownership of your own life and start looking for a better way. There are tons of resources that can help you do that. This blog has over 50 articles that can help you get started.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>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 kindle books in the sidebar for the crash course.</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-31496577593990538172015-02-23T15:36:00.000-05:002015-02-23T15:36:00.246-05:00Does Your College Major Suck?<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CSpnuU2DQNY/VLQbMmNb1aI/AAAAAAAAAnQ/buZ7LrPJZIo/s1600/5616240389_4d0a64033a_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CSpnuU2DQNY/VLQbMmNb1aI/AAAAAAAAAnQ/buZ7LrPJZIo/s1600/5616240389_4d0a64033a_z.jpg" height="320" width="213" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">It’s one of the biggest mistakes you can make in your life. Yes… not only in college. Picking a bad college major can end up costing you for the rest of your life. While it may look like you only have to invest 4 years in a bad major, many students end up having to spend decades of their life trying to pay off the debt of that major mistake. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Do you remember those advisers telling you to “do what you love?” I’m sorry to have to be the one to inform you of this but they’re full of crap. Now, if what you love happens to be engineering or medicine then maybe they’re right. If you’re like most people, those advisers can end up costing you a good portion of your life.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">How do you know if the college major you picked sucks?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Market</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">That philosophy degree is probably a bad idea. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The first thing you need to look at when considering a college major is the jobs available after graduating. There is an exception to this rule though. If you happen to have the money to pay for college in cash and don’t expect to get a job after graduation then you can consider a major without looking at the market. Unless you happen to be rich, money matters.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">College can end up costing over $30,000 a year. We’re talking about over $100,000 in debt. It doesn’t matter how good a college degree you get, that’s going to take a damn long time to pay off. College can be an investment or it can be a luxury. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you don’t look at how marketable your skills are after graduation then it’s sure as hell not an investment. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">There are two major pieces of information you need to gather. What do the jobs you can practically get out of college pay? What are the odds that you can actually get one of these jobs?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Many people look at salary websites alone to research their job options. “Oh, a philosophy teacher gig pays $xx,xxx a year. That’s plenty!” It’s absolutely essential that you take that information and consider it in the terms of competition. How many jobs are opening in the field every year? (How many people are going to be graduating the same year as you? Sometimes those numbers can be disturbingly close when you consider all the colleges in the country.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">If college is a luxury then sure, skip this step. If it’s an investment then it’s the most important step.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Competition</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Do you want to get into law school or medical school? Maybe you shouldn’t…</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">You’ll notice that most of the issues this article deals with can be kind of painful. That’s the point, plenty of people will tell you what you want to hear. You don’t need to read an article on that stuff. The important stuff is the stuff people don’t want to tell you.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">You need to look at how skilled in school you are before going into certain fields. A small minority of students make this mistake but it can be a very costly one in the long run. You need to go into a major that you can practically compete with the other students in. If you’re a mediocre student, don’t go to college expecting to compete well in the hardest fields. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">I know. You may be able to succeed in the harder courses. That’s very possible. It’s much more likely that you’ll suck. At the very least, you’re going to be struggling to keep your head up. Just because a school lets you into a major, it doesn’t mean you should want to go there. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Ideally, you want to be in a college major that you can do amazing in. At the very least, you should be looking at college majors that you can comfortably compete in. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Sure, it doesn’t matter the grades you get in school after you get your degree (in most fields,) but getting the degree shouldn’t be a surprise to yourself or anyone else. That’s just risking years of work and tens of thousands more dollars. Constant failure and struggle is the cause of many high debt drop outs.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Your Preference</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">You should not be getting a college major in a field that you don’t love without a damn good plan. Yes, I used the word love. If you’re thinking, I kind of like math, I guess I’ll go into math, then you’re not listening. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">This can seem like a pretty high bar to have to jump over because it absolutely is. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The majority of high school students aren’t ready for college. Most students going to college right out of high school might as well be jumping out of their plane before they grab their parachute. You should love any field you want to get a college degree in unless of course, you planned it that way.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">What’s that plan I’m talking about? Let’s face it. Some people are never going to find a college major they love. Colleges don’t cater to everyone’s preferences. That being said, college can be an investment if treated like an investment. You don’t need to always love your investment, you just need to be willing to pay the price. I would argue, unless you’re talking about a 6 month or smaller time investment, is usually not worth paying, personally. If you’re thinking about a 4 year degree at a nice university as your investment then you’re being downright crazy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">What if you like a certain field but aren’t sure if you love it?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">That’s one of the best places to be short of finding a subject you love. If you have any doubt about how much you’d enjoy a particular field then get a job in it before college. If you’re thinking about becoming a nurse, become a CNA. Sure, it’s not exactly the same but you’ll get to watch nurses work. If you want to be a math professor, become a math tutor for a while. If you want to run a business then heck, why not run one before you go off to college too. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">You don’t need a college degree to get started in most fields. As long as you don’t make any foolish decisions, you will be able to go to college in the future. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">I know it can be scary to head out in the real world when everyone is telling you college is the only smart option but just imagine how much more scary it’s going to be after college. Imagine spending another 4 years in school and building up tens of thousands of dollars in debt that you have to worry about. (You can’t afford to work minimum wage then. You better hope you made the right decisions in college.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">College can be an amazing investment but it can also be a costly mistake if you’re not careful. Don’t let other people push you into something that you’re not completely comfortable with. You know that “peer pressure” your parents talked about? It’s real and it’s exactly what everyone is trying to get you to succumb to. If you go to a bad college major then you might as well be walking off that bridge the old cliche talks about.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Do you want to know how to study fast? Check out the archives for all the secrets your teachers won’t tell you. Also, check out the sidebar for all the details in three convenient ebooks. </b></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-37850005466432394672015-02-16T15:38:00.000-05:002015-02-16T15:38:00.068-05:007 Test Taking Tricks: Increase Your Score Dramatically Without Wasting More Time Studying<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7ulMVWU2GRM/VLQV9_9ZQxI/AAAAAAAAAms/jWczcyFQ_V8/s1600/13905987989_4d0401eb9f_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7ulMVWU2GRM/VLQV9_9ZQxI/AAAAAAAAAms/jWczcyFQ_V8/s1600/13905987989_4d0401eb9f_z.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Despite the constant onslaught of advice provided for students, virtually none of the information provided is good. Sure, there is a lot of advice that can increase your grades a little but really, who cares? I do not want to stare at my textbook 3 hours a day to see my score increase by 5%. It’s just not worth it. I want to see my grade shoot up without investing a ridiculous amount of time. That’s what this whole blog is about. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">While this blog focuses a lot on test preparation, there is actually a fundamental factor that can often be overlooked. This factor can easily increase your test scores by 10% without even investing another second. With a little time, crazy increases can happen. That factor is test taking skills.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Let’s face it. We all think we suck at test taking but if there is one thing worth buckling down to learn its this skill.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Using these test taking tricks you can see a dramatic increase in your final score while investing the bare minimum amount of time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.15;">1. Last Second Cram</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The amount of time required to study is significantly dependent on the amount of time you have until the test. The human brain has long term memory and short term memory. Long term memory is the strategy employed by the vast majority of students. Long term memory is what you’re using when you study days before the test (or weeks before it.) Using short term memory is often neglected.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">By studying within 20 minutes of taking your test, you can maximize the value of your short term memory. The closer you are to test time, the better you’ll remember the information you’re studying. While it has some severe limitations, those limitations mean nothing compared to the huge score boost you’ll get. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Certainly, you shouldn’t rely on the last second cram to provide you with your whole test score but it can definitely be used to give your test score a shot of last minute points.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">This next step is so powerful that it can feel almost like cheating. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">So, after your last minute cram, ideally when the teacher is starting the class and before the test is handed out. Put your study material in your bag. You won’t need it and it will just make it harder to do this next step. As soon as the teacher hands you your test to start, use the margins to write down everything that you’re afraid you’ll forget.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Yes, any of that last second cramming information you’re worried about losing because of the heat of the test, write it right on the test. It can’t get forgotten now. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Will a teacher ever ask a question about it? Sure, but just tell them the truth, you were afraid you’d forget in the heat of the test. (Your books were away and you were allowed to start to test.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">I’ve actually received compliments from teachers for that strategy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">3. Quick Run</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Once you’ve got everything prepared to start taking the test, it’s time to maximize the accessibility of the information you just last minute crammed. More importantly, you’ve also got to find a way to use your memorized information without letting the stress take over. One of the best ways to do that is to pick up the pace.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Go through the test as quickly as you can possibly do it. Skip every question that isn’t easy for you to complete. Do that until the end of the test. In an average college test you can expect an easy 50% of the test to be completed at this point. (Of course, every class is different. That’s just a guideline to look for. If you don’t reach it, consider the possibility that you need more test prep.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">This helps in the two goals mentioned earlier.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">First of all, you’re utilizing all of the information you just memorized as quickly as you can use it. Since it’s only in your short term memory, it’s essential that you get it out fast.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Second, this is a relatively stress-free process. If you’re stressing out then you’re doing it wrong. If you can’t answer a question without breaking a sweat then you shouldn’t be trying to answer it in the quick run.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">After you finish your quick run through the test, you can focus on going back through for the tougher question. (I recommend you skip questions you need to guess on until after you answer every answerable question too. This can help you not twist your brain into too many loops before you finish the important stuff.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">4. Critical Reading/Common Sense</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">I’ve taken more tests without any prep than I’d like to admit. This is not a very smart practice but it teaches you some important things about test taking. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">A significant portion of test taking is reading and paying attention to the test. I’ve repeatedly taken tests where the answer to one question can be found looking at a later question on that same test. By reading the later question, I can logically extrapolate the early answer. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">That being said, there is an even more common problem with many tests. Oftentimes, usually poorly written tests, actually give away most of the answer directly in the question. Using a little common sense you can figure it out. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Sure, it may be intimidating to look at some of the questions you’re sure you don’t know the answer to but by taking a few minutes to dig into them, you may find they’re actually some of the most obvious questions around. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Worst case scenario, by reading carefully, you may be able to figure out enough to make an educated guess. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">5. Stress Free!</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">One of the easiest ways to ruin your grade by at least 10% is to get stressed out.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The human brain is not designed to remember things when it’s significantly stressed out. If you’re curling yourself into a ball of worry while taking tests then you’re killing your own grade. You need to change your strategy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Controlling an emotion like stress can seem almost impossible but it can be done. There are tons of strategies for doing it. You only need one of them to work for you.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Personally, I accept my fate before the test is even handed out. Honestly, after you’re finished studying, you either know the information required to kick-ass on the test or you don’t know it. There is no more possible prep time. It’s over. The grade might as well already be written on the test. No amount of stress will positively impact your test score from that point on.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">6. Early Test Scoring</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">This following test strategy doesn’t directly increase your test score at first but it’s actually one of the most interesting tricks you have. By using the information it provides, you’re able to cater the time you invest in the test to however high you want your score to be. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Go through your completed test before handing it in. Next to each question, mark it with one of three symbols. Use one symbol for the questions you know you got right. Use another symbol for the ones you think you got right. Use the final symbol for guesses you made. Count the total number of each type question on your test. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Assuming your test gave 1 point per question, give yourself 1 point per sure-thing answer, and give yourself half a point for every maybe answer. Using that total number, you can estimate (usually a lower end) of the score you can expect. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Simply put, estimate the score on your own test before handing it in. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you’re satisfied with the score then hand it in. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you’re a little disappointed with it, keep working on the details until you can pump it up a few more points. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The best part of this is that you leave the test knowing whether or not you completely bombed it or did amazing. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">7. 15 Minute Test Prep</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Using these quick test taking tricks you can increase your scores a ton. Just learning to use a few of these tricks can easily boost your score by a single grade level. That being said, they are not more powerful than what can be done with an effective study strategy. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Notice the word effective.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">While the vast majority of study strategies people are taught these days are virtually complete time wasters, there are alternative strategies that can show massive score gains with virtually no time invested in studying.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Personally, I recommend my 15 Minute Test Prep Strategy. You can learn more about that by checking out my article on this blog.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">By using this test prep strategy, you can ensure that failing doesn’t even have to be on your radar. Heck, A’s will sometimes come on accident (not that I’d complain.) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Test taking skills can take you far but proper test prep strategies can take you all the way.</span></div>
<br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Do you want to know how to study faster? Be sure to follow this blog, check out the archives, and maybe even read the kindle books in the sidebar. </b></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-24659214352812468772015-02-09T15:19:00.000-05:002015-02-09T15:19:00.056-05:00How To Actually Learn A Subject<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Learning gets a really bad name. Just imagine you’re trying to convince everyone that you’re completely awesome, and then having public schools representing you for a decade of their life. Sadly, most people are forced to “learn” from public schools for the vast majority of their formative years. Of course, most people are going to hate learning. They’re forced to sit through boring classes for over a decade and they’re told that’s learning. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Phew… I got the rant out of my system.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">My point is that learning is actually a pretty awesome thing. I know… you may not completely appreciate it because of the experiences you’ve had with what most people consider learning but give it a real chance and you’ll fall in love.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">What I’m going to be going over in this article is not “how to get good grades in any subject.” That’s what the vast majority of this blog is used for. Go look through the archives for that. This article is for the people that actually care about learning a subject. Yes… there is a major difference. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Becoming thoroughly proficient in any subject is one of the most fulfilling things you can do with your time. That being said, in my experience, there is one very useful thing you can do to help to learn any subject.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Get It Out Of School</span></h3>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--DiWCU8OsY8/VLQROeutVKI/AAAAAAAAAmQ/JUQw_PkEkJs/s1600/6092122923_7ef4ea00c8_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--DiWCU8OsY8/VLQROeutVKI/AAAAAAAAAmQ/JUQw_PkEkJs/s1600/6092122923_7ef4ea00c8_z.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">School is one of the most inefficient ways that anyone can learn anything. If you want to learn a subject, you shouldn’t count on getting educated in school. Sure, there is absolutely nothing wrong with trying to make the best of the school you have to go through but do not expect that to teach you well. The first thing you should do to actually learn a subject is leave the traditional schooling environment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">At first, learning outside of a school environment can feel a little crazy. You never know exactly which direction to research in. You could research forever in books, on the internet, and from millions of other sources. In most subjects, it’s a complete overload of information. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">To get through the jungle of assorted information you need to find a guide. If you’re literally trying to learn a subject for school then use the information from school to get you started. After that, you can use resources that are highly regarded from a large selection of sources. (If 10 places say, this is the go-to-guide then you’re probably on track to finding a good resource. Of course, look for other verifications like author credentials too.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">For example, if you’re researching World War 1, you’ll be able to find thousands of potential resources. For a broad resource, google best books on world war 1. You’ll probably get led to at least a few different opinions on the subject. If you see a book mentioned a number of times. Check out the book’s Amazon page. Is the book well-reviewed? Repeat until you find some good sources.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">BUT THEY’RE NOT ACADEMIC!</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Most of the best sources you’ll find on the internet are not academic. That can sound like a disadvantage but in most cases, it’s actually an advantage.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Academic sources are designed to be completely accurate and non-offensive to the status quo. Sure, they’re not perfectly accurate but serious embarrassment can come to an academic that gets a bit too loosey goosey with his or her fact checking. That is good for an accurate source but it’s damn unproductive when you’re trying to be entertaining.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Guess what? Sources that will actually entertain you will use information in a more entertaining and less perfectly accurate way. History books, for example, that aren’t written for academic reasons are actually designed to provide entertainment value while remaining mostly accurate. (If you want to see a major difference. Compare a math non-fiction book to a math textbook. I hate most math stuff but there are some amazing books written on math.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">So what is better for learning, an unread textbook that’s 95% accurate or a read book that’s 90% accurate? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Even if you manage to force your eyes across the words of the average textbook, odds are, you haven’t put a quarter of the thought into it that you would have put into a book for entertainment. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">As soon as you start reading, non-academic sources on a subject, the information involved in that subject becomes a natural part of your thinking processes. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Taking Learning Into Your Own Hands</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">I realize that most of the readers of this blog aren’t going to spend hours a day reading into their school subjects from non-academic sources. If I thought you’d do that then I probably wouldn’t have mentioned this point in the first place. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">It takes a whole lot of time investment to learn any subject. Considering, (assuming you’re in high school) you’re forced to spend 6 plus hours a day sitting in a boring classroom, I wouldn’t expect you to want to spend more to truly learn the subjects in school. That being said, there is always something worth learning.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Just because you don’t want to spend hours studying school subjects after school, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t spend some time looking into subjects that you care about. Don’t let the way school pretends to teach you interrupt your ability to truly learn. I know the word learning may give chills down your spine but spend a few days studying something you love and that chill will be gone. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">Find somethings that you want to learn and dedicate some time to learning it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">The information I teach on this blog is meant to help you get school out of the way so you can actually learn what you care about. I teach tricks that mean you don’t need to invest much time in your classes. That leaves you with two options. Option 1, waste your life watching TV and searching the net. Option 2, become a better person. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;">I write this blog with the hope you’ll choose option 2. </span></div>
<br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Do you want to know how to study in less than 15 minutes a night? Check out the archives of this blog. Also, check out my books in the sidebar to get the whole shabang.</b></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-82474626180165236912015-02-02T13:03:00.000-05:002015-02-02T13:03:00.042-05:00Where You Study Matters <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Student after student has been told the same piece of bad advice time and time again. The empirical studies on this subject have shown how stupid this piece of advice is but teachers, parents, and everyone else with a complete lack of creativity seems to spout it out like gospel. If you're looking to improve your grades they tell you to “work harder.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">I know, you probably don't think that sounds stupid at first thought but there have been repeated studies on this. Working harder is absolutely awesome in some aspects of life. If you're looking to dig a hole in the ground, it helps to work harder. If you're looking to bang your head against a wall until you can use that hole as your own final resting place, working harder helps again. That being said, if you're trying to do something that requires more than a handful of brain cells, working harder is probably just going to screw you over.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">A conscience effort to work harder almost always leads to increased stress hormones. Increased stress hormones are useful when you're running from a bear but they're detrimental if you need to think creatively or are trying to remember something. There are much more important factors that need to be considered when looking to improve your grades that don't run that same risk of stalling your study progress completely.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">It's much more effective to focus on the mechanics of your studying to improve your grades. After that, you can worry about optimizing your “effort.” One of the most important of those mechanics you need to worry about is the environment that you're studying in. (If you want to learn more about those other mechanics then be sure to check out this blogs archives.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Your Personal Study Bubble</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">The human brain isn't designed to plop itself into isolation from the rest of the world to study. You can't sit down in the middle of Times Square with your textbook and expect to be capable of learning the information you need to learn effectively. Your brain is designed to be easily “distractable.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Just look at it from an evolutionary perspective. Which brain is more likely to survive and breed, the one that hears a branch break and looks in that direction, or the one that thinks it's studying is more important than a potential predator? Of course, studying means nothing when a tiger can eat you alive. You've, thankfully, inherited that easily distracted brain.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">With that, you need to learn to work with it instead of constantly trying to fight it. To help you work around it, I recommend thinking about your need for “your personal study bubble.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">You should only be studying while in your personal study bubble (or possibly in a group personal study bubble, but I've never been able to appreciate the benefits myself. I always felt unnatural studying in groups but if it works for you...)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">In the ideal world, your personal study bubble would be a completely safe and quiet room without any distractions from your studying. That means no phone, no people, and virtually no entertainment short of the textbook. If you can make that happen then I highly recommend it. That being said, I've virtually never been able to make it happen for more than a day or two myself. People generally need to work at it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Working Out The Kinks</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1;">If you're not privileged to complete silence, complete seclusion, or even a safe place, you need to find a way to make the bubble work.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">For example, if you don't have a completely silent place to study. A library may be an acceptable alternative. While it's not completely silent, the quiet voices and environment will reduce distractions. Let's say you don't even have a semi-quiet place to study. Perhaps you can only study in your frat house or something. What do you do then? While leaving would be ideal, you may be able to block out the background noises with music (or white noise on repeat in your headphones.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Students regularly complain to me that they struggle to study because of interruptions from other people. People say that their friends or parents “won't leave them alone!” This brings two thoughts to my mind.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">How could they possibly interrupt you? Seriously, turn off your phone, lock the door, or run away into the forest if you have to. When I'm setting up to study, there is virtually no way someone could possibly interrupt me. That is the ideal scenario. (No... do not play the “emergencies” card. Emergencies don't happen every 10 minutes you've turned off your phone.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Even when people find a way to interrupt my studying, they don't do it more than once or twice. Why not? If I'm interrupted, I start by politely (but harshly) asking them to value my study time and leave me alone (perhaps with an expletive if we're close.) If I'm interrupted again, I respond coldly and accept that they're not going to help me study so I need to get away from them to study. They're no longer to be trusted. The evidence has officially shown that they disregard requests to be alone to study. Accept the evidence and find a way around it. (Maybe a new place to study will help.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">By consciously changing your environment to be your personal study bubble, you do more than just improve your immediate study environment. You also signal to yourself, and other people, that you're in your study bubble and your damn well taking it seriously. That improves studying in more ways than you can count.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Constant Improvement</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">The most important point you can get from this article is not the specific study recommendations. It's realizing the necessity for improving your study environment. Most students give up almost immediately when their study environment gets compromised. Maybe the library they're studying in gets filled with loud people. Instead of getting up and leaving, the student will sit there and stew in their frustration for an hour praying that the loud people will get run over by a truck. That strategy isn't helpful (especially since trucks rarely drive through libraries.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Students always need to be looking to improve their study environment because the world is constantly changing, and, of course, there is always room for improved study efficiency. While it can seem virtually impossible to change your ability to focus, everyone has some control over their physical environment. Use it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Do you want to know how to study in less than fifteen minutes a night? Check out the archives of this blog for details. (Also, be sure to check out my ebooks on Amazon. Check them out in the sidebar.)</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-68436850608456747172015-01-26T15:31:00.000-05:002015-01-26T15:31:00.164-05:00The Quickie Flashcard Strategy: Never Sit Down To Study<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Throughout my hardest years in college I developed a strategy that improved my grades dramatically while reducing the actual time invested in studying. While I'd tried tons of crazy strategies in the past, I started to realize that my most consistent results were coming from the more traditional approaches to studying. Flash cards were consistently showing good results while some of my other methods were more spotty. That drove me nuts.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">I'd always hated flash cards in the past. Using flash cards always seemed like a really boring game to play with yourself. I'd read one side of the card. I'd say what was on the other side. I'd check it. Within 10 minutes of using flash cards I'd want to drive a railroad spike in my eye. I always found it miserably boring.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">When I realized how effective flash cards were, something started to click for me. I was already into researching study strategies like crazy at that time and I knew that enjoyment made all the difference in studying. I knew that people that enjoy studying study more effectively than people that dread studying. If I studied with flashcards and dreaded it while still getting good results, how good would my results be if I actually was able to enjoy using flashcards?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Now I'm not one to try and force the enjoyment of something but this thought got me looking into flashcards much deeper.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Magic Of Flash Cards (And The Problems)</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Flash cards are one of the most commonly recommended study strategies for a reason. They are one of the simplest methods of testing the effectiveness of your studying. When you're looking at one side of a flash card, you either know the other side's information or you don't. This can be stressful but it's using your brain the same way as a test would.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">When students study using their textbook, they can read for hours without doing a single test on whether or not the knowledge stuck. (If they're not actually learning it then they're going to be preparing for an unpleasant surprise on test day.) With flashcards, it is almost impossible not to know if you’re screwing up.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">After going through a set of flashcards, you can empirically determine which information is in your brain and which information isn't.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">This comes with some problems though.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">First of all: Constantly testing information is relatively stressful. After a few minutes of using flash cards you can completely wear out your brain. That ultimately means it's really hard to enjoy doing for a long time. While you can derive some “running a marathon” pleasure out of it, the actual process is just painful.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Second: Flash cards are a major time investment. It can easily take 20 minutes or more to prepare a set of flashcards for a difficult course. In some cases, that means you're investing more time in preparing for the studying than you need to spend actually studying.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Finally: You need to actually use them. Yes. Despite the stresses of setting this whole system up, eventually you need to buckle down and find time to use them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Making The Most Of Flashcards</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Flash cards may be stressful to use but it is possible to enjoy things that are stressful. Anyone that's had a good workout in their life knows that. Stress, to a certain extent can be pleasurable. That's exactly how you need to think about flashcards.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Flashcards are stressful but only using a few flash cards at a time can actually be pretty fun. That's the change I needed to make to instantly rewire all of my previous thoughts about studying because everything finally came together.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Studying in short bursts with flash cards aligns with some of the most verified study experiments around. Studying is most effective in short bursts with long rest periods in between.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">The problem with short bursts of studying is usually convenience. Who wants to carry a textbook with them to study a few minutes every few hours? That's where flashcards come in handy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Picture this: You're waiting in line at a store. You pull the flash cards out of your pocket. You go through a couple. You put them back into your pocket.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;"><br class="kix-line-break" /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">This is the ideal way to study with flashcards. The effectiveness of each time you pull out the cards is off the charts. Flashcards are absolutely perfect to use in short bursts randomly throughout the day. Within that one minute you would have used to stare at a celebrity on a magazine cover, you were able to learn as much as you could have learned spending 2 or 3 minutes reading out of your textbook.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Not only that, but you'll often even find the random flash card test kind of enjoyable.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Making The Flash Cards</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">One of the hardest parts about designing your study strategy around flashcards is creating the flash cards in the first place. It can take a little bit of a time investment but it's well worth it if you make a large number of flash cards at a time. It also helps to create a system you regularly use to decide what deserves a flash card and what doesn't.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">For example, here is a strategy I used:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">At the end of most textbook chapters, they have a summary of everything in the chapter. Use that summary and develop at least one flashcard per key point in the chapter. Those flash cards are the bulk of the information required. Oftentimes, they produce 85%-90% of what you need to know and they can be turned into flash cards within 5-10 minutes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">After memorizing those points over a few days, go through the chapter completely. (Fortunately, going through the chapter after you already know all the key points is much easier.) If there is anything else that seems important than make a flash card for that information.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">The funniest part about this strategy is that you never have to sit down to study. You just need to sit down for 10-15 minutes a week to make the flash cards and randomly sneak a few flash cards out of your pocket a few times a day.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">This is all you need to do:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">1. Invest a few minutes in making flash cards.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">2. Carry those flash cards wherever you go.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">3. Pull them out randomly 3-6 times a day and go through them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">4. Never force yourself to study more than a few minutes at a time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Total Time investment: Less than 10 minutes a day.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Do you want to know more ways to study faster and easier than you ever have in the past? Be sure to check out the archives for the secrets you need to know.</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-30844762222290303652015-01-19T15:26:00.000-05:002015-01-19T15:26:00.084-05:00Screw Your Plan! You Don't Need It<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">I had the perfect schedule all laid out. I was in college and I was set to go own my A+ rampage. I was getting good grades at the time but I wanted to crush them. My schedule started at 6 am. I'd get up. I'd workout. I'd eat. I'd shower. I'd study. Then class. Then more studying. Then another class. Then... more studying. I'm sure you get the point.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">I was reading a book on time management and it inspired me to try and become a better student through being more organized with my time. It didn't take long before I realized how stupid my plan actually was. Within a week I wanted to quit school and join the circus.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">That's what a schedule can do to you. (Everything except possibly the circus part. I'm weird.) A schedule seems like a wonderful thing in theory but it takes a special kind of person to actually put it into action consistently. I've talked with tons of students that had similar experiences to me. When you make an exact plan for what you need to do, you're just setting yourself up to fail.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">You are not a study machine. You can't just insert a schedule of hole punched cards in your mouth and program your actions. (If you understand that joke then you win some geek cred.) You can't program yourself into doing things you want to do. Even if you could, it probably wouldn't be better than the alternative. What's the alternative?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Passion Is The Plan</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">This may be something you can't understand right now. If you've never experienced it then it can seem a bit unbelievable but after a few years of practice, it comes together. There are times in the day that I'm dying to get studying. I'm serious. My brain is pumping with every focus hormone in the world and I'm thinking, stimulate me! (No that's not a sexual reference. No matter how much it sounds like it. I use that kind of a reference because it's eerily similar.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Your brain knows what it wants better than you do. Despite what you may be told, you're brain isn't naturally lazy. It takes years of training to make your brain that way. When you work to stimulate your brain, it can break free of that natural stagnation. Eventually, when you break off some of the brain rust, you can get it running naturally again. What's your brain running naturally?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Your brain wants to think. It's designed for it. It wants to soak up all the information required for it's survival. Once you start getting that survival instinct kicking, you may even start to want to study. (It will likely start with studying subjects completely unrelated to school. It's an urge you want to cultivate from there.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Your brain won't always want to study but eventually your brain will tell you that it's time to start thinking. When your brain tells you it's time to study, hours of scheduled studying would mean nothing compared to 10 minutes of passionate studying.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Sure, scheduled studying may sometimes be a necessity but so much more is possible when you get passionate.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Schedule Of Passion</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">As much as anyone would love it to, passion doesn't happen to come on a schedule. It's impossible to predict the dates and times that you're going to feel passionate about studying. That means, you cannot count on scheduling to set up the best study periods of your life. They need to come naturally.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">I believe a study time scheduled daily is helpful for studying in school for two reasons. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">First of all, it takes time to break the bad study habits that hamper most students. Most students have effectively trained themselves to hate studying. (Who can blame them with the way the school tries to educate them?) That means the method of getting a student to study efficiently has to change. The first thing that needs to be changed is that hatred for studying. That can't changed without consistent and non-miserable study sessions (short, regularly scheduled, and not too stressful.) To get into my specific prescription, check out the archives of this blog.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Second, you can't count on passion when you have class tomorrow morning. You sometimes need to take it into your own hands. Eventually, with practice the schedule gains the same advantages as I'm about to discuss. It just takes time to work out the skill.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">As you begin to hate studying less and less, you'll get more and more moments that you actually want to study. At first you may only feel the urge to study once a month. Over time though, you'll find that urge can come as often as daily.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Breaking The Plan...</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">One of the worst things you can do for the efficiency of your studying is making a ridiculous plan. Sure, it can make sense to plan a half hour a day but you need to be unbelievably careful every time you do.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Plans don't work because your brain doesn't work that way. The things that you’re passionate about get your attention whether you want them to or not. There is no magic button you can press to get into the zone studying. It's much better to just be ready whenever you find the inspiration.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">The worst part about these ridiculous plans is that they interrupt your ability to study in the future. One week of excessive or boring studying can completely change the way your brain works while studying. The brain needs to be focused to work well. When you force it through miserable study sessions, you won't be able to focus. When you don't focus, you make your brain think it's acceptable to not focus while studying. It all just stacks itself up into the impossible wall of studying that most students never break through.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Do you want to know how to let your brain do the studying without the stress? That's what this blog is all about. Be sure to follow and check out the archives for all the details. Oh... And if you have a kindle, make sure you give the ebooks a look too.</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7664585560574387157.post-47762043920851950072015-01-12T14:49:00.000-05:002015-01-12T14:49:00.327-05:003 Reasons You Might Be Procrastinating (And What To Do About It)<br id="docs-internal-guid-c3c6bb98-d03d-1ccc-f245-487957feeca7" />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">“HOW DO I STOP PROCRASTINATING?!?”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">It's one of the most common questions that I get asked. Yes, and it is regularly asked with caps lock on. (Really, if you're going to ask me anything, please turn caps lock off to help what’s left of my sanity last a little longer.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">This is a really tough question to answer. It's kind of like they're asking, “how do I stop getting hungry?” To actually offer advice on the matter, I have to completely understand the situation. Maybe you're hungry because you haven't eaten in a month. Maybe you're hungry because you have medical issues. Maybe you're hungry because your Redbull and Adderall diet don't offer enough calories. Really, this is a question that needs some serious background info to even touch on.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">If you want to stop procrastinating then you could have any of a number of different problems. Each of those potential problems come with a different solution. Here are three of the most common problems.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">1. You Don't Care</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">This point should be one of the most obvious ones but sadly, many students don't actually realize how much they don't really care about school. If you don't care about school then you are going to procrastinate. Even worse though, even if you beat that procrastination physically, your brain is going to study terribly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Many students are scared to admit that they really don't care about school. They have the urge to please their parents or teachers but they really have no internal motivation to learn the information required. This is something that you may need to think about for a while to realize.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">You might recognize this problem from completely forgetting about studying. If you never even think to pick up the textbooks (more than a quick thought) then this may be the problem. It may not be though. There are a lot of potential procrastination causes and this one can be one of the trickiest to spot.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Another way to think about this problem is the “have to” mindset. “Do I have to do this?” No... You absolutely don't have to. No one is pointing a gun at you. You only should study because you want to (ideally.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>How To Solve This Problem</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">This is the hardest problem to solve.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Procrastination is just a symptom of not caring. Of course you're going to put off learning for school if you don't care about school. That's your brain doing the right thing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">You need to find a way to care about school.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">The best way to do that is to change your schooling situation. Get a better method, teacher, or school. That, of course, is impractical for college students and almost impossible for high school students. (It's absolutely natural for self-directed schooling.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Since that’s probably not an option, your next option is to change the way you feel about school. Find a way to actually care about it. Spend some time thinking about how important the information you learn could be to your future. If you're in high school, think about how it will prepare you for college. If you're in college, think about how it will prepare you for your job. At the very least, think about how the course is a means to an end. Maybe you just need to pass to graduate. (Of course, that pass only motivation won’t help you study more than the minimum but it’s better than nothing.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Get in the habit of reminding yourself the reasons you have to study every time you want to study.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">2. Too Much Study Stress</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">One of the biggest reasons people don't do things is because those things seem too big to do. It's your brain's defense mechanism. If you want to do something that your brain doesn't think can be done, you're easily going to be distracted by all the other things you're confident you can do.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">You might recognize this problem from thoughts like these: “Well... I want to study but I don't have much time.” or “I want to study but I'm too tired.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">There will always be excuses not to study. You will virtually never be wide awake and have plenty of time to study. Studying is something that has to be done despite those challenges. The problem isn't what you're excuses are, the real problem is that you made studying into way too important a task to manage. (You wouldn't not surf on Facebook or play a video game because you're too tired.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">How To Solve This Problem</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Usually, you just need to chill out on the studying a bit. No, I don't mean study less, I mean loosen up your study routine a little. If you normally study an hour a night then cut the study time down to twenty minutes. If you normally work yourself into a curled up ball of stress by the end of the study session then you need to find a way to relax a little. (I've got some articles that can help you with that in the archives.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Just changing your study routine isn't enough though. Your brain still associates that high stress to studying. That means you're still going to want to procrastinate. You need to break that association in your mind before the procrastination stops.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">That association is usually best broken by using a little discipline to develop a study habit. Use your new more relaxed study routine at the same time everyday. Notice the word everyday. Trust me, everyday is way easier than only when you need it. Once that habit sticks you'll be learning more with less stress than ever. (In fact, this blog teaches how you can study only 15 minutes a night and still ace your courses.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">3. Distract Me!</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Okay. Now I'll tell you to study. Then, I'll place you in a room with the most awesome video games around. The room has a phone to talk to your friends. The room has fast internet. The room has a television with hundreds of stations. It has every movie you could ever want to watch. Oh yea... it also has a textbook for that studying. GOOD LUCK!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">You cannot be surprised that you're procrastinating when you put yourself in an awesome place to be procrastinating. Your brain is designed to seek out pleasure. Studying is like a subtle pleasant flavored candy versus a sugar packed candy (all the cool things you own.) If you sit down to study with all kinds of awesome things around you, you're going to struggle to get yourself to study.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Sure, with a little practice and discipline it can be easy to study around turned off distractions but when you're stuck in a bad cycle of procrastination, it can be almost impossible to get out.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>How To Solve This Problem</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">At the very least, you need to turn off every possible distraction that you own. That video game, shut it down, and unplug it if you have to. Disconnect from the internet. Your phone needs to get shut down. Do everything in your power to make studying the most interesting and easy thing to do in the place that you study.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Ideally, you don't even want to be in the same room as something more interesting than studying. The farther away you are from something more interesting than studying, the easier it's going to be to get into the studying. (“Wow... I'd really like to play that game but I would have to stand up... and... whatever... I'll just finish studying.”)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">To make this happen, it may be smarter for you to head somewhere other than your bedroom for studying. It also helps to get into the habit of studying at the same time everyday. That means, sometimes, your body will just go to the place you study without you needing the discipline to force yourself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;">Procrastination is a complicated problem. There is no one size fits all solution but there are some very common problems that people share. Solving procrastination eventually comes down to you making a personal decision of what's important to you. You can put yourself in a good position to choose right but eventually, you've got to make that choice.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Do you want to know how to study in less than 15 minutes a day? Well... that's what this blog is all about: efficient studying. Check out the archives or my books to learn more.</b></span></div>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07470005319948762902noreply@blogger.com