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Study Hacks
calnewport.com/blog
61
Demystifying Student Success
#22702 in All

Decoding the Impact Instinct

A Tale of Two Applied Mathematicians Over the past few months, I’ve been working on an interesting research problem. My collaborator and I are taking some math tools typically used to analyze c...

1 day ago

Some More Thoughts on Grad School

Re-Reflection In 2009, as I was approaching the end of my Phd program, I wrote a blog post titled, Some Thoughts on Grad School. It described lessons I learned during my time at MIT. Since then, I...

18 may 12

Facebook’s COO Works Less Than You

The Fixed Schedule Phenom Sheryl Sandberg is the COO at Facebook. Last year she was paid over $30 million dollars in stocks and salary. This year she was named to Time magazine’s 100 Most Influ...

08 may 12

Walking in Merlin Mann’s Footsteps and a Book You Should Know About

Two brief administrative notes… A2 Earns an A When I first started blogging in 2007, I needed web hosting. I noticed that Merlin Mann had a note on 43 Folders about his happiness working with a...

29 apr 12

Do What Works, Not What’s Satisfying: Pseudo-Striving and our Fear of Reality-Based Planning

The Dune Revelation In July 2009, I took a trip to San Francisco. At some point, I ended up hiking at a sand-duned nature preserve, not far south from Monterey on Highway 1. What I remember about thi...

29 apr 12

The Father of Deliberate Practice Disowns Flow

Feeling Low on Flow In a trio of recent articles, I emphasized that flow is dangerous (see here and here and here). It feels good, so we’re tempted to seek it out, but it doesn’t actually...

09 apr 12

The Satisfying Strain of Learning Hard Material: A Deliberate Practice Case Study

A Deliberate Morning This morning I finished my notes for an upcoming lecture in my graduate-level theory of computation course. There are two points I wanted to make about these notes… The pro...

28 mar 12

“Being Very Good at Anything Involves Being Somewhat Addicted”: Hard Truth on the Sheer Difficulty ...

The Chess Master and the Economist A reader recently sent me an interesting interview with Ken Rogoff, a hotshot economics professor at Harvard. As a young man, Rogoff was a world-class chess player....

15 mar 12 1 person likes this

You’re Working too Hard to Make an Impact

Professorial Exodus Living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which I did for many years after college, I learned to recognize a curious ritual. Come June, the academic offices of Harvard and MIT would cle...

09 mar 12 1 person likes this

Don’t Know What To Do With Your Life? Seek Bargains.

A Career Crossroads In the early winter of 2004, I was a senior at Dartmouth College and in the fortunate position of having two good job offers. The first was from Microsoft. It paid, by 2004 standa...

24 feb 12

Can I Be Happy as an Investment Banker? The Difference Between Pursuing a Lifestyle and Following Y...

A Nervous Sophomore The following question came from a sophomore finance major at a well-known state university: I have read and heard that entry-level investment bankers have to work long hours doin...

18 feb 12

The Start-Up of You

Many Study Hacks readers are also fans of Ben Casnocha, so it’s probably no surprise to hear that Ben’s new book comes out on Tuesday. He co-wrote it with Reid Hoffman, one of the founder...

13 feb 12

Learn the Landscape Before Putting on Blinders: How to Direct Diligence Toward Remarkable Results

The Five Year Eureka Moment Daniel Kahneman met Amos Tversky in 1969 when Tversky came to Hebrew University to give a talk. As Kahneman recalls in his 2011 intellectual biography, Thinking, Fast and ...

05 feb 12 1 person likes this

Closing Your Interests Opens More Interesting Opportunities: The Power of Diligence in Creating a R...

The Banjo Player Steve Martin made the comments around twenty minutes into his 2007 interview with Charlie Rose. They were talking about how Martin learned the banjo. “In high school, I couldn&...

29 jan 12

Distraction is a Symptom of a Deeper Problem: The Convenience Principle and the Destruction of Amer...

The following line is from an e-mail I recently received from Georgetown’s HR department. It references “GMS,” the slick new database system they installed to unify all employee ser...

21 jan 12

A Major Newspaper Wants Your Thoughts On Passion

A reporter from a major national newspaper is looking to interview people about their experiences with “passion.” In more detail, he’s looking for the following two types of people:...

20 jan 12

Intelligence is Irrelevant: An MIT Alum’s Advice to a Struggling Student

A Reddit Gem A reader recently sent me a link to this fascinating Reddit thread. It’s titled:”I’m not as smart as I thought I was,” and it features a high school senior worrie...

09 jan 12

Beyond Flow

A Deliberate Day Earlier this week, after three days of trying, I proved an interesting theorem. I was studying a certain type of scheduling problem in graphs. I was finally able to prove that withou...

05 jan 12

How I Used Deliberate Practice to Destroy my Computer Science Final

The Deliberate Student I just received the e-mail reproduced below from a computer science major who successfully applied the deliberate practice hypothesis to his academic work. This is good food fo...

28 dec 11 1 person likes this

Flow is the Opiate of the Mediocre: Advice on Getting Better from an Accomplished Piano Player

The Piano Player Confessions I recently received a message from an accomplished piano player. Let’s call him Jeremy. This is someone who majored in piano performance at music school, where he w...

23 dec 11

The Ambitious Minimalist: Musings on Impact, Simplicity, and the Good Life

A Simple Tower My friend Chris Guillebeau just published his latest manifesto. It’s called The Tower. In the manifesto, Chris asks: “what truly matters?” “The purpose of life,...

22 dec 11

Abandon Your Big Idea. But Don’t Give Up Your Big Ambition.

Project Problems Earlier today I answered an e-mail from an undergraduate at a well-known college. She was studying neuroscience. A true believer in the Study Hacks student canon, she had pared down ...

08 dec 11

Is Talent Underrated? Making Sense of a Recent Attack on Practice

Bad New for Strivers? Two psychology professors, David Hambrick and Elizabeth Meinz, recently wrote a New York Times op-ed with a typically snarky title: Sorry, Strivers: Talent Matters. Many helpful...

02 dec 11

MindMaple Gives, I Give Back…

I don’t accept paid advertisements. I do, however, have a standing offer to write an honest post about a student-related product if I like it and the company is willing to donate to a charity of my c...

27 nov 11

Perfectionism as Practice: Steve Jobs and the Art of Getting Good

The Perfectionism of Steve Jobs While designing the original Macintosh, Steve Jobs became frustrated with the title bars. As Malcolm Gladwell summarizes in a recent essay on industrial innovation: &#...

25 nov 11

Complicate the Formula: John McPhee’s Deliberate Practice Strategy

The Mathematical Logic of John McPhee In the nineteen-sixties, a young John McPhee had made a name at The New Yorker as a profile man. As McPhee explained in a recent essay, writing a profile is an e...

16 nov 11

If You’re Busy, You’re Doing Something Wrong: The Surprisingly Relaxed Lives of Elite Achievers

The Berlin Study In the early 1990s, a trio of psychologists descended on the Universität der Künste, a historic arts academy in the heart of West Berlin. They came to study the violinists. As descri...

11 nov 11 2 people like this

Welcome to the Post-Productivity World

The Age of Productivity September 8, 2008 was an important date in the world of self-improvement writing. Yet almost no one knows this. To understand what happened on this date we should return, brie...

05 nov 11

I am Looking for a PhD Student

Excuse this abuse of the blog for personal reasons, but… I’m looking for a computer science PhD student for next fall. If you’re planning on graduate school, and want to make an imp...

21 oct 11

Citelighter Gives, I Give Back…

I don’t accept paid advertisements. I do, however, have a standing offer to write a short, honest post about a student-oriented product if the company is willing to donate to a charity of my ch...

13 oct 11

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