It doesn't matter how old you are or where you're from; you can start a profitable business. Through stories of young entrepreneurs who have started businesses, this book illustrates how to turn hobbies, skills, and interests into profit-making ventures.
Mariotti describes the characteristics of the successful entrepreneur and covers the nuts and bolts of getting a business up, running and successful. Most people were just winging it. It wasn't because they weren't smart, talented people. They were.
The problem was that in all of their years of school, no one had taken the time to teach them how to learn things efficiently. I want to change that. Because here's a secret Take it from me I have two bachelor's degrees and a master's degree. While I was getting my master's degree, I had three jobs. And let me tell you something: if you have three jobs while you're getting a master's degree, you are virtually forced to come up with some study hacks or you'll go insane!
I was also a college instructor for many years, and during that time, I was working as a professional tutor. All told, I've coached hundreds and hundreds of students into better grades. Now I want to teach you. What will you learn? Discover how to cut study time in HALF. Who really likes to study? Not me! Luckily, you probably don't have to be studying nearly as much as you probably are right now.
Because here's a secret: the top students don't study as much. They just study more effectively. There are tons of different study strategies out there.
Most of those strategies can't be applied to everyone. Want to know why? Because studying isn't about flash cards or formulas or any other "tip". Studying the right way is a whole different type of approach. It's a WAY of learning, remembering, and interacting. Even more than that, studying the right way includes a lot more than just preparing for tests.
There are social, biological and psychological elements to it. Learn 19 study habits that will totally reshape how you think about school. Here are just a few of the things you'll learn. And guys What's not to love? Want to know more? Download and start boosting your GPA immediately.
Scroll to the top of the page and click the BUY button. You can predict how well a student will do simply on the basis of their use of effective study strategies. This book is for college students who are serious about being successful in study, and teachers who want to know how best to help their students learn.
Being a successful student is far more about being a smart user of effective strategies than about being 'smart'. Research has shown it is possible to predict how well a student will do simply on the basis of their use of study strategies. This workbook looks at the most important group of study strategies — how to take notes with advice on how to read a textbook and how to prepare for a lecture.
There's advice on individual differences and learning styles, and on how to choose the strategies that are right for both you and the situation. Using effective notetaking strategies will help you remember what you read. It will help you understand more, and set you on the road to becoming an expert or at least getting good grades! You want to study smarter not harder. As always with the Mempowered books, this thorough and fully referenced workbook doesn't re-hash the same tired advice that's been peddled for so long.
Rather, Effective Notetaking builds on the latest cognitive and educational research to help you study for success. This 3rd edition has advance organizers and multi-choice review questions for each chapter, plus some additional material on multimedia learning, and taking notes in lectures.
Your reading notes should reflect this as well, and you should later convert them into rapid-fire questions that you can use to quiz yourself. On the other hand, essays require you to have a firm grasp of the main idea of a reading, and you need to be able to summarize it and build off of it in your own words.
To prepare for this, its better to practice honing in on the most salient points of a reading and try to summarize them once youve finished reading. Dont Read Textbooks Like Newspapers People generally read newspapers passively, and they do it just to get the gist of the days events. If you were to ask someone about specific details theyd read in a newspaper the day after theyd read it, you probably wouldnt get good answers in response.
When you read your textbooks, youre reading to learn and apply the information. Youre not just trying to get the gist. Thats why you should do your best to not read your textbook like youd read a newspaper.
I call students who do this textbook zombies - theyre singlemindedly concerned with running their eyes over the assigned pages and then shuffling off to their next planned activity possibly eating brains?
Think of your textbook like an art museum. While I do remember that the Met is the most amazing art museum Ive ever been to, I dont really remember the details of the pieces I looked at.
Thats because I just casually strolled through the halls and looked at the art - I didnt take much time to note down the names of the paintings or who painted them. Just like passively walking through a museum wont give you a detailed knowledge of the art in it, passively running your eyes over the words in a textbook wont help you really learn the material. And trying to re-read it multiple times wont yield much of an improvement either.
How often you read something is immaterial; how you read it is crucial. When she talks, you listen intently. When she pauses, you. You come away feeling energized, not drained. This type of reading is called active reading, and its the key to dealing with your textbooks in the most effective way.
Im not the only one who thinks this; Cal Newport, the founder of the excellent Study Hacks blog, wrote:. Ive never met a high-scoring student who used a system like SQ4R. The reason: theyre too timeconsuming! What these students do instead is discover simple, streamlined and devastatingly eective heuristics that can be easily adapted to specific classes. So, instead of appeasing the secret acronym society members and recommending a cumbersome system, Im just going to give you 5 active reading strategies you can adopt as you wish.
Note: Again, including images of each technique would mess up the formatting of the book - but you can see examples in my Active Reading video. Use the Pseudo-Skimming Technique. The longer a reading assignments is, the more likely a large portion of its paragraphs will be filler - stuff you dont really need to read.
According to Cal Newport, filler paragraphs can include:. Background story Asides Exceptions because professional scholars want to be thorough Extra details. In many cases, information of these types wont make up the bulk of what youll be tested over later - so paragraphs containing those types on information should be quickly scanned. However, a good number of paragraphs in any reading will contain important material that you should learn.
These paragraphs should be read intently. Enter Cals pseudo-skimming method; essentially, youre going through your readings at a staggered pace. One moment youll be quickly scanning through paragraphs, the next youll notice an important paragraph and slow down to take it in fully.
Read the Chapter Backwards Heres the thing about textbook readings theyre usually not suspenseful. They dont have a narrative, and rarely will you spoil yourself by going to the end first. You can take advantage of this by reading backwards. Before you dive into a chapter, flip to the back of it and see whats there. Usually, youll see a list of key vocab terms, review questions, and other helpful stuff. Use what you find here to prime your brain for the actual reading.
Once youve loaded what you can from the review section into the front of your consciousness, youll be able to pick out those bits more easily when you read them in the actual text.
Recall - the practice of forcing your brain to actually retrieve information instead of just passively exposing yourself to it. Doing this helps you learn much more efficiently.
An easy way to prep for Active Recall-based study sessions is to create questions while you do your reading assignments. You should definitely take notes when you read - either during or immediately afterward - and a great way to process these notes for easy studying is to pull details from them and rework them into questions you can quiz yourself on later.
In addition to the details from your notes, another great source of questions is the section headings of your actual readings. These generally pull out the main idea of a section, so using them as a basis for a question is a good way to jog your memory of that sections most salient points.
Pay Attention to Formatting Text in your reading assignments thats bolded, italicized, or. If text has special formatting, its a good sign that it represents a main idea, vocab term, or important process that you should learn. When I took my marketing class, I actually got to the point where Id just scan through each textbook chapter looking for bolded vocab terms and write them down in my notes.
I had figured out that the tests were largely based on these vocab terms along with a few case studies, so I had no need to waste time on all the other details in each chapter of the book. Mark Up Your Book and Take Notes Lastly, find a way to make reading a more interactive process by either marking up your books or taking notes on what youre reading.
Both of these techniques emphasize active reading over simple, passive exposure, and both will make your later study sessions easier. If youre renting your textbooks, plan to sell them, or otherwise cant permanently mark them up, you can use sticky flags instead to mark important points in your assignments. These can stick out of your book slightly and give you easy access to places youve marked, even when your book is closed.
If you can mark up your books, then you can either use a highlighter or a pencil to make permanent markings. Im generally not a fan of highlighting; as a sort-of. OCD person, I always found myself spending too much time trying to make my highlighted lines nice and straight. For me, using a pencil works so much better. Not only can you easily underline and bracket important terms, but you can also write short notes in the margins of your book.
Margin-notes can really help jog your memory later because they help you connect the reading material to things you already know, making it easier for your brain to solidify your understanding of the topic. Speaking of notes, one last way to get more interactive with your readings is to take actual notes on them - in a separate notebook or on your computer.
This is where creating questions can come in handy; you can turn your section headings into questions in your notes, then jot down details from those sections with a goal of answering those questions. For most books, my preferred method of taking notes is to worry about them after Ive finished a reading section. Ill typically read a chapter of a book Im going through once, then open Evernote and create outline-style notes of all the details I remember Im trying to use Active Recall during this part to maximize my learning.
Once those details are down, Ill scan through the chapter once more and add anything else I deem important to the notes. However, when Im digging through textbooks while trying to find specific information - for example, when Im researching a topic for a new video - Ill have a notebook open while Im reading and will be jotting down flow-style notes as I go through the book.
Summarize What You Read I want to put special emphasis on summarizing, as its about the most useful implementation of an Active Recall strategy you can apply to your reading assignments. When you attempt to summarize what youve read, youre digging into your brain and pulling out the information for, essentially, the task of teaching what you read.
You may have heard of the Learning Pyramid before:. Now, many experts disagree about the accuracy and validity of the learning pyramid, and I wouldnt venture to claim that the percentages listed on it are completely accurate. There are a ton of factors that go into how well you can retain information, not least of which is the actual nature of the information itself - our brains are weird and built upon millions of years of odd, non-logical evolution, so the way they remember facts about math wont be the same they remember facts about the ninja creeping up behind you.
Still, both sense and my own experience tell me that the bottom of the pyramid is more or less right - teaching something results in higher retention in your own brain. This is because youre intensely processing the information with a goal of being able to communicate it in a form that will be understandable to someone less knowledgeable than you. Summarizing does this really well, so its a perfect strategy for efficiently learning the most important material from your readings.
As I noted above, I tried to summarize what I learned from each chapter in The Power of Habit by trying to type out bulleted notes from memory before going back through the chapter and fleshing them out. You can do this as well, though if the reading youre doing is for a class thatll be assessing you with essays, it might be better to try typing out your notes in paragraph form - at least for sections and assignments you deem to be especially important which means you should definitely be paying close attention to your syllabus and what your professor says.
Step 4 - Plan Like a General As a student, your goal should be to never have to say,. Holy banana pancakes, I totally forgot about that assignment. College life is a complicated maelstrom of activities, assignments, projects, events, and spontaneous trips to the grocery store at 2 A.
Without a good planning system, things will fall through the cracks. This chapter is all about helping you form that planning system and build the habits thatll keep it running smoothly. Its also about helping you be more productive, and heres why. Planning Mode vs. Robot Mode As a student, youre not often forced to do specific things at specific times.
You have a lot of choice in any given moment. Jorgen von Strangle, the toughest fairy in the universe, is not standing behind you in preparation to put his boot up your rear every time you have to study. And thats a pity, because its often exactly what you need. Your freedom of choice is one of the most devious culprits in the sabotage of your productivity. Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia Business School, has done a lot of research into the topic of choice.
Heres a quote from her that summarizes a lot of her work:. There are times when the presence of more choices can make us choose things that are not good for us. For me, the clearest example is that. With a bit of thought, this actually makes quite a bit of sense.
A lot of people never start investing because they feel there are just too many options, and theyre afraid of picking the wrong one. Ironically and tragically , the most wrong option is usually waiting too long to invest. As a student, you probably have this problem as well; the only difference is that youre worried about marginal opportunity costs instead of marginal financial returns.
You wonder which homework assignment you should tackle first, which class you should study for now and which to save for later, etc. A successful student doesnt spend very much time on this problem at all because they know how to effectively split their time between their Planning mode and their Doing Mode which I like to call Robot Mode instead.
The word robot actually comes from the Czech word robotnik, which directly translates to worker or slave. Workers and slaves do not typically take care of the planning aspects of a projects. However, when motivated properly, they do get down to business and get stuff done. Logically, this means that you want to be in Robot Mode as much as you possibly can during your work sessions.
Steps 7 and 8 will go into detail on how to upgrade yourself to be a better robot, but in this step well talk about how to utilize Planning Mode effectively so you dont have to spend much time in it. In short, the best way to do this is to get your planning done up front. Plan Out Your Entire Education While most of this chapter is about weekly, in-the-trenches planning, I want to mention the importance of having a plan for your entire education.
Doing this really pays off. As a freshman, I created an Excel spreadsheet that mapped out all the classes I would take over the following eight semesters. Note: Want to download this template to use as a guide for your own graduation plan? Its available right in the subscriber toolbox where you downloaded this book. To do this, I spent a few hours going over all the requirements sheets relevant to my major - the core MIS curriculum, general business requirements, electives and gen.
I made sure I knew how many credits Id need to graduate, how many of those needed to be level or higher, etc. Then, I created a column for every semester and listed all the classes I would take, being careful to make sure all the requirements for my major were planned for. I also used Excel formulas to create dynamic credit totals, so my sheet would still work if I changed plans later on. Doing that really came in handy, because I did change plans several times.
I ended up changing electives based on new interests I gained, changing the order of certain classes I took, and dropping a program that no longer benefited me. Each time I changed plans, I always made sure to update the spreadsheet. Doing this ensured that I always knew what my overall graduation plan was. It also kept me mindful of when I could sign up for classes, which I did as early as possible each semester.
Plan Your Week on Sunday Sunday should be your planning day. You can go ahead and pick another day if you want, but if you do, we totally cant be friends. Ok, we can - but only if you can beat me in a DDR battle. Which you wont.
Sunday is a prime choice, because its right before you get back into the swing of things for the week. Luckily, this process shouldnt take you much time.
Chapter 6 covers techniques on staying organized and capturing data intelligently, so if you follow the advice there, youll have an organized planning system that doesnt require much management. On this planning day, youll look at your task management system and make a mental note of everything you need to achieve during the week. Youll probably have academic tasks:. In addition, youll probably have events with specific start and end times beyond your classes.
Job shifts, group meetings, etc - make sure these are all on your calendar. Now that you know all that you need to get done during the week, you can move onto the next step of planning - grouping your tasks by context. Understand Task Contexts When it comes to managing your work, there are only two contexts that you need to concern yourself with:.
Work that requires lots of brainpower - reading, research, writing, creative projects, doing heavy math - is of the high thought-intensity variety. Heres the thing about work of this type: It requires long, uninterrupted stretches of focused work to be done properly. If youre trying to write a big research paper in little minute spurts between classes, youre not going to do as good of a job. When you give highly thought-intense projects the time and attention they deserve, youre much more likely to find yourself in the flow state while working on them - that mental state of zen-like focus, where time seems to melt away and you create your best work.
Thinking about your tasks in terms of their contexts helps you get into that flow state more because you can batch low-intensity tasks. By planning ahead, you can block off a few concentrated hours to take care of all these easier tasks leaving longer time periods open for the focused, high-intensity work thats. Another thing to note here: When planning, try to review your past performance at certain times of the day. Do you do your best work in the early morning?
Late at night? Right after class ends? When you know yourself, you can plan for optimum effectiveness. If you know youre focused in the early morning, you can choose to schedule your class, work, and social engagements later in the day. You can also take care of your batched low-intensity tasks later on as well, leaving the early mornings open for even more focused work. Create a Daily Plan Planning your week out on Sunday or whatever day you choose gives you a solid, high-level view of how that week is going to go.
It allows you to make sure youre on top of any upcoming events and reduces the chance youll get blindsided by something. However, at least in my experience, you cant plan everything out on a Sunday. Youll run out of clean pants on Wednesday and realize you need to do laundry the next day.
A friends car will break down in the Target parking lot and theyll need you to come give them a jump. Things will come up unexpectedly, and youll inevitably realize that there were already tasks lurking in the darkness that you didnt see on Sunday. Thats why I think you should create a daily plan as well. You can either do this first thing in the morning, or the night before; either way, its a good thing to turn into a solid habit.
I have my reminder to do so listed in Habitica as part of my morning routine, but in truth, I often sketch it out right before I go to bed at night. Heres how I create mine; each night, Ill stand in front of the whiteboard in my room. Ill look at my two main time management apps:. Google Calendar for events and the content I need to create I keep it planned out there Todoist for individual tasks.
Once Ive done that, Ill write down a list of tasks on the whiteboard that need to be done the next day. A lot of productivity experts will tell you that your daily list should have no more than 23 tasks on it; otherwise, youre at risk to overwhelm yourself and end up getting nothing done. If Im being honest, my daily list usually has However, I do have a couple of hacks in place to deal with my many, many tasks which you can take advantage of.
Firstly, I try to prioritize my daily list by putting the most important tasks at the top of it. On most days, I dont actually finish the whole list, though I do try my damnedest. Theres a great analogy Ive heard from several different sources that speaks to the wisdom in prioritizing, and it goes something like this.
A professor has a giant glass jar in front of him, and surrounding it are four buckets holding four different materials: big rocks, pebbles, sand, and water.
Ill spare you the less relevant part of the story where he does things wrong to bolster the illustration; the ultimate point is that, by putting the big rocks in first and then moving on to the next biggest material, the professor was able to fit all four materials nicely in the jar. When the big rocks are put in first, the gaps they create are easily filled by pebbles, which in turn leave gaps perfect for sand, and so on. This analogy applies perfectly to the real world; take care of the important things first and youll get the best results.
Whats important? Think about your tasks in terms of:. What will get you closest to achieving your goals What will prevent your life from spiraling into utter chaos, destruction, and the rise of Beelzebub himself What will require the most willpower to complete. That third one - willpower - is an especially crucial consideration, as willpower is a finite resource. There are things you can do over the long term to get more, and over the short term to get the most out of your current store, but it is limited.
Dont waste it on unimportant tasks; as the day wears on, youll come to find youre unwilling to do the things that actually matter. Remember: big rocks. Secondly, I attempt to estimate the amount of time itll take to complete each task accurately - see the section on the Fudge Ratio below. I then add up all the estimates and come up with a total time commitment for the list, which Ill write at the bottom. Since I typically start my work each day around 8 a. Doing this helps to externalize my motivation to complete my work by creating time pressure that exists outside of my brain.
Its not as motivating as a hard deadline like a due date on a paper , but it helps keep me from working in ultra-long, unfocused stretches. Try Timeboxing My time-estimating strategy for my daily plans that I just went over works well for me, but sometimes you want to go a step further. Enter timeboxing. This means actually scheduling specific blocks of time for each task on your daily list.
Timeboxing is the closest you can get to becoming your own slave-driving asshole of a boss, but it can be effective if youre able to estimate your time blocks well and then stick to the schedule. I actually tested out timeboxing during a week in the fall. Instead of creating a single-day task list, though, I timeboxed my entire week.
Doing this was the ultimate way of separating Planning Mode and Robot Mode; when I finished planning and started going through the timeboxes, I already had almost every choice made for me: I knew exactly what to do, the order in which I needed to do it, and how long each task should take.
You can use timeboxing in multiple ways; in fact, you dont have to apply it to your entire daily plan. Instead, you can simply try using it on one particular project that you know youve been procrastinating on. By setting a timebox, youll create some time pressure thatll help motivate you to work more quickly. You can also use timeboxing when youre faced with a project for which youre not feeling a whole lot of clear direction. When you dont know what to do and youre paralyzed because of it, creating a timebox can motivate you to spend that time at least trying to make some progress.
Know Thy Fudge Ratio Humans are really bad at accurately predicting how long it will take to do things, and this is due to something called the planning fallacy. This is a phenomenon in which peoples estimates for the time needed to complete a task show optimistic bias.
In short, people almost always underestimate the time needed to get something done. Heres an illustration: In , a Canadian professor of Psychology named Roger Buehler asked his students when they thought theyd be able to complete homework and other tasks.
Buehler actually asked for probabilities - specifically, The results? They tried to make an extremely conservative estimate, and most were still wrong. Another psychologist named Ian Newby-Clark discovered the root of the problem in his own studies.
He asked research participants for time estimates based on both:. As it turns out, peoples estimates in both cases were virtually identical. The key finding here: When people try to come up with a realistic, best guess time estimate, their brains actually consider the best case.
We are very bad at taking unpredictable setbacks and delays into account when making time estimates. Theres actually a good way of accounting for this problem unlike many other cognitive biases , and thats to base your prediction on a broad view of the task, rather than all the individual components.
When you do this, you can compare it to similar tasks that have already been completed in the real world, and make your estimate based on the amount of time those tasks actually took. As you do more and more work, youll have more and more data to pull from when doing this. However, theres another effective trick you can use in making time estimates called the Fudge Ratio. This term was coined by the personal development blogger Steve Pavlina, but it harkens back to a concept thought up by Douglas Hofstadter, the author of what is potentially the most daunting book on my shelf, Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.
Hofstadters Law, aptly named, states:. It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadters Law. Hofstadter came up with this law in reference to how long it was taking to Pavlinas Fudge Ratio acknowledges the Planning Fallacy and offers up a simple process for fixing it: 1.
Write down a list of tasks you need to do. Put an off-the-cuff time estimate on each one. As you finish tasks, write down the actual amount of time they took. Divide the actual task time by your estimate to get your Fudge Ratio. So, for example, say you estimated that it would take you 45 minutes to finish a study guide for your history class. In reality, it takes you 1 hour and 15 minutes.
Over time, you wont need to do the math anymore; you just get better at making accurate time estimates. In fact, I never did the math. As a student, I started trying to make better predictions before I ever heard about the Fudge Ratio, and the way I did it was to simply try to be mindful of how long it took me to get things done. I also tried to predict potential setbacks, distractions, and other things that might derail me from the best case scenario.
If you do this, your estimates wont always be perfect - but theyll be a heck of a lot better than the estimates of most other people. Individual projects should be broken into steps and prioritized as well - and your goal here should be to create a list of steps that are actionable. Hypothetical example: Study for Calculus Final isnt a good task it doesnt implicitly tell you exactly what to do, so it should be broken up into action steps that a robot could do, like:.
Set up study area and download practice problem set from Blackboard Review chapter on LHpitals rule in textbook and take summarized I call this the Captain America Method, because I like superheroes and shaky metaphors. Captain America was able to break a large-scale alien invasion down into components and direct his resources the Avengers to each portion; similarly, you should be able to break up your tasks and devote your resources blocks of time to each step.
Heres a couple of examples from my own work: Answering 97 Emails in One Day I get a lot of email, and I normally try to stay on top of it. Between questions from readers, partnership opportunities, old web design clients, and everything else, I probably get emails that require action every day.
During the early fall of , I spent quite a bit of time traveling to conferences and other events. As a result, the emails piled up to levels that werent easy to clear out in a day so I just neglected them entirely. My negligence eventually culminated in an inbox that held 97 unanswered emails. Since I delete everything that isnt important every day, each of these emails that remained in the inbox required some sort of action essentially leaving me with a item to-do list.
Day after day, Id tell myself:. Today the day Ill answer them all! I call this the Hulk method, as I was simply trying to brute force the task. It didnt work; day after day, Id try to tackle my inbox, realize how big the task was, and inevitably go do something else. Then, one day, I decided to draw out a specific plan detailing exactly how Id tackle my emails. I categorized each message, then created steps based on which messages were of the highest priority.
Then, I forced myself to go through my inbox in the exact order the steps dictated. Doing this worked - I finished answering all 97 emails within 24 hours. This is the day I came up with the Captain America method, because it was what I was doing: breaking down my task and planning out how Id devote my resources to it.
Creating Craptons of B-roll For each of the videos I make for my YouTube channel, I have to create B-roll all the graphics, animations, and other things that go over the main footage of me talking. Without B-roll, the videos would be much less interesting. However, creating it is a lot of work. Its a messy process and takes a really long time to do. So, in order to keep my mind focused, I created this list for my video on active reading:.
Look at the legend at the top: Ive broken this list of something B-roll items down into contexts. Some are just text, some are graphics, and some are fullblown animations. Theyre also written in the order that they appear in the video. Lastly, the two columns of checkmarks let me track my progress on both creating the B-roll in Photoshop and including it in my Premiere Pro video project. With this list in hand, I was able to go down the line on a per-context basis.
First, I created almost everything in Photoshop, and then I moved onto Premiere. This was a lot more efficient than switching between the two for each item. Step 5 - Build Your Optimal Study Environment Your environment - the area around you, the things that interact with your senses, the systems you interface with to do your work - is hugely influential on your ability to study and work effectively. Design it deliberately. This step will help you optimize your environment in four major ways:.
Location For me, one of the most important aspects of a study location is the vibe. By that, I mean:. What are the other people around me doing? If the people around me are working diligently, then I feel more motivated to work - in fact, it almost feels like an obligation at that point.
Id almost feel like Im bringing down the collective productivity of the room if I slacked off. For that reason, Im a huge fan of studying and working at libraries, coffee shops, and co-working places. I actually took this to the extreme during my senior year; I had taken on an independent study class my method of weaseling out of a required class I didnt want to take , and my project was to build an iPhone app. The only problem was I didnt know how to do it.
Between my other classes and projects, I also was having a lot of trouble finding the motivation to crack open the iOS programming book Id bought. So, I decided to go nuclear. It was about a month into the semester when my friend Alex told me about a new conference going on in Austin, Texas called FU Weekend. The entire point of the conference was to get a bunch of people together who all had creative projects that just werent getting finished - and to finish them.
There was an application process, and the organizers were selective in order to keep the conference limited to people who would actually show up and do work. I applied and got accepted about a week before the conference started. Thats a lot of money and effort just to finish a school project - but it paid off.
I ended up meeting a ton of awesome people over that weekend, including one of the people who works at Treehouse - an amazing learning library similar to Lynda. He pointed me to their iOS course, which turned out to be much easier for me to follow than the book.
Over the course of just two days, I learned the basics of iPhone programming and built two apps. There was a feeling that great things were being created there, and I wanted my weekend to have a great output as well. Another thing to take into account with your choice of location is the specific tasks you have on your plate - and what tools you need for them. If you need to write a huge research paper, for example, the library is a great choice because youre surrounded by research materials you may need.
Your environment can reduce the friction involved in getting into your work by giving you easy access to tools and resources you may need. Think about this factor when selecting your study spot. Study Music Listening to music while studying is one of those little things that people like to argue about.
Some people think it hurts your concentration, some think it helps. For me, it definitely helps. So all Im going to say about this before recommending some great music sources is to experiment. Figure out what works for you, take steps to know yourself, and study better going forward.
Also the whole music vs. The type of music I prefer depends on the type of work Im doing. If Im going through a process, such as creating graphics for a post something Ive done countless times , I can listen to anything. It might be metalcore, it might be rap, or it might be weird remixes of anime theme songs. Basically, whatever boosts my energy levels is good. This goes for purely logical tasks as well, such as programming.
Even if Im writing code I havent had to write before, I can put on any kind of music and be fine. When it comes to writing, reading, or studying, its a different story. I can recommend several artists if youre looking to expand your selections:. Actually, a lot of my favorite study music picks are individual tracks off of albums that wouldnt otherwise be fit for studying; for example, many metal bands have one or two instrumental tracks or interludes in the middle of their albums.
Additionally, youll find plenty of great study music in the soundtracks of movies, video games, and anime. Theres also a thriving online community for a PC game called Touhou, and within it youll find hundreds of fan-made songs many of which are piano-only or otherwise fit for studying. If youre looking for a good place to find great new study music, Ive been working on a YouTube playlist for the last year called The Ultimate Study Music Playlist.
As of this writing, its got songs of all different genres. I always put it on when I need to read or write something Im listening to it right now, actually. While youre at it, you may want to subscribe to my YouTube channel as well.
If the content in this book is helpful to you, youll find a lot more there. I release. So what if you dont work well with music at all? Well, you can study in absolute silence - or you can try out a couple of other options. The first alternative is white noise, which I would describe as the sound of static, or possibly of a fan blowing. Its constant, unobtrusive, and a lot of people like it better. You can also opt for pink noise or brown noise, both of which emphasize lower frequencies than white noise.
Pink noise is a good middle ground. Here are a few places where you can get good white noise:. This is vital, as anxiety actually blocks your ability to recall information easily.
Step 3: Get to Studying Now, get to work. Fill out your study guide by actively answering the questions you created earlier. Test yourself until recalling the material is easy. Godspeed, friend. This is called Active Learning, and it should form the basis of all your studying efforts. This start with active reading, as I talked about in Step 3 - you should go through your reading assignments intensely, either highlighting, taking notes, or summarizing what you read.
Your proclivity towards active modes of learning should then extend to your studying and review sessions. This is another huge reason I showed you the process in the last step - the act of gathering your materials, creating a study guide from them, and then answering those questions essentially quizzing yourself is all part of learning actively. This, in turn, helps you become even more familiar with it. The kids that spent all night trying to cram their entire textbook onto the notecard in uber-tiny handwriting ended up learning a lot of that material in the process.
Anki takes advantage of the spacing effect, which is a phenomenon in our brains that makes it easier to remember information that is presented in multiple, spaced-out study sessions rather than one huge cramming session.
As a result, Anki is at its best when you start using it early and regularly. Hopefully, though, your planning skills will eliminate the need to do this very often!
By that analogy, though, subjects like math are like a house. This means that you need a solid understanding of each concept before you move onto the next. To that end, there are tips I have for your math studies: 1. Learn to notice your confusion 2. Can you take a similar problem and work it out to get a correct solution? Learning math in a completely systematic way, where you understand every concept perfectly before moving to the next, is almost impossible.
In math, you need to understand why operations work the way they do. When you do this, you no longer need to memorize things. A core understanding of the fundamentals makes it possible to deal with new things. Could you work through an example problem with him and tell him why each step happened the way it did? If not, you have more work to do. I could do this myself. Math is not a spectator sport.
Math is all about going through the actual procedures, working the problems, and getting your hands dirty with the concepts and rules. In addition to doing lots of problems though, you can also seek help.
Also, check your work on tests. You will make dumb errors at times. Eyes bulged. Incredulity became more than a shared mental state; it became a tangible part of the atmosphere itself.
You could breathe it. Of course, none of us died. Due in part to the solid foundation Mrs. This section of the guide will attempt to make it a bit less daunting for you as well. Have you ever tried to look at your surroundings and pick out every object of a certain color?
Are we good? Wikipedia has rigorous standards for the sources of its articles, which means that those sources are often good enough for your papers.
You can also do this with general textbooks and other books such as popular science books. For this, I recommend using Evernote. I had a notebook for every class in Evernote as a student, and I highly recommend that you do the same if you use the app. However, if you have a writing project that requires a lot of research, you might want to actually create an entire notebook for it. Rather, I recommend skimming your sources quickly and creating short notes that reference page numbers.
For topics that might not be crucial, but that you still might like to add, try to have at least one source. Write a Shitty First Draft Perfectionism is paralyzing. The cure for this? Write like that. Hey, you made it to the end! Thanks so much for taking the time to read this sample of the book - I hope you enjoyed it.
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