“The days are long, but the years are short.” — Gretchen Rubin
It’s that time of the year again. Tax day’s got you throwing your hands up in frustration, your New Year’s resolutions have long vaporized into thin air and you feel like your hold on 2017 is getting weaker and weaker.
I’m here to tell you: You still have time. Read More
While getting my Bachelor’s degree, I’ve tried every mode of study you can imagine. Go to all the classes, go to some classes, go to no classes. Self-study, group study, teaching, being taught, you name it, I’ve tried it.
All I ever got was Bs.
So when I decided to go back to school, I thought why stress myself. I’ve been hacking college since the day I got here.
In Germany, most classes aren’t mandatory. Since all we have is one final exam for most subjects, you can stay home all year, study for yourself and then ace the class.
Here in Munich, most classes are even recorded to watch at your own leisure, yet most of my fellow students still go for one reason: they’re lazy and they feel bad if they don’t.
Last semester, many of them went to all the lectures, did not pay attention, watched the replays, did not pay attention again, and then tried to study the slides.
What I did was to go to every class once, see if the professor does nothing more than read off the slides (most of them did), and then summarized the slides myself instead.
For every single slide, I wrote down what it meant in one sentence. This way, I’d end up with 6–12 dense pages of notes for each class. All I had to do then, was study them.
The goal of summarizing is to reduce the amount of information your brain has to hold.
You’ll do a lot better by knowing 80% of the material in detail, rather than having an idea of 100% of it, but not really knowing what you’re talking about.
When I was all done with my summary, I would try to create a tree structure of the material on one or two pages, so I could have the entire class on one piece of paper.
Minimize the number of classes you take by going for those with the highest credits on average.
In my program, 6 credits per class is solid. 3 aren’t worth your time, 5 fall one credit short when adding up to modules (you need 12, 18, 24, etc.), and 8 are usually a ridiculous amount of extra work.
Everyone I know struggles with studying for several exams in parallel. So whenever you have three in a week, shit hits the fan. You spend way too much time studying for the first and are only left with the time between exam 1 and 2 to study for the latter, and so on.
So the first thing I did was to pick classes based on exam dates, which were spread far apart.
Only two of my exams fell in one week, and those classes were mandatory. The earlier in the semester an exam, the better. Classes started in October, my first exam was in December. This not only meant it was far away from all the others, but also that there was less material to study.
The second thing I did was to improve my exam schedule as I went along. That December exam I only found out about in November, so I adjusted.
Same thing with a required law class. It was scheduled right between the two mandatory exams, but then the professor opened another slot for it three weeks earlier.
Was it a hassle to study the material in one week rather than three? Sure, but this way, I probably spent more time focused on law than I would have, if I’d had to study in parallel.
The best thing you can achieve when structuring your exams is peace of mind as you move towards them.
Every minute you spend in a hasty state of worry is a minute of studying lost, so optimize your schedule as best as you can.
In one statistics class, we were eligible to get an additional 20% of the exams points as a bonus for completing a report. Had I known this would turn into a 50-page paper about energy drink consumption, I probably wouldn’t have done it, but oh well.
We started from scratch and went all the way from designing our own questionnaire, to surveying a sample of people to analyzing the data with SPSS.
However, nowhere does it say you have to do assignments like this the hardest way possible.
You might think outsourcing work as a student is ridiculous, but consider this:
Would you pay $10 or $20 for 3–4 hours of focused study time?
Not including the stress from fretting about the tasks and delays you encounter. Sometimes, your time really is worth more than the return of a menial task. Even, if you’re a student.
Of course, there is one big disclaimer to all the above: none of these hacks work if you don’t.
Ultimately, I put in just as much, if not more time into studying than I did during my Bachelor’s. But thanks to these hacks, it was a lot more fun to do so, because I could focus on the parts that mattered.
And I did it all while writing articles like this one, every single day. If I can find the time, why not you?
“Nobody likes you around here” is one of the nastiest weapons of negative workplace communication.
It hits right in the heart, gets you worked up and ready to lash out yourself, but worst of all, you start to wonder if they’re right.
So how do you respond to that phrase when it’s thrown right in your face?
Here’s the response I’ve come up with:
“Yeah, but nobody is just 30% of the people.”
This’ll startle them and they’ll scratch their head. In the meantime, you can go on to explain what I’m about to tell you.
There is a great story in James Altucher’s book Choose Yourself, which I will never forget.
He alludes to it on his blog as the 30/30/30 rule. James kept using images from the same woman doing yoga poses for his blog posts without giving her credit. Eventually, she messaged him and they started talking.
She told him that she found over the years, whatever she did, 30% of people loved her for it, 30% hated her for it and 30% just didn’t give a damn.
In my experience, that’s pretty accurate. So why not spend your time on those that love you?
“No matter who you are, no matter what you do, no matter who your audience is: 30 percent will love it, 30 percent will hate it, and 30 percent won’t care. Stick with the people who love you and don’t spend a single second on the rest. Life will be better that way.”
— James Altucher
And if they don’t buy this wonderful story, or point to the logical flaw of the remaining 10% missing, because we’ve used 30%, not 33%, nothing takes the wind out of their sails faster than a good old…
“Now what?”
You know how sometimes, within a few seconds, an idea you had taken as true for decades is shattered to pieces? For example, when I was little, my dad told me the glass windows in churches were thicker at the bottom, because glass was actually a liquid. Just last week I told this to a friend. Well, two minutes ago, this false belief burst.
Some of these urban myths are more pervasive than others. Occasionally, even more people will fall for the lie than stumble into the truth. I think passive income might be one of those extreme cases.
Today, we’ll debunk this concept, and replace it with a better one.
I’m doing it again. I can feel it. Like a toothpick, my thumbnail rests in the gap between two teeth. It’s the position it takes right before I bite it. When I catch myself, like right now, I can prevent it. But it’s always a battle.
Often, I’m okay with losing it, as long as it means I’m winning the war with the article I’m writing. After all, what ends up on your screen isn’t a picture of my fingernails, but a (hopefully) helpful blog post.
It wasn’t always a conscious decision though. For over ten years, I bit my fingernails, unaware of the habit. When I started learning about self-improvement in 2012, it was the first habit I made a conscious effort to break. This both required and helped me with one of the most important human capacities: self-awareness.
Today, I’d like to help you cultivate yours, with 27 self-awareness activities, which you can practice on three distinct levels to improve your thinking, mental health and decisions – and thus, your results in the game of life.
Keep your phone out of sight. I’ll say that again, very slowly, because it might not make sense at first.
Keep. Your phone. Out. Of. Sight.
The difference between this…
…and this…
A study at the University of California, Irvine, found that “the typical office worker is interrupted or switches tasks, on average, every three minutes and five seconds.”
3 minutes and 5 seconds. That’s 185 seconds in total between one interruption and the next.
What’s more, “it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task.”
23 minutes! That’s over 7 times as long as it takes for you to be interrupted again.
What does that tell us? The average worker never even gets close to the zone of deep work, where complex tasks are accomplished with good results.
As if that wasn’t enough — your phone is only one of many sources of distractions, after all — we keep our biggest nemesis right in front of us.
Not only will we look at it every time it vibrates or makes a noise, when our phone is within arm’s reach, we’ll naturally pick it up every couple minutes, just because we can.
You know “just in case.” Don’t give me that look. I know you do it too. We’re all weak.
Well, Justin, you can stay in your case from now on (pun alert), because we won’t be playing your game any more.
Put your phone…
…or keep it in another room altogether.
The level of peace, relaxation and productivity you’ll face will be unprecedented.
Stop being “the typical office worker.” Start being an awesome office worker.
Sometimes, all it takes is something as small as moving your phone a few centimeters. That’s the life hack I’d like everyone to know.
This Wednesday, I realized all my current blog post ideas would take more than a day to complete. Between The 4 Minute Folio launch, AniQuote suddenly materializing from the massive mist of ideas in my head and a new side gig I’ve taken up two weeks ago, it’s a week as busy as ever.
Hence, I decided to give myself the following constraints for this post:
Artificially limiting yourself is liberating. Busy weeks come with a lot of learnings, so these rules forced me to go narrow and think really hard:
What’s the biggest lesson from the past 7 days?
Read MoreWhen you were 1 year old, you thought trying to touch everything you could get your tiny hands on was a good idea. Whatever would happen next, it sure would be amazing.
When you were 2 years old, you first learned to speak. You used that ability to be brutally honest. When you wanted mom, you said “Maaa!” and when you wanted dad you said “Dada!”
When you were 3 years old, you yelled in the grocery store that you wanted the cereal in the red box. And you didn’t give a damn what anyone walking by thought about it.
When you were 4 years old, you built the best Lego or Barbie house in the world. You were your own biggest fan, and you meant it.
Read More
Meet Charles Proteus Steinmetz.
Charles was a German-born, American mathematician, electrical engineer, who spent most of his life in Schenectady, New York, as a professor at Union College.
You can thank him for the thing we all most depend on in life: Electricity.
Charles helped shape the development of alternating current (AC), and is the reason you can plug your toaster, blender, TV or lamps into the sockets on your wall.
As soon as General Electric got word of this little (he was indeed just 4 feet tall) genius’s work in New York, they bought out the company he worked for in 1892, and with it, the man’s expertise.
In 1965, a Life magazine reader, Jack B. Scott, wrote in to tell the story of an encounter his father had made with the so-called “Wizard of Schenectady” at Henry Ford’s River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan.
Ford’s engineers had a problem they couldn’t fix, and so Steinmetz went down there on behalf of GE. Here’s the excerpt from Smithsonian Magazine:
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