How the fuck do you study?

_Legendairy_ · 2019-08-15T16:01:27+00:00

Quit jacking off, quit smoking, quit drinking.

For the next ten months your life is figuring out everything you’re taught in school: what does the teacher want you to know, why is it important, how/why does it work, etc..

If you don’t immediately understand something ask your teacher about it during their office hours, your friends can wait.

grabyourselfabeer · 2019-08-15T16:38:06+00:00

Dude. It’s high school. Literally show up, don’t fall asleep, ask questions, and get in tight with the teachers.

We_Are_Legion · 2019-08-15T16:36:33+00:00

# You study when the desire to study trumps the desire to not study.

This is a simple and incredibly truthful way of putting things I learned (from Kapil Gupta). When we understand this truth (which is a principle, not a prophecy), we can start to unravel our life and design it so as to address the two categories,

the desire to study & 2) the desire to NOT study

What follows is my experience going from someone who failed exams my whole life to getting some of the highest scores in my field later on. Including academic honours and a fully-funded international scholarship.

First understand that you are a very productive and an extremely focused human being WHEN doing things that feel right to you. At the last moments or days before your exams, I am sure you muster super-human focus and drive as well for cramming. That's when your desire to DO supercedes your desire to NOT DO. Out of panic.

But most of the year, you don't do anything. This is when your desire to NOT DO supercedes your desire to do.

# The desire to NOT DO

There is only 1 probable causes for desire to NOT DO (called procrastination):

You are afraid. Most of the literature on procrastination agrees that it is caused by subconscious resistance to the task your conscious brain has chosen. Your subconscious resists because it is afraid of failing, of being punished, of n

As Neil Fiore notes in the amazing book "The NOW Habit",

"Procrastination is not a character defect, rather, it is an attempt at coping with the often incapacitating fear of having our worth help up for judgement"

We use a metaphor to understand how we learned to procrastinate

• A. Walking a board on the ground

• B. Walking a board suspended between buildings 100 feet above the pavement

• C. Walking a board suspended between buildings 100 feet above the pavement, with the building on your end on ﬁre

On a psychological level you are often the one who raises the board off the ground by changing a straightforward task into the rest of your worth, proof that you are acceptable, a prediction that you will be successful and happy or a failure and miserable

Through perfectionism you raise the task 100 feet above the ground, so that any failure or rejection would be intolerable • You demand that you do it perfectly, without anxiety, with complete acceptance from your audience, with no criticism

In most cases you are the one who confuses just doing the job with testing your worth, where one possible mistake would feel like the end of the world

When you believe that your self-worth is determined by your performance, you focus on psychological selfprotection from fear of failing, rather than just doing the job

When you procrastinate, it’s as if you are the one raising the board off the ground, getting yourself frozen, and then lighting that ﬁre to create the pressure of a real deadline

Procrastination allows us to resist being judged by our production because we never make a complete effort that reﬂects our full ability

You should get this book. PM me if you need help.

But anyway, if these underlying fears can be released, the desire to NOT DO fades away and the LEARNED HABIT of procrastination can rapidly be unlearned.

# The desire to DO

I find I used to be very focused when playing video games (which give us goals, achievable challenges and rewards) and pursuing girls (who give us boobs) but not much when it came to school. In fact, there was an invisible and extremely sneaky force field that would PREVENT me from putting in the required hours. It would find excuses for why it wasn't necessary to study or start precisely NOW.

Although its really risky saying this (given what I later understood about the nature of hard work), I will say it anyway: I learned that the field I was in at that time wasn't truly for me. It didn't excite me nor did I find it to be a daily obsession in the way that the field I eventually ended up choosing. I hesitate to say this because you might impulsively make such a decision based on your fears and current incompetence. With the right training, you might well be suited for the subjects that you hate.

Later, by choosing subjects that excited me, I gained a desire to DO, which helped me excel.

i-am-the-prize · 2019-08-15T17:36:07+00:00

get on a schedule

a sleep schedule
a workout schedule
a study schedule
- find if your limit of useful study is 20, 40, 54.22 minutes and do chucks of that time span, don't do longer if you're not absorbing.

Maybe your a Kinesthetic learner, try to read your study book pacing in a safe zone (back yard, north 40) as one of my friends who thought "school wasn't for them" needed to move to learn, he would pace during intake and during reading/reviewing his papers for great effect.

track your diet and exercise vs. ability to read and study and look for patterns. take it seroius and see for results.

good luck man.

RedPillD · 2019-08-15T17:20:57+00:00

Finish high school for sure.

Start looking into trade schools. You don’t need an office job to make good money.

Corvus_Uraneus · 2019-08-15T16:33:21+00:00

There are apps that do it way better, but I used stacks of index cards.

Basically the night before each class, I would read the chapter we are to cover and highlight the important bits. Then I put questions from the end of the chapter relevant to those bits onto index cards with the answer on the back.

I would then sort the cards into stacks as I went through them, into 3 piles: I know it, I get it and I don't get it. Each time you go through your stacks, the first pile should keep getting bigger and the third keep getting smaller. I'd keep going through them for however much time I had allotted for studying for that class, say an hour. Then I'd bring the ones I still don't get to class and ask when its time for questions.

Finally, before test time I'd swap my index cards with a study buddy and we test ourselves then eachother. I would also at the end of the year box up my highlighted textbook, class notes notebook and index cards. If ever someone needed tutoring in a class I had taken, those boxes were an excellent resource.

I don't know the app names, but there are some that are good at tracking what you know and what you need to be quizzed on again through repeated use.

joelhamptn · 2019-08-15T17:36:44+00:00

I see a lot of my old friends from high school who didn’t take things serious in this same position. I’d recommend prioritizing your time on the things that matter most to you. Get your work done or at least do your best on everything ranging from homework all the way to class participation.

TehJimmyy · 2019-08-15T19:31:54+00:00

pomodoros

Irtotallynotrobot · 2019-08-15T20:32:48+00:00

The habit of now. Scheduling yourself is key.

nobody_thinks · 2019-08-15T20:36:45+00:00

lugrulo · 2019-08-15T20:55:16+00:00

By reminding yourself of the alternative

boy_named_su · 2019-08-15T20:58:37+00:00

Talk to your doctor. Maybe you're depressed or have adhd

new__vision · 2019-08-15T22:13:07+00:00

Read "How to Be an A+ Student" by Cal Newport, and put literally anything you need to remember into Anki and review daily. I was a terrible student until I changed and earned one of the toughest degrees.

Theorymeltfool1 · 2019-08-15T22:35:23+00:00

This book will change your life

Title	How the fuck do you study?
Author	RP_Throwaway_4U
Upvotes	13
Comments	15
Date	August 15, 2019 3:43 PM UTC (6 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/askTRP
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/asktrp/comments/cqrkk6/how_the_fuck_do_you_study/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/askTRP/how-the-fuck-do-you-study.248073 https://theredarchive.com/post/248073

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