Wouldn’t life be simpler if there was a straightforward guide to becoming a superstar in our chosen field. Life would be even sweeter if this guide helped you choose a field, and worked in whatever domain you wanted it to. Unfortunately guides like this currently don’t exist, but I have a theory that an overlooked book on how to get into top schools can be extended to into something similar. A theory I’ll hopefully be testing soon.
Cal Newport’s How to be a High School Superstar is meant to serve as a guide to help high school students get into their dream schools without without taking on overloaded course schedules, joining meaningless honors societies, or even breaking much of a sweat doing things they aren’t interested in. Instead of following the conventional wisdom he preaches a doctrine of cultivating trait interestingness, under-scheduling, honing your focus, and living authentically. I have reason to believe the bold claims this book makes since Cal’s college guides led me to accomplish extraordinary things while living an extraordinary life as a college student.
This book is about much more than getting into college. It’s filled with unique practical philosophy on how to live an extraordinary life. The tactics in this book are applicable to many areas of post-grad life, and if applied in the real world, where the ceiling is much higher than getting into Harvard, I wonder if they’ll lead someone like me to become a real world superstar.
While reading the book I generated a list of action steps Cal suggests that can be applied to areas of non-high school life (with a little massaging here and there). I organized them into natural categories, and plan on taking the action steps detailed in the following lists, one list at a time, and documenting the result. If you’re reading this in the future, the titles of the lists will have links to the results of my experiments. If you are interested in the answers to any of the following questions, I suggest you take action on the listed steps to find out for yourself.
How to Be a High School Superstar
How to work:
- Cut off all work at dinner on weekdays
- Time-box your work to your cut off hour on weekdays plus one half-day on the weekend
- Work in an isolated study location, somewhere that make it a chore to go anywhere interesting (tv, dog, family)
- Work in 50 minute chunks followed by 10 minute breaks
- Get as much work done during normal working hours as possible
- Strive to start your work tasks early and complete them quickly
- Abstain from all sources of easy stimulation during focused work
- Go straight from work to your isolated study location or visa-versa
- Eat healthy non-processed food every hour after work to maintain energy levels while working on “personal projects”
- Work offline
- Get a large public calendar for your home and office
- Fill it with all relevant deadlines
- At the end of day make a plan to finish all work for the next two weeks by
- Tasking out work with estimates
- Scheduling tasks on calendar
How to manage time:
- Track how you spend your time in a diary
- Review your time log and identify where you should have done things differently
- Dedicate free time to undistracted reflection and relaxation. A walk outdoors with no internet connection or other outside source of stimulation is a good example of this.
- Use free time to explore then follow up on your most interesting experiences
How to find and interesting project:
- Make a habit of reading and explore new books at the bookstore or library
- Launch a Saturday Morning Project
- Something that when explained will likely elicit a response of “wow!”
- Work on your SMP only between waking up and lunch on Saturdays (interchangeable with Sundays)
- If it takes off you can contribute more time as it will likely be converted to a deep interest that you regularly focus on during the week
- If you have a casual interest in a topic find a related community, join projects that interest you, and follow the projects through to completion
- Pursue ideas that have piqued your interest for the last few days following the advice guide method:
- Find examples of people who succeeded and failed at your desired pursuit
- Identify the differences between the success and failure stories
- Contact someone who succeeded and ask for specific advice
How to turn interesting projects into successful pursuits/How to master an interest:
- Pick pursuits that will hold your attention instead of perfect pursuits
- Find out how to become good at your chosen pursuits
- Ignore what you think you know and start with a blank slate
- Assume you know nothing in your area of focus
- Learn from people who are already good
- Find local experts and learn from them
- Once you’ve chosen what to master and found expert advice, dedicate yourself completely to that pursuit
- Keep your number of focused pursuits under 3
- Involve yourself in small activities and interests surrounding the pursuit you want to master
- Sow lots of project seeds to expose yourself to enough randomness to maximize your eventual chance of stumbling on the right project
- Regularly (every 1-6 months) conduct productivity purges to maintain your focus
- Write down your focused pursuits and “extra” (non-big picture) pursuits
- Whittle your number of focused pursuits down to 2 or less
- Under each pursuit list all projects (defined as anything with a regular time commitment) in progress
- For your focused pursuits, star the 1-2 projects with the greatest chance of advancing your ability
- For extras, star the most enjoyable sub projects
- Cross off non starred projects you could quit right now
- Quit them
- Come up with a plan to wrap up the remaining (unstarred) projects in the next 1-2 weeks
- Wrap them up
- Now you’re left with a small list of projects that will evolve that maximize your chances of success
- More frequent purges allow for more experimentation
- Pick appropriately sized projects and leverage your success to grow
- Ask “What’s a project that I’m well suited to finish efficiently and competently right now?”
- Pursue it to competition
- This will make larger more innovate projects available as you grow your competency and confidence in completing projects
How to pursue an impressive achievement:
- Find a peer that achieved something that impresses you, in a field you’ve chosen to pursue, and have them walk you though their journey step by step
- Map out the achievement using the innovation map method (Participating event -> Accomplishment -> Work required -> repeat) so you can understand what is required to achieve the accomplishment
- Choose innovative projects
- Strip the idea down to a one sentence core outcome
- Inflate your ambition by seeing how scaling effects difficulty
- Ask yourself: would a jaded brother admit some pride if you achieved this?