1. THE WAY OF THE STUDY NINJA
The alarm goes off. Your brain slowly remembers that itās not the first time youāve heard that alarm this morning. You look at the time. āI canāt have snoozed for that long, surely?!ā Itās Wednesday. You have an assignment due tomorrow. Time is running out and this morningās planned extra hour of reading just became an extra hour in bed, which isnāt an ideal start. Oh, and youāre probably going to miss the bus now and be late for the start of the class.
You shouldnāt have gone out last night. Your friend just said to come round for dinner, but then dinner turned into the whole night. You feel tired and foggy and not quite ready to face the world. As you look at the texts on your phone you remember that you said yes to an extra shift at work tomorrow night (well, you do need the money), but with another deadline looming on Monday, itās going to be a busy few days ahead. A crazy few days. In fact, you already know that these next few days will look nothing like the peaceful and serene plan you created for tackling this term, just a few short weeks ago.
āWhy donāt things work out like I planned?ā
āWhy do I always find myself in a mess?ā
āJuggling all these things is so damn hard.ā
These issues are what this book is all about. Itās about helping you move from muddling through to becoming a Study Ninja ā slaying the enemies of stress, chaos, procrastination and feeling overwhelmed, and creating a sense of playful control and momentum in all that you do.
Itās easy to feel like everyone else has cracked it and that youāre the only one in a mess. So Iāll let you into a little secret ā everyone feels like this. From the most powerful business leaders and politicians to the coolest people on TV to your friends, family and role models ā theyāre ultimately all human beings with their struggles and faults. As human beings weāre more prone to mistakes than we like to think: we plan badly, weāre not realistic, weāre not organized enough to have a good enough view of whatās ahead, we struggle with prioritization, we get scared and nervous and oh, how we wish there was an exam for procrastination, because weād be guaranteed an āAā for that one (although weād probably put off that exam until tomorrow, come to think of it!).
Thatās part of the problem with creating study plans or reading study guides ā life isnāt perfect and we forget that weāre not perfect either. We keep finding ourselves in a mess because life is ā¦ messy. Yet study books and our own grandiose plans sell us the dream of perfection and we fall for it every time. We dream about this perfect life we can lead and convince ourselves that buying a smart new notebook and some highlighter pens is but the first step on our inevitable journey to awesomeness. Three weeks into the term, those dreams have faded again and weāre back to feeling disappointed, flustered, daunted and messy again.
How do I know this? Well, Iāve spent the last six years coaching and training senior business leaders in how to be productive and successful, and I wrote a bestseller that helps people do that in their work and life, called How to be a Productivity Ninja.
And how did that become my job? Because I was spectacularly bad at productivity. Because I tried to live the perfection myth too. Because Iām naturally flaky, lazy and disorganized. Because Iād struggled so hard at making myself productive that I found it easy to relate to other people struggling and could help them find solutions.
I was far from a grade āAā student. You should see my school reports. Oh wait, my mum still has them in her loft. And now Iām reading them again after all these years, theyāre even less pretty than I remember them. And I have even less of an idea about why she might choose to keep them ā¦
āGrahamās mark here is about average but does not reveal the number of reminders that have been necessary before work appearedā
āMr Abyss, Chemistry
āGraham is still satisfied with inaccurate work in his writing. He continues to rush his homeworkā
āMrs Bettany, French
āItās the same old story ā Graham can work well in class, but not out of schoolā
āMr Cartwright, History
āIncapable of simply arriving on time in the morning, I am not surprised at his present problems with courseworkā
āMr Goodes, form tutor
āThe progress he has made has been pulled out of him, and most credit for it goes to others, not himself. He sees it as a little local difficulty, but his attitude to organized study is in fact a major future problemā
āDr Rex Pogson, Headteacher
What those reports donāt tell you is that I was learning loads in those school years, but very little of it was in school. I was editing a music magazine, singing in a band, campaigning for political change, putting on music events, writing a music column for my local newspaper, DJing on a local radio station, as well as delivering newspapers six days a week and working in a bank three evenings a week. But I still look back on some of those school years as a wasted opportunity. If Iād have known what I know now about topics like productivity, attention, psychology, self-control and motivation, my school days ā and my qualifications ā would have been very different.
Since those days, Iāve learned something really important about learning itself, too. Knowledge is power ā itās a clichĆ© because itās true. But weāve come to see education as a passport to a better pay packet, and as a āchoreā thatās necessary for us to reach the next level in life, when really we should see it as a path to a richer life experience. Yes, thereās a destination to reach, but why not make the journey richer, more fulfilling and more interesting, too?
This mindset shift happened for me when I was studying for my degree, at the University of Birminghamās famous and pioneering Centre for Cultural Studies and Sociology, set on a beautiful campus in a fascinating multi-cultural city ā home of course to the Balti curry, Tolkien, Cadburyās chocolate and, of course, Aston Villa Football Club.
At the end of those three years, I was given a degree and I was happy that within weeks of graduating, I got a job doing something that I cared deeply about. Conventional wisdom is often for people to abandon the thought of education or personal development at this point. Why would you need to keep learning when youāve reached the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? But the thing that university gave me ā that was much more important than the piece of paper I could use to inflate my salary expectations ā was a deep sense of curiosity, a thirst for knowledge and understanding about how the world works, and excitement at finding out what makes people tick, what principles or politics are worth fighting for, how the world and society should develop. Iād finally learned that there is nothing as exciting as asking big questions, knowing full well that youāre unlikely to get a simple answer.
So, dear reader, whether youāre studying for your GCSEs or A-levels, your degree, or your French class after work, my hope is that this book ignites within you a passion for learning as well as giving you skills, techniques, tips and tricks from the world of business and productivity that mean you can take your learning to a new level. If thereās a destination you have in mind ā a qualification, a life stage, an achievement ā then I would be delighted to be your guide on that journey, and I promise weāll get you there in good shape.
But my aim will be to go further: my real aim will be to give you the gift of playful curiosity that my three years studying at the University of Birmingham gave me. Whether youāre learning for school, for college or university or just for the fun of learning, my intention here is to show you the way.
You have a reason for wanting to learn. Perhaps itās to make your parents happy, perhaps itās to advance a career or perhaps itās for the sheer unadulterated pleasure of learning new things. It could be a combination of all of the above, or something else entirely. But letās be honest, thereās also plenty of reasons not to learn, too. It could be that amazing new series on Netflix, it could be the distraction of the football scores or the Xbox, it could be your family or a great book. All of these are enemies of progress, because youāre human. As much as we all like to feel weāre above such distraction, and as much as we beat ourselves up at our regular lapses into spectacular bouts of procrastination, it happens. Weāre human. We know itās not good for us. We do it anyway.
For the past decade or so, Iāve been obsessed with productivity. I became obsessed with it because I was fed up of watching myself fall for bad habits, struggling to find ways of being organized and in control and realizing the sheer inefficiency of so many of my approaches to work and life. Ever since I started my company, Think Productive, and started teaching productivity at some of the best-known companies in the world, one of the most common things people have said to me is: āI wish they taught these kinds of skills in schools.ā
I quite agree: I was lousy in school. I had no awareness of how to study well, I struggled to hold my attention on things for long enough to do great work (by the way, this never changed, I just developed better ways around this!) and I never really felt I hit a groove until well into my degree ā and only then because I felt so totally engaged and inspired by the subject matter, which Iām realistic enough to know is a luxury in itself.
What wins on a rainy Tuesda...