Speaker 1: Every morning I wake up at 3am, hours before my classmates. And what's the first thing I do? I go for a run. And no, not just any run. I like to run a marathon. I'll usually keep running until my legs feel like they're about to collapse. Then once I come home, I like to jump right into a cold shower. Actually no, it's not just a cold shower. It's a freezing cold shower. Sometimes the water is so cold that icicles start to form on the shower head. Only once I've lost all motor function in my fingers, I'll decide to jump out and start my next habit of the day. Meditation. Now this one's special. I'll sit still for hours as I contemplate the meaning of the universe. I'll dwell on string theory and the Big Bang as I listen to Mozart's entire discography. And after that, well, it's time for breakfast. Nothing like some straight vegetables and a cup of water to start the day. Usually by now it's around 3.30am, so I'll spend the next four hours before school reading up on next week's lectures. And of course, this is all a lie. I never have and never will ever in my life wake up at three in the morning. And cold showers? I don't really like them. Let's break down the five habits that actually helped me succeed as a student. All right, let's break down habit number one. Back in high school, I would follow an after-school routine. And I genuinely believe this is one of the best habits that you can form as a student. Now here's the reality for most students that you might even be familiar with. They'll come home from school, they'll sit on the couch, they'll bring out their phone, and they'll end up scrolling for hours on end. The whole point of having an after-school routine, and more importantly, actually following it, is to make sure you don't get lost in this rabbit hole. Essentially, you want to make it as easy as possible to jump into work as soon as you come home. But Gohar, what if I'm exhausted and don't want to do any work? You know what? You can take a break. But here's the thing. You have to use a timer. Don't just sit on the couch and tell yourself, oh, I'm just taking a little break. If you want to take an actual break, by all means do so. But make sure that in 15 minutes or in 30 minutes, your alarm goes off and you get to work. Otherwise, you'll just find yourself scrolling TikTok endlessly. Now here's what my routine roughly looked like in high school. I would come home from school and I would relax for 10 to 15 minutes. Then I'd spend the next 10 to 15 minutes getting ready to work both physically and mentally. I'd clean up my workspace, I'd bring out my supplies, I'd update my to-do list. I'd make sure that everything that I needed to work was primed and ready to go. And then I'd just jump right into work. I would grind for anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour or just when it was time to eat dinner. After dinner, I'd come back to my desk and I'd start my first real grind session of the day. I would sometimes work for two, three, or even four hours straight. But now here's the thing. Every student grinds differently. Some students prefer to focus on one different subject every single day. For example, they might do math on Monday, science on Tuesday, English on Wednesday, and so on. Other students, myself included, prefer to do a little bit of each subject every single day. And that leads me into my next habit. For pretty much all of high school and college, I would evenly distribute everything. For example, if I had two weeks to do a 70-page AP psych reading, I would read five pages every day. If I had three days to do 24 AP calc problems, I would answer eight problems every day. Honestly, this habit gave me so much comfort because it prevented me from cramming. There were so many points during freshman year of high school when I had one, two, or even three weeks to do an assignment. But I would find myself doing it within the final few days. And I'm gonna be honest with you. I still follow this habit to this day. For example, when it came to this video, I had around seven scenes and seven days to shoot it. So I've been shooting one scene every day. Yes, I find this habit pretty helpful. But I think the next one is what actually allowed me to get straight A's. All right, before we jump into the next habit, I want to talk a little bit about how school can be pretty stressful at times. Not only do you have to balance academics with extracurriculars, but you also have to think about friends, family, hobbies, and so much more. Look, all of this is a natural part of being a student. And if you find yourself feeling pretty stressed, know that you're not alone. But I get it. Sometimes it might just feel like too much and you really want to talk to someone. And that's where the sponsor of this video comes in, BetterHelp. Look, if you've ever thought about therapy, you've probably realized that starting is pretty hard. Sometimes you might not be able to find a therapist around you. And at other times, the idea of doing a face-to-face therapy session sounds kind of intimidating. Well, BetterHelp is a platform that makes starting therapy super easy. All you have to do is fill out a short questionnaire, and within 48 hours, they'll match you to one of the 30,000 licensed therapists that are in their network. And the best part is, you can do your sessions in almost any format. You can do it as a phone call, a video chat, or even over text. You can book these sessions whenever you have time throughout the week, and make it a habit to check in on yourself and take care of your mental health. If you think you might benefit from therapy and want to check out BetterHelp, then head to this link. Clicking it will not only support this channel, but it'll also get you 10% off your first month. Alright, now on to the next habit. Alright, I have some good news and I have some bad news. So I'm guessing you want to hear the bad news first. Out of all the habits that I'm going through in this video, this is probably the one that's the hardest to implement. But the good news is that out of all the habits, this is probably the one that'll have the biggest impact on your grades. Alright, you need to get into the habit of confronting your knowledge gaps. And now you might be sitting there saying, well, Gohar, I already do that. I study every single day, I go through my flashcards, and so on. And yes, this is a way of confronting your knowledge gaps. But I genuinely believe the students who do well in school go one step further. So let's walk through a little scenario. Let's say you're sitting in APUSH and your teacher's handing back the last exam. You get yours back and you see you got 5 out of 30 questions wrong. You start flipping through your exam packet. You look at each error, but you just tell yourself, oh, these were dumb mistakes. And then let's say a few hours later, you're sitting at home studying for the next APUSH exam. And you come across the terms horizontal integration and vertical integration. Now, deep down, you know you don't fully understand these terms. But what do you do? Because you've heard of them before and because they sound vaguely familiar, you just say, oh, yeah, I know what these mean. And you move on. Look, if you have had this experience, you are not alone. And I have had it myself plenty of times. But the reality is, in these situations, you have to accept what it is you don't know and do whatever you can to fill in that knowledge gap. For example, if you get an exam question wrong, instead of just dismissing it, I want you to imagine yourself taking that exam again and answering that exact same question. Go through your train of logic, rewrite these steps if necessary, and figure out exactly where things went wrong. Similarly, if you come across a term or a concept you're not too familiar with, in that moment, you should pull up Quizlet, your flashcards, your textbook, whatever resource you need to fully understand that term. Yes, this habit will make your study sessions longer and more uncomfortable. But as you've probably heard many times over the internet, if you're uncomfortable, it means you're learning. In my opinion, it's very easy to just dismiss or put off the things you don't fully understand. And you need to do everything you can to prevent that from happening. Now, there's another habit I want you to follow as well. Let's talk about it. All right, so this next habit is less of a habit and more of a life philosophy. And here it is. Get comfortable asking for things. So I'm going to go ahead and put this in the context of college admissions. If you're a high school student, there's a good chance you've seen those college acceptance videos all over YouTube. You see these students screaming, jumping up and down, getting into a bunch of Ivy League schools. So like any normal high school student, what do you do? Well, you try to figure out what the heck they did in high school. Slowly but surely, you find out about the activities they did, the awards they won, and you slowly tell yourself, there is no way I could ever do this myself. And look, part of me accepted the fact that I probably couldn't do most of that stuff. For example, some of the students that are winning these international math competitions literally start training while they're in elementary school. But at the same time, I was looking at some of these activities and accomplishments and telling myself, there might be a way that I could do that. For example, a lot of these superstar students were doing scientific research in high school. And I slowly realized, wait, if I just email professors at colleges around me, I could probably get a research position myself. And that's what I did. I sent off a bunch of emails, not afraid asking for a potential research assistant position or an internship position. And before you knew it, one of those professors got back to me and offered me a position. And I actually did a similar thing to become editor-in-chief of my school's newspaper. So I joined Newspaper Club my freshman year. And by the time I was a junior, I had written a bunch of articles and I even helped to digitize the entire school paper. Now, there really wasn't a formal way of choosing editor-in-chief. So when the old one was graduating, I went up to the advisor and asked, hey, could I just be the next editor-in-chief? And given my track record, it wasn't too hard for her to say yes. Look, the big takeaway here is that if you really want to bolster your high school resume, lots of things won't just be handed to you. In fact, some of these things don't even have applications. You kind of just need to understand what you want, who you'll potentially have to ask, and then have the guts to go and ask them. This could be for research, getting a leadership role, job shadowing, starting a club, getting funding for a business, and so on. Trust me, learning how to send the right cold message to the right person can drastically change your high school trajectory. Maybe I'll make a video just about this. Let me know. Oh, okay. So next habit. I want you to do something that you enjoy every single day. It could be listening to music. It could be watching your favorite TV show. Honestly, if all you're doing is working day in and day out, you're eventually going to burn out as a student. And look, I'm not asking you to indulge yourself for like several hours every day. I'm just saying that you should find something small that makes your day a little bit better. Maybe it's going for a walk. Maybe it's reading a little bit. Maybe it's trying out a new hobby. A little bit of variety that comes in the form of doing these small things that make your day a bit better can make it so much easier to be a student. Now, look, you might be sitting there saying, Gohar, I'm taking like four or five AP classes. I do not have time to read or watch TV shows. And yeah, I totally get that. So I have two other solutions. One, just do something you enjoy each day, even if it's just for 10 or 15 minutes. If you're short on time, that's totally fine. Just do something small to make the day a bit better. Or at the very least, if you can't find time during the weekdays, make sure that you decompress or do something special on the weekends. Look, I hope the takeaway from this video wasn't that you have to just keep grinding and keep working hard 24-7. It's super important to balance academics with all the other parts of your life, like friends, family, hobbies, and so on. And speaking of doing things for fun, I actually got to go to the gym right now. So like and subscribe for more.