Speaker 1: From the age of 4 to around 18, I didn't get good grades at all, I was lazy and unmotivated and I would much rather sleep or play video games than spend any amount of time studying. It's maybe no surprise then that I graduated at high school with a 1.3 GPA. Then in 2015 I started studying at university for a bachelor's degree in economics and finance and I graduated university with a 4.0 GPA and I learned a lot on that journey. I managed to reverse 14 years of bad study habits and destructive behaviours that were causing me to achieve relatively mediocre grades and turn myself around so that I went on to graduate in the top 5% of my class at university. So in this video, I'm going to take you along the journey with me, my thought processes along the way and the specific mindset changes that I made and what triggered them and exactly what steps I took that allowed me to make that transformation. And I'm going to go straight into the single biggest thing I did that completely changed the way that I behaved, acted, carried myself, how I studied. It really did change everything. I had a complete shift in my mindset. So I started to actually believe that I could achieve A grades. I started to believe that if I studied hard enough, I could actually achieve any grades that I wanted and I removed my self-limiting restrictions that I had put on myself for 14 years. So once I started to believe it, I then started to study like it. Once I started to believe it, I set goals. I'd set goals to aim for A grades in my exams and then I'd study just like an A grade student would. But what triggered this? It wouldn't just happen randomly, right? But something must have happened to trigger it. Well, what it was was that I started to spend time with students far better than me, those students that were getting A grades. I realised that those students getting phenomenal grades in every exam, they're just normal people just like me. The only difference was that they actually studied for their exams. They put in the hours. They probably studied five to six times the amount that I was studying and I was watching them. I was watching what they did. There was no magic involved. They weren't cleverer than me. They weren't more talented than me. They didn't process information faster than me. They didn't read or write faster than me. They just put in the work, whereas I didn't. And while they were studying 12 hours a day sometimes before an exam, I'd be playing video games for 12 hours a day before exams. And it's funny because it's such a basic thing, right? Such a simple concept to understand. But if someone gets good exam grades, then it's probably because they're studying harder than you. But it wasn't until I started watching them that I actually started to really understand that, which is really daft looking back at it. I thought I wasn't getting good grades because I wasn't smart enough or I wasn't capable enough. And being able to remove my self-limiting beliefs, it's an incredibly powerful thing to do. And it's a skill that even after graduating, it's something that I think regularly about. With my work, for example, am I really having the biggest impact that I can have? Or am I thinking too small? And Grant Cardone talks about the 10x rule quite often, which is where whatever your goals are, whatever you're aiming for right now, whether it's your grades, whether it's your finances, whether it's the relationships in your life, maybe it's your physical health or your mental health, whatever your goals are, times those goals by 10 because it's very likely that you're thinking far too small.

Speaker 2: The 10x rule is really about how could somebody take where they're at? If they're making $29 an hour or $15 an hour or $8 an hour, how would you take and 10x all that activity? And then while you're doing that, also 10x your marriage, 10x the kids, 10x your time off.

Speaker 1: And I was definitely a victim to that. I was thinking far too small. I didn't believe that I was capable of achieving decent grades. Therefore, I didn't even try. And it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. And so to anyone watching this who is in a similar position to me where you don't really believe that you're capable of achieving incredible grades, I hope this video goes some way into showing you that if I can do it, and there's nothing particularly special about me, so if I can do it and I can completely turn my grades around, then I'm absolutely sure that you can too. Another thing I did that helped me make that transformation was I took extreme ownership of the situation that I was in. I began to self-reflect. I started being brutally honest with myself and ask, why am I not getting decent grades? Why am I not prioritising my studying over other things? And it's really easy to blame the teachers or to blame the education system or blame your parents or friends or the financial situation that you're in. It's really easy to blame other people, but that doesn't fix the problem. If you continue blaming everyone else but yourself, then the problem is never going to go away. You're only able to fix it when you take responsibility and you start to make yourself accountable for your own problems. So for 14 years of my education, I was sitting on pretty average grades for the whole time, but I never really took responsibility. I didn't take action in order to improve those grades. I didn't take ownership of my problems. If I did particularly bad in an exam, I didn't self-reflect and think back on how I could have done better or try to improve my grades in any way. I did feel bad if I failed an exam, but I'd move on and I'd never think about it again. I never learned. I think that was my problem. I never learned from my mistakes. So I kept making them again and again and again. And Jocko Willink talks quite a lot about extreme ownership. In fact, he's written a book about it. It's called Extreme Ownership. Whether he coined the term or not, I don't know. But he explains how our ego is the biggest obstacle because we don't want to take the blame for when things go wrong. We want to blame everyone else.

Speaker 3: Take ownership of everything in your world, the good and the bad. Take ownership of your mistakes. Take ownership of your shortfalls. Take ownership of your problems. And then take ownership of the solutions that will get those problems solved.

Speaker 1: And it's such an important message. It's such an empowering message because if there's something in your life that maybe you're not financially where you want to be or maybe you're not healthy or as fit as you'd like to be, taking extreme ownership really does give you power and lets you take back control so you can then take massive action in fixing those problems. So whatever problems you have in your life, there's a very, very, very good chance that if you change your actions, you can then fix that problem. One of the biggest differences between how I lived my life at high school and how I lived my life at university was that I used my time so much more wisely at university. I remember I used to play video games sometimes 14 hours a day and obviously that left me very little time to do anything else. In 2015, researchers at Cambridge University studied 845 pupils from secondary schools in Cambridge and Suffolk in the UK and they found that 14-year-olds who spend just one hour a day on screens during their leisure time score 9 fewer points at GCSE when the sum of their grades is calculated. And that's the equivalent of dropping two grades, so from a B grade to a D grade. And two extra hours results in 18 fewer points at GCSE. They saw a negative correlation between screen time and grades, so the more hours a student spent in front of the TV or video console, for example, or their phone, the lower their grades would be. And so Kirsten Corder, the author of the report at Cambridge University, pretty much summed it up saying, spending more time in front of a screen appears to be linked to a poorer performance at GCSE. And on the flip side, a study published in the International Journal of Behavioural Nutrition and Physical Activity found that students who did just an extra hour of daily homework and reading performed significantly better in their exams than their classmates. Now, that's probably not surprising, but what is surprising is actually how much better the grades were of the students that did just one extra hour of daily homework and reading. So on average, their grades increased by 23.1 and that's equivalent to improving from an F grade to an A grade with just one hour extra of daily study. So imagine the next time you get home from your school or university, instead of turning on the TV or going on your phone, what if you just spent one extra hour studying that evening? And then imagine you made that into a habit and you did that every day. As soon as you get home, you just study an extra hour. That's one hour of studying, providing you make it worthwhile and you're focused the entire time. It can significantly help boost your grades in the long term and the study certainly backed that up. But screen time isn't all bad. Honestly, one of the most effective tools I use at university was YouTube. So it's kind of weird advice, but consider watching more YouTube. And what I mean by that is anything that I didn't understand, whether it's a concept that the lecturer explained, but I didn't quite understand it, or terminology in a book, for example, that I didn't quite understand. I would just type these into YouTube and there'd be so many easy to follow videos on that particular subject. Now, it's probably dependent on what subject or what degree you're studying. So I studied economics and finance and there are literally millions of videos on YouTube on those subjects. So YouTube was incredibly helpful for me in helping me understand my course on a far deeper level. But also it's nice to break up a study session by watching educational YouTube videos. It can be quite tedious reading thick textbooks for hours on end. So breaking them up with educational videos helps keep things interesting and keeps you focused. And that's a really useful productivity tip just in general in order to be able to study for longer while staying focused. If you're reading a relatively boring textbook, then split the study session up. Instead of spending five hours reading that boring textbook, consider breaking it up by watching some educational YouTube videos by creating color-coded mind maps, for example, or turning on some quiet background music or changing the scenery and maybe moving to a coffee shop or going outside to study. And if you like this video, last week I made a video similar to this going through the seven most effective habits of high-performance students. You can click on the video on the screen to watch it. They were the most powerful daily habits that I observed high-performance students at university implementing into their daily lives, which directly helped them achieve A grades consistently. And judging from the comments and the number of views they got, you guys loved that video. So I'm aiming to make more of those in the future. And so I'll see you over in that video.