Speaker 1: Wherever you are in your high school career, you can always make an effort to give yourself better chances. And I mean always. When an admissions officer takes a look at your application, they take the GPA as a number one factor in your admission. Here's what I mean. Take the UC system for example. There were 245,768 applications this year. 245,768. Do you think they have the time to truly read through your whole application? No. They do GPA cutoffs. And speaking rationally, if you couldn't handle the high school curriculum that the other students were able to, why should they give you a chance? So, if you're finally in a situation where you're taking this shit seriously, here's a plan to at least improve your chances. First though, without knowing where you are, you wouldn't know where to go. So analyze where you're at currently. Maybe you've only been taking regular classes and just breezed past high school. Or even the complete opposite, just overwhelming yourself with honors and AP classes. I don't know. I'm not you. No one can truly tell whether you're fulfilling your potential or not because the only person that is with you constantly throughout the day is yourself. Only you can truly judge yourself. If you're watching TikTok all day and you're studying after all the hours of games you've played with your friends, are you really taking college admissions as your priority? And I know college admissions isn't the end-all be-all in life, but in this season, this is what matters most. You can play all the games you want, party all you can, hang out with your friends, all of it in second semester of senior year. So don't worry about missing out. Write down these three categories. Time, intensity, and consistency. For each of these categories, rate yourself from 1 to 10. So let's talk time. How much time are you investing in studying? Doing projects in a timely manner? Or even just doing your homework? Intensity. How intense are your studying sessions? Are you just skimming over your notes, acting as if that's studying? Or are you actually finding more practice problems to get more reps in? Consistency. Are you only putting in the hard work during finals? Or is it the consistent effort all throughout the school year? We need to put ourselves on a metric to objectively look at how we stand as a student outside of class. Let's look at your time rating. If your score is below 5 out of 10... Like, what the fuck are you doing? I thought you were trying to get serious with this. Fortunately, the world isn't yet crazy enough to reward undeserving people. So don't fake yourself into believing that you deserve this acceptance after you put no time in. If you're anywhere above that though, try to look for the small improvements you can make throughout the day to make it more efficient. One great way to stay productive is to schedule your time after school. For example, a student was trying to create a schedule for the day. Do you think he'll put a reminder at 4.30pm to check Instagram for an hour, and then binge-watch TikTok all the way until dinner time? What do you think? You're on your desk doing homework, but the second you get a notification, your hand just... just gravitates towards your phone. It's hard to have a predictable day without a schedule. And if you're not successful, it's because your life is unpredictable. Plan your day. Next up, intensity. This is where many, many students fall short. Because there's not many students that do the deep, focused, and hard work that is required. Robert Greene. You've probably heard of him. Six-time international bestseller. The author of The 48 Laws of Power. The Art of Seduction. The 33 Strategies of War. The 50th Law. Mastery. The Laws of Human Nature. He's been featured on New York Times, USA Today, CNN, LA Times. What I'm trying to say is that he knows his shit. He says, The time that leads to mastery is dependent on the intensity of our focus. What that means for us, is that we don't have to spend every waking moment of our high school life studying day and night, as long as we have high intensity. Winners don't have a better strategy. They simply do the obvious things with higher intensity. And you won't even know what max intensity looks like until you see it. Intensity is a strategy. Finally, Consistency. You can invest all your time you have, and actually study the proper way, but without consistency, it has no significance. Miller Drexler, the CEO of Alex Mill, says, People like consistency. Whether it's a store or a restaurant, they want to come in and see what you're famous for. In the same way, admissions officers are looking for consistency in the success that the students find in their class. I know it's hard to stay consistent. Because why wouldn't you want to do something else that's more fun, more exciting? But I promise you, the fun and excitement you'll sacrifice in a short sprint will be worth it. The reality is, there's thousands of other students that are better and smarter than you. But that doesn't fucking matter. Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Because focus and consistency trumps talent when talent doesn't show up. Success comes through sustained effort. But the key word isn't effort. It's sustained. Todd Bryson. I know some students who say, I'll outwork them all. I used to be that type of student too. But you come to realize that it's not about outworking them. It's to out-sacrifice them. When they're out playing with their friends and having fun, you're making sure you go over the course material to ensure the best grade. When they're chilling at home, watching TV shows all night, you're summarizing the notes from your club meeting you had earlier that day. You always have to sacrifice what you want now for what you want most. Sacrifice and feed your dream. You probably know by now, when motivation is gone, discipline kicks in. But if you don't have any discipline, it's hard to stick through. Long journeys such as this, you need to find the wins along the way. After getting that first taste of winning, will you find the purpose and meaning of this mission? I mean, who wants to grind for months, even years without tasting a fraction of what the win is like? So, that first win. Where the hell do you find it? Out of all the classes you're taking right now, choose the one you're having the most struggle with. That one class that makes you feel lost. Like, what the hell is going on? Once you start understanding and passing that class that used to limit your beliefs, you'll have the confidence to dominate your other classes. When you get that A, when you stop making those stupid mistakes, when you stop feeling hopeless looking at the problems in front of you, that's the moment you get hope of turning things around. And we want that win as soon as possible. So, let me help you get that first win. Like most students, you've probably crammed before an exam, and after it, you probably did okay, maybe even well. But did you remember any of the things you've learned after the exam? Let's go to the drawing board. One evidence-based way to better remember what you've learned is through spaced repetition, or spacing out your learning and practice of new knowledge or skills. Here's how it works. Say you plot your retention, or how much you remember of something versus time. Now you'll learn that something on day zero. Without reviewing it, the forgetting curve will look like an exponentially decaying curve. If you review, or better yet, actively retrieve the material at increasingly spaced intervals after learning it, then the forgetting curve starts to flatten out, and you'll get a lot better long-term retention. Now, the goal here is to review the material at the right time. It turns out that the best time to revisit information that you're trying to learn is right around the time you would naturally forget it. Since forgetting typically follows this exponential curve, the trick becomes timing your study sessions around it. One of the best parts of spaced repetition is that it suggests that we gain a lot more by studying smarter, not necessarily longer. This goes hand-in-hand with the relations of time and intensity that I talked about earlier. Remember? That being said, give this studying technique one shot, and a good one at that. Once you see the results of a perfect execution of the studying technique, you'll be stupid not to use it going forward. Easy to say, but hard to do. So go do the hard work. Until next time, peace.