Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

I have some friends who say that "learning to learn" (the skill and the book with the same title) is key to being successful; specially if you're not a genius. Through my whole life, I met people who seemed nowhere near as bright as me but eventually got to surpass me both in academia and at work. From what I could observe about these people, the main difference was regularity; these people studied or wrote code every single day; they took small steps, but never stopped. Also there was the point of asking for help, not to get the answer, but to find a way out. There's also the "curse of the genius", but I don't think that is the case.

In the moments I was struggling the most in my life, what helped me the most was managing my time and finding ways to work a little bit every day, even if it was only writing down the plan of what I had to do. Pomodoro timers also helped me a lot to "start doing something".

I really think motivational, self improvement, anti-procrastination and studying advice courses should be offered by universities. I'm convinced that regularity and a good study strategy is enough to move even the weakest among the mediocres to attain a doctorate level. I saw some cases like these myself.

I always overestimate how much I can do in one day and I underestimate how much I can get done in 100 days (with the caveat that I have to work on it consistently).

Richard Hamming in his "You and Your Research" talk compares it to compound interest:

    What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this.

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

> I really think motivational, self improvement, anti-procrastination and studying advice courses should be offered by universities.

Agreed but i also think it should be focused on much earlier as well.

It's like exercise: if you can withstand more training, you will get better results. The most important thing is not how hard you train, but how consistent you are at training.

The advice given here can be dangerous to some people: one should be cautious of exerting too much effort because "working harder allows you to get more done".

The useful bit of advice here is the consistency, not the quantity of work.

> ... should be offered by universities.

Yes, but remember the onus is on the student to figure out how they learn best. Tertiary education is no longer about spoon-feeding (adult) students everything.

Since the parent mentioned a book, here is the reference, and also two related Wikipedia pages regarding how to learn effectively:

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn, Gordon and Breach, 1997. https://www.amazon.com/-/en/Art-Doing-Science-Engineering-Le...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system