★★★★★ 4
70% practical advice, 15% feel-good advice, 1% useless advice, 14% advice that saved my academic life
Format: Paperback
To be honest, if I had just graduated high school and someone gave me this book as a gift, I would roll my eyes and never open it. I picked it up a week ago, however, now that I am almost done with my second year of university, and I really do wish that I had had it (and cared to read it) two years ago.
The book is seventy-five pieces of advice, each with about two pages of explanation. The advice is pretty simple, as you can see from looking at the table of contents ("Dress Nicely for Class," "Never Nap," "Eat Healthy," "Always Go to Class"). But the reason this book is effective is that it serves as a quick-reference manifesto for some of the more important (to me) advice.
For example, I'm taking a grad-level fiction writing class. No due dates (except the final deadline at the end of the semester) and no class. You just write at your own pace and turn in a portfolio. This is incredibly difficult for me to do, and I'm unbelievably far behind in the work for the class. I was really quite worried about how I would ever pull it off. The whole semester, my fiction work has been priority #75, and I usually crash between priorities #14 and #20. But with some of the advice in this book ("Keep a Work Progress Journal," "Set Arbitrary Deadlines," "Avoid Daily To-Do Lists," "Don't Take Breaks Between Classes"), I actually feel pretty confident about being able to finish on time. By reading this book (and [...] and Newport's more recent book,
) I've adopted some strategies and habits that have actually yielded results.
Before Cal Newport, I was up late every night, angrily doing my homework until I couldn't drink any more tea, without any free time. Now, I'm getting my homework done before sundown (for the most part), feeling enormously more relaxed, and regaining a good amount of the excitement that I had about college before I got here.
If you're on your way to college, and you're the sort of person who can stomach (and listen to) advice, do yourself a favor and read this book. Newport admits in the introduction that not every piece of advice will be for you (for me: "Exercise Five Days a Week" and "Use a Filing Cabinet"). If you want to be more than an average student without being a "grind," this book has a good deal of solid advice.
If you're already in college, and you're looking for more in-depth and practical advice, I recommend also reading
. It has more thorough advice for confronting the terrors that you have come to know in college.
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Reviewed in the United States on April 8, 2010
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