(upbeat music) - Yeah, we have one more question. It's from a student and he has a question about starting for a highly competitive exam. - All right, let's do it. - Hello Carl, Shubham here from India. Firstly, thank you so much for your podcast and books. Your books have profoundly influenced my academic career and life in general.

As a student preparing for civil services examination, one of the highly competitive examination held in India, the only way I think to stand out is to putting extra number of deep work hours in the preparation. Any tips for that and in general about cracking and highly competitive examinations? Thank you.

- Yeah, I used to deal with these questions a lot when I was doing primarily student focused advice back in my early days. The big high level point that applies to any high stakes examination and really sort of any high stakes grading situation is to make sure that your approach to preparing is what actually matters and not what you want to matter.

It's the most common trap that happens here is that people write a story in their head of what they want preparation for this exam to be. And it matches something that's typically it's some sort of activity that it's hard enough to feel fulfilling, but not so hard that it's really gonna cramp their life or be too hard.

Or they just like the idea of it and they just throw hours at it and they just want that to be what matters. And often what really matters for doing well for the exam might be completely different and actually require a lot less time once you know what it is.

So you gotta figure out what really matters for passing the India civil service entrance exam. And the way you figure that out is you talk to people who have done it. Know about it from direct experience. You say, what mattered? What was the prep you did that really was useful and what was the waste of time?

And you talk to five people like this. And if it's a big enough exam, there might be books on it, you read the books too. You figure out what really matters. And then you get a realistic picture of this is what I the activities I actually need to do, the activities I actually need to do to prepare for this exam.

And then you find the time for it. Okay, well, how much is that gonna take? And so how early do I have to start? Then where do I wanna put that on my calendar? You should autopilot schedule it. Let me get that all on my calendar in advance, the same times on the same days.

And then you just execute and you're executing the stuff that matters. If you're really working backwards from focusing on what people know from experience makes a difference, it's probably less time than you think. For God's sakes, it's much less time if you come at this with the mindset of just, this is a morality setup.

Like the more sacrifice I do, the more I'll be rewarded. So let me just make sure I'm miserable and doing lots of hours. Your hours are only interesting to me as a secondary side effect of you figuring out what prep matters and you scheduling it. And that'll take whatever it takes.

Hours are not a planning tool. Trying to hit another hours is not a planning tool. Trying to hit a certain level of misery or so you feel like you're at least trying hard means nothing. All I care about is are you doing the actual concrete activities you have evidence work?

Did you give yourself enough time to get those all done? Do those things when you've done them, you're done. If you don't, you're not, that's it. A real differentiating factor when it comes to high stake test, the people who figure that out and the people who want it to be some sort of more morality play about sacrifice and sweat.

That's not the way it works. Here's an example from my own days in college. So I went to an Ivy League school here in the US and had a lot of friends go to Harvard Law School after college, right? Which by the way, side note, naive public school kid I was going to this Ivy League school was completely surprised that most of the people I know went to Harvard Law School, right?

Because in my mind, I didn't have this mindset of like, these are the professional tracks that are allowed. Of course, this is why you went to this school so that you can then go to Harvard and then get a law firm job. Like I just thought everyone was gonna be professors and journalists and start nonprofits and cool companies.

And no, they all went to Harvard Law School, right? Because I was from a naive public school background, right? So I didn't realize like, oh, these are all pathways. You become a doctor or a lawyer or a management consultant or finance and you go through these schools and whatever.

So you look at that from the outside, you're like, man, how did all these kids get into Harvard Law School? And depending on your orientation on the optimist pessimist scale about human nature, you think it's one of two things. Either they must all just be brilliant. Man, I'll never be like that.

Look at these smart kids. They all can just go into Harvard Law School. Or you say, yeah, it's all just like, what school you went to and look at that pipeline. You just for free, you get to go to Harvard Law if you go to an Ivy League school.

And so it's just perpetuating, sort of entrenched privilege. But there's a third element here that I noticed up front, which was they systematically figured out what is needed to accomplish this goal. And they looked up, there's these matrices you could look up first of all, that shows you with your current GPA, what LSAT score would you need to have a high percentage of being accepted into Harvard Law School?

And they all looked at this and they all looked at their current GPAs and said, great, I have to get this LSAT score. So they're specific. And they figured out by talking to people who had gone before and gotten good scores on the LSAT, what really matters. And it was practice.

A lot of it was practice, real tests under real conditions. You would learn some techniques and do real tests under real conditions. And so they organized a club internally where they would just do these tests, real LSATs under real conditions again and again and again until their scores hit exactly this number that the statistics told them would give them a good chance of being accepted.

And then they were done. And then they went and took the LSAT and they got that score and they got into Harvard. The reason why I tell the story is to show what they were doing there is what often happens when you see people who do very well in high stakes testing is they figured out what do I really need to do and how do you actually do it?

And they put aside the time. And these students, my memory is they spent like a whole quarter working on this. They're like, okay, we're probably gonna end up having to dedicate, I'm trying to add this up in my head, 100 hours of work on this to get our LSAT scores where they are.

So we got started early and we do this every Friday or whatever, every Thursday morning and let's just go. So I just use it as an example of this is the key to anything high stakes is get the ground truth evidence what really matters here and confront that for better or for worse.

This is what I would actually have to do to prepare for this. And then try to find time to do it, build your schedule, start early to fit it in. So, and then either do the work or you don't, but do not invent your own story for what you think should matter.

Do not just retreat to storylines about there's nothing I can do because I'm not brilliant. So I'll just never get a good score. Nah, it's work. Like how do I get to where I need to get? So figure out the real solution, do the real work. It's not very exciting, but that's, honestly, that's how the world turns with most of these, most of these types of high stakes exams anyways.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music)