We have a question now from Dami, who asks, "Doesn't doing problems on the go, as you recommend in How to Become a Straight-A Student, incur a cognitive burden?" This listener goes on to say, "I'm entering my junior year in college in Ireland, and I was wondering if the advice that you give to take your problem sheets with you on the go just makes you a "grind on wheels"?" Thanks.

Well, I appreciate the opportunity to go back and talk briefly about How to Become a Straight-A Student. My second book I ever wrote came out in 2006. I wrote it primarily as an undergraduate/first-year grad student. Interesting aside about that book, it's the best-selling of my student books. I stopped really paying attention to that, but for whatever reason, when my agent sent me my royalty statements earlier this week, I was like, "Hey, how is that book doing?" It turns out How to Become a Straight-A Student has sold now more than 200,000 copies since it came out in 2006, never with a big marketing push, never on a best-seller list.

It just sits there, and we just sell every week. People buy it. It's been there forever. I'm surprised that someone hasn't come and usurped it because the concept was very simple. I said, "What if you just wrote a book about how to study in college that took the question seriously and did nothing but just give advice?" Say, "Okay, I talked to 50 students who get good grades without burning out.

Here's how they do it," and just be very technical. That was the whole concept. Treat students with respect, give them the information. That book, man, that just rolls along, just rolls along and crushed it. How to Win a College, I checked that. It's now crossed healthily past the 100,000 copies sold, and How to Become a High School Superstar is catching up.

I think it's at 60,000. There's this secret underground world of those student books I wrote as a young man that are continuing to do some damage out there. All right, so let me just really briefly tackle your question. I talk about, I guess in that book, and, Dami, I am mixing up that book with blog posts I wrote immediately after that book came out.

To me, these are kind of the same thing. The original point of my Study Hacks blog when I started it right after Straight A Student came out was basically to add extra chapters that did not show up in the book. It was just continuing the conversation that was that book, so I mixed these things up.

I don't know if it was in the book or on my blog back then. I would talk about bringing with you these, you call them problem sheets. These were probably the mega problem sets I talk about in the book, but basically sample problems, which is at the core of how I suggest in that book studying for technical classes or mathematical classes.

I talk about these are portable. You can bring them with you to study. You're asking, "Will that make you a grind on wheels?" Well, no, because my recommendation is not, "Okay, when you build these study guides, study with them all the time." That's not what I'm saying. I wasn't saying, "Now you want to do 30 hours of studying, and because you have these sheets, you can study much more than you could before." That's not what I'm saying.

In fact, the core idea in how to become a straight-A student was the equation. Studying accomplished equals time spent times intensity of focus. The whole idea in that book is if you get your intensity of focus higher, you can reduce the time spent required to get the same amount of work done.

The real advantage of having portable study materials is that you can go to locations that are going to juice up that intensity of focus. You can go to the deepest, darkest, most concentration-inducing stacks of a faraway library. Shout out to Dana Biomedical Library on the Dartmouth College campus where I used to do this studying.

It means you can go into the woods and hike for 20 minutes and sit without distraction by a waterfall to think nothing but about your problems. It means, like one student I wrote about on my blog back then, you can find a way to sneak onto the roof of the physics building and study by light with the stars above you.

So the advantage of having portable material is that you can seek out the places that will reduce the total amount of time you have to study, not that you can now do more studying. I'm all about figuring out what work needs to be done. Why am I doing the studying this way?

Is this the fastest way, the best technique, or am I just spinning my wheels? And when do I want to do this work? You make that plan, you execute. That's the key to getting good grades without burning out. And that's what I recommend in that book. That's what I recommend on those early blog posts.

So that is what I will continue to recommend now. (upbeat music)