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7 Mistakes Students Make Every Year

2023-11-24 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 15:32 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Learning and studying (also: Work and career, Productivity and time, Health, sleep and habits, Goals, purpose and life design) · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Aimed at students, Feel-Good Productivity thesis, Sponsor segment present, His medical past

Ali lists seven mistakes he sees students make every year: not learning how to learn, treating studying as a single-player game, cramming, choosing careers by their degree, squandering free time, neglecting their health, and too fixed an approach to life and career, for which he prescribes an experimental mindset.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Students still email him for advice: seven top mistakes he sees every year

00:00:29 — Mistake number one: not learning how to learn

  • ★★★ Ali's first mistake of students is not learning how to learn: there are well-documented, evidence-based ways of studying, and students who have not taken time to learn them are profoundly shooting themselves in the foot. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Ali wishes schools, colleges and universities taught how to study; generally they do not, so students learn it themselves or copy what they see other people doing. — 00:00:29
  • ★★★ Rereading, highlighting, underlining and even making notes with the textbook open are suboptimal ways of studying for exams, Ali says. — 00:00:58
  • ★★★ The study methods that actually work, Ali says, are active recall, spaced repetition, interleaving and categorising. — 00:00:58 · active recall, spaced repetition
  • ★★ Ali promises students that learning a few effective study strategies will save them a great deal of time, leaving more time for other important things than their studies. — 00:00:58

00:01:42 — Mistake number two: thinking of studying as a single player game

  • ★★ From students' emails and from talking to students, Ali finds that those who absolutely hate studying are the ones doing it alone, following the myth that the ideal way to focus is to lock yourself away in a bedroom or library. — 00:01:56
  • ★ People who find studying alone fun and energising, and do not struggle with focus, discipline or procrastination, can ignore Ali's advice to study with friends. — 00:01:56

  • ★★★ Since almost everything is more fun with friends, Ali advises treating studying as a multiplayer game, with you and your friends together tackling the final boss, the exam; the friends need not study the same subject. — 00:02:26

    “treating studying as a multiplayer game”

  • ★★ At university Ali set up a group of about eight friends who went to libraries together; each day five to seven of them came and did Pomodoros together, 25 minutes of study and a five-minute break. — 00:02:26 · Pomodoro technique

  • ★★ Before the study group Ali studied mostly alone and found it draining; he read studies on relational energy, that we get energy from the people around us, and decided to try studying together. — 00:02:59

  • ★★★ The thesis of Ali's book Feel-Good Productivity, he says, is that when stuff feels good we become more productive, which is why the book has that title. — 00:03:29 · Feel-Good Productivity (book), feel-good productivity (concept)

    “When stuff feels good, we become more productive.”

00:03:50 — Mistake number three: cramming

  • ★★ Students who brag about cramming the day before an exam and getting good grades miss the point of school, Ali says: the goal is to understand, to learn, to know about the world and to expand your horizons, not to get the grades. — 00:03:55
  • ★★ Cramming for an exam only to tick a box or get a grade, Ali says, bases your student career on extrinsic motivation, and we tend not to enjoy the things we feel we have to do. — 00:04:21
  • ★★★ What Ali would tell his past self: a little studying every day is far more efficient and effective than cramming before the exam, because it helps memory and understanding, and so grades, and the material sticks over the long term. — 00:04:50
  • ★★ It is never too late to start, Ali says: with an exam coming up imminently, cramming is still better than nothing, but next time a little revision every day is far less stressful. — 00:04:50

00:06:04 — Mistake number four: narrowing career choices by your degree

  • ★ Ali took the idea of not choosing a career by your degree from Professor Cal Newport's blog, which he read at medical school and which changed how he thinks about it. — 00:06:04 · Cal Newport
  • ★★★ Cal Newport (quoted): Cal Newport argues that students narrow their job options by their degree (economics to banking, consulting or accounting); instead of asking what job a degree allows, ask what life you want and reverse-engineer the career, a view Ali fully shares. — 00:06:28 · Cal Newport
  • ★★★ To choose a career, Ali advises asking what your dream life, ideal week and ideal Tuesday look like (the work, when you come home, where you live, the commute, the people), then picking careers that match that life. — 00:06:28 · ideal Tuesday
  • ★★ A medical degree is a perfect example of choosing by degree, Ali says: graduates think they must become doctors, yet zillions of careers within and outside medicine can use a medical degree. — 00:07:14
  • ★★ Students working out the life they want will probably change their minds, Ali says, and that is fine: it is much easier to steer a moving ship than a stationary one. (hedged) — 00:07:14

00:07:43 — Mistake number five: squandering the free time you have as a student

  • ★★ Students think they are busy, Ali says, but once they have a real job taking 40 to 80 hours a week plus the commute, they will look back amazed at how much time they wasted at school and university. — 00:07:48
  • ★★★ Learning simple time-management and productivity strategies leaves a student far more spare time, Ali says, which they can enjoy but also use to learn skills that will fit anything they want to do later. — 00:08:21 · time management
  • ★★ At school Ali taught himself web design and web development. — 00:08:21
  • ★★★ Ali's web skills let him create a business while at university that funded his entire medical degree; the skills then morphed into his YouTube channel, which let him quit his job several years later. — 00:08:51 · 6med
  • ★★ At school Ali still wasted a lot of time on TV shows and was addicted to World of Warcraft, playing three hours a day; he does not regret it, but with more productivity knowledge he would have squandered less. — 00:08:51 · World of Warcraft
  • ★★ Skills learned on your own, outside school and university, such as public speaking, video editing, web design, graphic design, data analysis and coding, fit almost any career, Ali says, and underpin the freedom to do your own thing. — 00:09:20
  • ★★★ If he were a student these days, Ali would learn a lot about AI and about no-code automation tools. — 00:09:20
  • ★ Ali sees nothing wrong with playing video games, having played a lot of World of Warcraft and playing a lot of Baldur's Gate these days, but says it is good to balance it with levelling up your skills. — 00:09:49 · World of Warcraft

00:10:18 — Skillshare sponsor read

00:11:17 — Mistake number six: not realising how valuable your health is

  • ★★ Students often do not realise how valuable their health is, Ali says, yet student years are when you lay the foundation of the healthy habits that carry you through life. — 00:11:17
  • ★★ Ali often asks the very rich entrepreneurs he talks to, some of them billionaires, for life advice, and they all say they wish they had taken their health more seriously when younger. — 00:11:17
  • ★★ Ali wishes he had taken better care of his health as a student rather than being a slouchy World of Warcraft–playing basement dweller: stretching, learning about posture and eating more healthily. — 00:11:46 · World of Warcraft
  • ★★ A recent DEXA scan showed Ali a lot of visceral fat, which he thinks probably built up over time from his Asian genetics and from living off French fries and doner kebabs at university. (hedged) — 00:11:46
  • ★★ Ali wishes he had embodied, as a student, the identity of someone who takes his health seriously, instead of the slob who lives off takeaways and sits at the computer, a choice he calls dumb. — 00:12:15
  • ★★★ Ali advises students to devote half an hour a day to their health, a habit that pays off forever, and to start young rather than build it with a full-time job, when it is much harder. — 00:12:15

00:12:44 — Mistake number seven: too fixed an approach to life and career; the experimental mindset

  • ★★ Many conscientious students think linearly, Ali says: focus on GCSEs, then A-levels, then getting into university, life as one step after another. — 00:12:44
  • ★★ After graduating Ali realised there had been a whole world of possibilities even at school and university, which he did not take advantage of because he followed one linear path. — 00:13:10
  • ★★★ Ali's cure for a fixed, linear approach is an experimental mindset towards career and life: approach student life with more lightness and ease instead of over-seriousness. — 00:13:10 · experimental mindset
  • ★★ Rather than doing something only if it earns CV points, Ali advises trying it because you are intrigued and following your curiosity: either way it is a valuable life experience. — 00:13:39
  • ★★★ Every experiment you run on yourself gives data about where you want to go, Ali says; students and adults who do not know what to do with their careers have probably not sampled enough things, and the answer is often to widen what they try. (hedged) — 00:14:02 · experimental mindset
  • ★★ Parents and teachers are often far more risk-averse than they need to be, Ali says: his mum would ask what the point of learning to design websites was and whether it would look good on his CV. — 00:14:31 · Ali Abdaal's mother
  • ★★ Ali says the point of learning to make websites was an experiment to see whether he enjoyed it and a good life skill, and he attributes much of his later success to learning website design at school. — 00:14:52

In the description and comments

  • ★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked by a viewer for side-hustle ideas for students, the channel replies with a link to a video it made two months earlier. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: Cal Newport · experimental mindset · feel-good productivity (concept) · ideal Tuesday

Also: People: Ali Abdaal's mother

Works: Feel-Good Productivity (book)

Organizations: 6med

Concepts: active recall · artificial intelligence · DEXA scan · extrinsic motivation · identity-based habits · interleaving · Pomodoro technique · relational energy · spaced repetition · time management

Products: Baldur's Gate · World of Warcraft

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