Let’s take the latter point first. You canstudy smarter. You canput in
less time and get better results. But learning how to do so ishard,
because learning of anykind takes discipline. And learning self-
discipline is, to many of us, the most difficult task of all. So don’t
kid yourself: You aren’t going to sit down, skim How to Study,and
miraculously transform yourself from a C student to an A student.
But you absolutely can achieve such results if you put in the time to
learn the lessons this book contains and, more importantly, practice
and use them every day.
If you’re currently doing little or nothing in the way of schoolwork,
then you aregoing to have to put in more time and effort. How much
more? Or even more generally, how long should you study? Until you
get the results you want to achieve. The smarter you are and the
more easily you learn and adapt the techniques in How to Study,
the more likely you will spend lesstime on your homework than
before. But the further you need to go—from Ds to As rather than
Bs to As—the more you need to learn and the longer you need to
give yourself to learn it.
Don’t get discouraged. You willsee positive results surprisingly quickly.
Make Study Habit-Forming
If you’re doing poorly in school even while putting in a reasonable
amount of study time, you’ve got poor study habits. Who knows
where or when you acquired them, but failure has, to some extent,
become a habit.
Good news! Not only can badhabits be broken, but they can be
replaced by goodhabits relatively easily. Here’s your battle plan:
■ It is much easier to replacea habit than to break it entirely.
So don’t attempt to stop poor study habits— just learn the
good ones to substitute for them.
■ Practice, practice, practice. Practice is the motor oil that
lubricates any habit’s engine. The more you do something,
the more ingrained it becomes.16 How to Study