How The Super Bowl is Like The SAT and ACT
Ah, the Super Bowl is upon us once more, and an entire world awaits epic entertainment from NFL athletes and advertisers alike. Not everyone loves football as much as I do, or considers Super Bowl Sunday one of the year’s finest holidays. But everybody, even the most ardent opponent of this sometimes-reviled sport, understands that every football player and coach that will be facing off in the big game reached the championship through massive expenditures of talent, skill, and commitment. Basically, you don’t get here… …without countless hours here… …and here. Every professional sporting event highlights competitors exerting themselves against challenges, challengers, and the limitations of the human body and mind. The SAT and ACT share much in common with even the highest-stakes game. Test takers must achieve their highest levels of performance just as the pressure is greatest, which means that nobody earns their very best scores without massive…
Five More Reasons to Read Every Day
Life is tough, right? We’re always looking for ways to become happier, smarter, richer, and just plan better with the least effort possible. So why, when the obvious time-tested answers are staring us in the face, do we look away in search of something new and gaudy? The answer, when wondering how to become better in almost all possible ways, is to READ. Reading makes us better in so many profound ways. Obviously, through the right kind of reading, we become more knowledgeable. We also become clearer thinkers with more expansive vocabularies. But if you need more incentive than that to pick up a book, consider five more ways reading will make you better: 1. Reading makes you happier. “A nationwide survey commissioned by the National Year of Reading to explore the importance of reading in everyday life confirmed that reading can have real benefits for your health, as…
Mindfulness and Concentration
Big tests challenge us on levels that extend far beyond sheer knowledge or academic prowess. Marathon exams like the SAT and ACT also test endurance, commitment, and focus. How we score, then, reflects how carefully we cultivate the physical and psychological drivers of peak performance. Focus matters as much as any other attribute. If you cannot focus, you cannot bring your best; if you cannot bring your best, you cannot do your best. Simple, really, but focus tends to fall by the wayside in deference to more concrete skills. Focus can be divided into two different yet equally important traits: mindfulness and concentration. Bhante Henepola Gunaratana elucidates the essential distinctions in the book Mindfulness in Plain English: Concentration and mindfulness are distinctly different functions. They each have their role to play in meditation, and the relationship between them is definite and delicate. Concentration is often called one-pointedness of mind. It…
Deliberate Practice and 4 Not-So-Easy Steps to Success
Over years as an entrepreneur, author, and publisher of (now-defunct) SUCCESS magazine, Darren Hardy has relentlessly studied and dissected the habits of the most accomplished people on the planet. He can attest that the secret to success isn’t much of a secret at all: practice. However, the kind of practice that drives stratospheric levels of accomplishment and excellence is extremely specific. Deliberate practice requires tremendous commitment and structure over time. But no other path takes you to even the chance of doing your very best when it matters. How do you know if you are practicing properly? Hardy described four essential steps to attacking deliberate practice: You must be motivated to attend to the task and exert effort to improve your performance. The design of the task should take into account your pre-existing knowledge so that the task can be correctly understood after a brief period of instruction. You should…
Three Reasons SAT Scores Are Dropping
Did you hear that SAT Scores from the graduating class of 2015 were low this year? In fact, total scores in all 3 sections are the lowest they’ve been in decades. Should we panic? Don’t worry… there’s always time to freak out later. For now, let’s tackle the question that’s perplexing the pundits who breathlessly exclaim that SAT Scores Continue Troubling Downward Slide, but No One Knows Exactly Why. I’d like to share three possible reasons: EXPANDED POOL OF TEST TAKERS Rumors of the SAT’s imminent demise have been slightly, or perhaps prematurely, exaggerated. A record 1.70 million students from the class of 2015 took the SAT. A higher percentage of students than ever were either underrepresented minority students and/or used fee waivers. We should be encouraged, rather than despondent, that the testing pool now includes so many more students that did not traditionally pursue enrollment in four-year colleges…
12 Days of Time Management: Work Your Flow
Let’s be honest: most of our productivity issues can be linked to mismanagement of time. If you want to do your best in school, sports, tests, art, or anything else, you need to manage your scarce seconds, minutes, hours, and days like a boss. Take some tips from our 12 Days of Time Management for Teens: Work your Flow Our previous recommendation to plan your days as if you’ll need more time to accomplish each task assumes average productivity. In fact, a smart schedule allows for occasional substandard performances, sanity breaks, and general lollygagging. But every once in while, lightning strikes and suddenly our best work emerges effortlessly… and quickly. Imagine work, meaning everything you are responsible for in a given day, as a river. We float downstream at our usual pace, speeding up and slowing down depending on what currents we catch. Sometimes all we can do is…