How To Become a Top 1% Student

John's Hopkins accepts just four out of over 300 applicants into its plastic surgery residency that's the top 1.3% making it one of the most competitive and prestigious programs in the world these are similar odds for college basketball players the top 1.2% it's easy to visualize what the top 1% athlete looks like right because their skills are so easily admired but for a top 1% learner it's not that clear so what do they have in common what can we learn from them we've studied some of the top students in our progam program who attend the top

universities and we found that there are a lot of similarities in the way that they think and behave and even if you don't want to become a top 1% student you can still steal these strategies and become an academic Weapon It's a framework I call the mental athlete think about the top 1% of sports athletes the best soccer players the best basketball players in the world they're not going through their day kind of guessing at what they should be doing from the moment they wake up they have an exact routine an exact protocol to follow

and the routine has been refined and tested by the best coaches in the world there's no room for overthinking right they just get it done well I'm not a sports coach but I am a learning coach and I can say that there's not a whole lot of difference here sure Sports athletes get paid with their bodies and we get paid with our brains their physical performance peaks in their 20s and 30s our mental performance is still rising in our 20s and 30s which is why they make their income earlier in life and we make our

income a little later in life but it just just keeps going other than those differences we have a lot in common the same way that Sports athletes have proven routines and training and systems to follow every day mental athletes need to have those same systems locked in as well so if you're planning a training day or a study day and you have no idea what you're doing or why you're doing it the best thing you can do right now is to build a mental athlete system stop wasting your time build a reliable system where it

removes all the overthinking it removes all the procrastination and allows you to just learn so what is the mental athlete system again let's look to these Sports athletes for comparison they need to train cardio right they need conditioning if you're going to play a rigorous sport for 2 hours then you're going to need enough endurance to outlast your opponents and if it goes overtime then having great stamina is just a bare minimum of what you need now for mental athletes we need to train our Focus stamina I'll give you an extreme example here the board's

exam that I had to take for my medical license was a 10 hour exam it's an all day event it's not an easy exam but it requires you to be laser focused for 10 hours that's not something you can just roll out of bed and kind of stroll in a test day and do right it takes conditioning but now our attention span is dying you can look at the data that big companies like Microsoft and Google have collected over the past decade you'll see that the human attention span has trended downwards most of us can't

even focus for 1 hour study session without getting distracted and the reason is because our training equipment our phones our laptops things that we use to learn those are the same devices that also provide us with entertainment and dopamine binging media so how do we implement this and get better at Focus stamina well to track this part of the system I recommend using a timer every single time you engage in deep work start a timer and track how long you lasted before you got either tired or distracted and then the next time you slowly work

your way up the only way you can improve is if you measure it otherwise how would you know what gets measured gets improved so having a system to increase Focus stamina is a must but what's more important is what top athletes do during that time which brings us to the next part which is training their muscles building lean muscle to give them more strength and Agility the thing about building muscle is that having muscle makes it easier to build more muscle so how exactly do athletes build muscle well it's a cycle right they stress the

muscle and they relax and they stress and then relax right it's a cycle and when you're stressing your muscle you want to make sure that you're lifting heavy enough weights where it's actually challenging in the gym world this is known as time under tension you don't want to just speed through your sets in 4 seconds right you want to get closer to 40 seconds well actually there's signs to this that depending on if you're training for strength or hypertrophy the guidelines are a little bit different but my point is that if you're a mental athlete

even if you're 100% focused during your learning session you're still not learning anything if you have no time under tension but for us this tension is called cognitive load the mental athletes muscle is our brain we have to build our knowledge and the thing about knowledge is that learning also becomes easier the more you learn so it's no surprise that building muscle and building knowledge or I guess strengthening neurons and neuronal Connections in the brain are similar to building muscle fibers when you're studying you want to make sure that it's challenging you're using heavy enough

weights this is the cognitive load you want your cognitive load to be not too easy but also not too hard you want it right in the sweet spot if it's too easy then you're probably learning in a very passive way maybe you're just passively watching a lecture or passively reading your notes it's not challenging enough but if it's too hard then you want to break down the big Concepts into smaller pieces or if you have too many Concepts to deal with and you want to chunk them together chunk the similar ones together to reduce the

cost load on your brain right so once you find that sweet spot that mental strain remember that feeling because that's what learning feels like so during your deep work sessions again you want to use a timer you want to set the timer for about 25 minutes and 25 minutes is a great place to start because some studies show that it's the average attention span of a student but you want to spend the entire 25 minutes under optimal cognitive load then you can take a 5 minute break right these are your reps and then you rest

in between and then you go again 255 then you go again 255 and over time you start to push past the 25 minute interval and I challenge you to try to get to 50 minutes with a 10-minute break we're training our stamina and then we're training our muscles but even when we combine these two components they still don't make up the majority of the training think about it athletes aren't spending the majority of their time on the treadmill or lifting weights right what are they doing the third part of the training routine is the drills

when athletes practice they run drills and they run plays with the rest of their team they practice exactly how they will need to perform on the actual game day and it's the same thing with us as mental athletes we need to be going through the same motions and practice in exactly the same way that we'll be tested on the day of the exam so if your exam is open book or open Notes then practice at home using open book and open Notes right get familiar with your resources you want to know exactly where to find

the information that you need on the other hand if your exam is closed then you'll want to practice doing your problems and questions with Clos notes and straight from memory if you have to take a 3-hour exam then you want to take a practice test at home and see if you can last 3 hours and it can't stress this enough this is the most important part of your training athletes spend most of their time in this drill and practice mode and so should you if you're spending most of your time reading notes or watching lectures

or doing something passive and not enough time practicing then that right there is the easiest way for you to start improving your results if you want to level up your learning skills and you want to score higher you want to save time in the process and you like the style of how I explain learning techniques then you're going to love study quests I'll leave a link in the description if you're interested I'll leave you one last tip here that sets the top 1% athlete apart from the rest and that is that they show up every

day and they do the hard work even if they don't feel like it