how I studied for 12 hours a day for over a year

hey what's up you guys today we have an important video probably the most important one i'm ever gonna make uh my most asked question how did you do it what was your mindset how did you study for 12 hours a day for over a year so yeah let's just go ahead and talk motivation discipline drive mindset what causes a person to do what i did so yeah this is just what uh worked for me um how i did it and kind of where i came from and yeah let's just go ahead and get right into it so what finally caused that 180 to the point where you're here now and the definitely the first step that i took was in physics um our professor assigned us a ted talk to watch and it's about this thing called the growth mindset and in the video they introduced two mindsets the first one is the fixed mindset and the second one is the growth mindset and in the fixed mindset it's kind of like all right here is my ceiling and anything outside of that ceiling i'm just not gonna do i'm born with the limit and i don't want to push myself i'm not smart enough to do this assignment and my boy greg has got me and that's definitely the mindset that i had up until that point in my life was the fixed mindset you know in high school i did really well without studying why would i study when i can get a's just fine but you see when college finally rolled around and it was actually difficult i didn't think that it was my studying that was a problem right i just thought i wasn't smart enough and that was just kind of how i was raised you know that kid's a priority over there so he's probably not very hard working and he just is born with all that talent you can just do it out of the bat i really thought that my mindset was the issue and i knew that i had like wanted to do well in university and in life in general so the other mindset they introduce is the growth mindset it's all about taking on your challenges and pushing yourself and breaking yourself down so that you can come back stronger it's about resilience it's about not waning in the face of aversion you know and it's not it's definitely a paradigm shift to what i had before and it's the very first step that i took was adopting and understanding the mindset in its entirety so if you're not familiar with the growth mindset i highly recommend you check it out and yep that was the first step that i took all right second topic that i want to talk about which is drive motivation and the desire to succeed all right so it's a pretty heavy topic uh i don't know how quickly i could summarize my entire life's experience in these short two minutes or so but motivation and drive the key part that i want you to take out of this following segment is that i don't rely on motivation to do the things that i do i think that if you just rely on motivation um you're just setting yourself up for failure right because motivation is volatile it's bound to change you know what it's raining outside i don't feel like running i'm just not gonna go train for the marathon today that's what motivation will get you uh nowhere no it might get you there for like two weeks but in the long run no motivation does not work at all so i think when people ask me all the time how are you so motivated why can you do this every day like what motivates you the thing is i'm not motivated to do any of this i'm driven to do this and that's a very big difference right drive versus motivation the fundamental change between the two is that drive continues drive can get you from point a to point b without stopping and it doesn't care about the rain outside when you're trying to go running it doesn't care about how cold the water is when you go shower you know and that sounds pretty intense but you ought to understand that motivation is volatile you know it's easy to be motivated to do hard things when you're comfortable in life when everything is going just a-okay but when you finally face challenges that actually push your buttons motivation is not going to work and that's why i rely on my drive so what is drive i have a difficult time defining it in words but my desire to succeed it kind of does and fans of flame inside my heart to get me driven to do the things that i want to achieve my goals my aspirations those are your drive and if you rely on motivation to get them it won't work so how did you finally find your drive i think like i hadn't met truly driven people in my life before you know i've met people who are brilliant but also driven they wanted to get life's full experience that's actually why i started this channel was to share my drive online so how did you get it um i don't want to say i read a book but the book can't hurt me by david goggins was really important in understanding why i wanted to do the things that i did i had this really massive chip on my shoulders all in high school because i was always like the weird kid who wasn't socially successful wasn't particularly liked by other people and i just really remember like hating that feeling people just looking down on me you know like i'm just another person that they're gonna meet but i just remember being like i'm just gonna be so driven that you won't forget me yeah i just always had that chip on my shoulder because i was always just like the weird kid and i just always wanted to do better i also will say about the whole um drive thing that it's not about showing off how driven you are or anything it's not about doing it for other people i would say that it was definitely for me like if you watch videos from when i was a little kid or in high school middle school you could see how unconfident i was you know i couldn't stand up straight anything that knocked me down i'll just kind of roll over and lay there and understanding why i wanted to do better really took me a long time to figure out and i think the book can't hurt me explains the reason for his drive and i could see a lot of myself in that person and i also wanted to share that with you guys so that's why i started this channel i wouldn't say that i did it for other people you know i did it for me because i wanted to become the best person that i could be i got things i want my life i want to buy my mom a big house i want to be a great father i want to help people and things like sitting there on instagram all day watching pointless youtube videos all day running away don't get me there it took me 19 years to figure that out i want to be present with my friends and i really want to connect with people and i just wasn't putting the two and two together i didn't know what i really wanted until i just been pushed so hard because in school my family no family not having a family and i knew what i finally wanted and i realized that i couldn't stop and care about small things together i didn't really wait i didn't want to wane no matter what and that's drive and that's why my my youtube channel you know starting off it took me like five months to reach 1000 subscribers when i started making these videos i lost subscribers because i had like 100 when i started but i didn't care about that motivation would have stopped me right there five months no growth why would i continue but no drive drive got me through that plateau because you know what after that five months i got 1 000 subs and then another month i got 10 000 subs and then three months after that i got 50 000 subs and that's what drive will get you you've got to figure out what you truly want and you have to figure out why you want it and those things have to be really clear all right because when you're out there and you're fighting you're gonna forget a lot about why you're there you know you're gonna ask why am i even doing this you have to remember why you're doing it so figure out what drives you why you want to be a better person and you have to remember all right drive after you figure out drive the first thing i did after that was build strong habits there's a lot of systems that i use to do that the first thing that comes to mind was definitely streaking like creating journals where you track how much you do something and every time you do it you just cross it off and i built a streak that's how i did it in the book atomic habits by james clare he talks a lot about how to build habits and i highly recommend the book if you haven't read it basically the habits are what keep you consistent it's what stops procrastination because when you're doing something persistently you don't think about twice about doing it right you don't think about man should i brush my teeth this morning no you just do it and i've managed to turn a lot of things in my life into habits including studying i would say before i study for so and so every day i don't think about whether or not i'm going to do it you know it's more like my body knows that it's that time of day again it's time to study it's time to go work out it's time to go do the dishes or something i can't summarize the entire book about how to build habits into this short video but i highly recommend you check out the book atomic habits by james clare if you want to learn how to do it but after drive figure out your habits so that's the next step all right and then another thing that i had wanted to talk about in this video was measuring your studying and how you're progressing in your studying and i think on youtube especially it's definitely too easy to get obsessed with how long you study but that's the wrong way to do it you need to become concerned about how deep you can get there's another book about this that i also recommend so in this video i'll recommend three books the third one is deep work by count newport and it's about studying deeply how focused can you get in this noisy world and that's how you should be measuring your studying because we do things to make us study longer when we know we're going to study for a long time you know if you're going to go on an 18-hour plane trip versus a two hour plane trip there's different things that you're gonna do i think that when you don't care about how deep you get you're not gonna make good use of your time you know there's better things to be doing than shallow work that you could be doing that actually makes you a better person in the book he introduces a formula high quality work is equal to the time spent times the quality of focus all right and if that second variable is low you're not going to get a lot of work done regardless of how much studying you do quantifying how well you can or how deep you can go isn't easy but i do recommend the book because he does give ways to measure that factor and how to get into the zone but that's my ultimate goal honestly is to get extremely deep for the entire study duration what i recommend you do is figure out where you're comfortable studying right now whether that's two or three hours you know or even longer than that and then during that span don't change it for a while but try to get as deep as possible during your study because that formula like i mentioned earlier there's an upper bar on how long you should be studying every day it doesn't really make sense to me to be studying you know the moment you wake up to when you go to bed because there's just no balance in that you know you have to have a life and you have to have friends and perhaps a bit hypocritical when i say this but i've managed to get good enough that i can study for you know a certain amount of time every day regardless of where you are you should always be prioritizing how deep you can get it took me a long time to be able to get where i am now a few years ago i could barely study for like two hours without getting a headache but it took a lot of deliberate effort to be able to push myself both in terms of depth and in terms of length that formula before high quality work is equal to work done times by the depth you need to make sure that you're aware that the depth is the more important one because that one has a lot more room for growth you know the other one is fixed it doesn't make sense to study more than 12 hours a day at least for me because i need to be getting like eight hours of sleep in order to get focused enough that i can study it for that long and certain amount of focus you know i'm just rambling but the point of this section of this video is that you need to understand that the depth to which you study is far more important than how long you study and i want you to remember that whenever you study so i also wanted to talk about burnout and staying committed to this lifestyle i wish i knew all the answers but i'm not sure what to tell people when they're burned out other than i think you just need to be patient with yourself and that you have to accept that it's always up there's also downs staying committed to this lifestyle it's not easy you know if it was easy everyone would do it but it's hard work there's a bounce between pushing yourself to the extreme and pushing yourself too hard and for a lot of people that balance is different and for me i can push myself pretty dang hard i think if i went even harder i would get burned out to be honest with you and i'm not sure what i'd do with myself then but at the start i did get burned out and really all that i was able to do during that time was just wait until things got better and i know that's not like a great thing to say but we have to accept that things do come with both positives and negatives and that pushing yourself so hard ain't easy you know and it's not desirable always i wish i could tell you how to get out of a burnout but i can't all i can tell you is that you have to be really careful about not getting into a burnout and if you do get into a burnout understand what happens and don't do it again i also want to talk about like your physical health and how i remains healthy you know even while sitting for 12 hours a day and the answer was i was always active outside of the studying outside of my live stream mainly running um i was training for a marathon before it was cancelled by running a 10k every few days around it three days a week there was like a two to three week period there where i lost track of things and i wasn't exercising and man that was physically horrible i like muffin tops almost immediately i think my mental health is just down in the drains then yeah going outside and routinely getting an exercise definitely was crucial in me being able to sit down all day and another thing that was really important was my posture if you like look at those earlier videos you can see that i have just horrible posture and that took a toll on my back after you know a few months of that and i wish i had taken it more seriously at the start but now i do take it very seriously um you can see me i use like a little angled writing stand i have an ergonomic chair in this position in a way that's very supportive of my back my lower back my legs i wish i had made an investment in those things earlier on because while i never had to go to like the chiropractor or anything i think that i wasn't pushing people to be more posturally correct as i should have been if you're going to do something like this you need to make sure that you're physically sound you know you're eating the correct foods and the types of foods that you're eating are all healthy for you and that you're sitting correctly you're getting enough physical exercise because that also impacts your mental health as well so yeah that was my physical health which also plays a big role in your mental health the last thing that i wanted to talk about in this video was whether or not this is for you um and i wish i could tell you whether or not it was for you but i know it's for me mainly because i really have strong aspirations i'm ambitious i want to become a better person i'm interested in helping other people i'm interested in becoming the best version of me so those are the reasons that i think i really wanted to study a lot but maybe those things aren't priorities for you so this isn't easy by any means in fact it's very difficult and if it was easy i'm sure that plenty of people would do it right because there's a lot of benefits to pushing yourself hard i mean i've learned so much just in the span of this pandemic i think as i grow older i'll also have to learn much more just by living in this lifestyle that i do i'm very happy and i'm present and i'm focused so i can tell you whether or not this is for you that's for you to answer but if you do decide to embark on this lifestyle i hope you do well you know i wish you the best of luck i really do hope that um you become a greater person so yeah thank you so much for watching i hope this video was a beneficial to you but have a nice rest of your day

Channel: James Scholz

Views: 11,954,530

Keywords: study tips, study tips and orginazation, study tips for college, study tips for exam, study tips for college students, study tips for college freshmen, how to not burnout, burnout, studying, study, how to study, how to study effectively, how to study for exams, how to study for long hours, how to study for finals, time management, usmle step 1, time management tips, sleep, exercise, mindset, environment, study with me, study tips and tricks, study tips for exams, david goggins, clear

Id: kICh_d6tHQk

Length: 19min 43sec (1183 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 18 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Emotional_Delay]

I remember seeing a video from him explaining that he is studying so hard to get her mom (and himself) out of poverty. Honestly, it touched me a lot. This guy is one of the reasons i started becoming more accountable towards myself, because he made me realise that it is ok that my motivation for now is getting a better job, so i can have a nice and comfortable life.

For fairness i did not watch this video, yet.

[u/DetailedKing]

Been following this guy for a while now. He is essentially the Davide Goggins of studying. His approach, like Goggins, isn't for most people, if any. There are things you can learn from seeing what he's accomplished, most notably in my opinion, is the growth mindset (like he talks about in the video). His videos are inspiring to me but they're not meant to inspire others to do the same or to practice what he does. He has a goal that's deeply routed in giving back to him family, in particular, his mother. With that goal in mind, he's figured out what he needs to do to achieve it and more importantly, he's broken the mental barriers within himself to achieve extraordinary results. The fact that most people think this is unhealthy and bad is an extremely reasonable conclusion to come to. Being unreasonable and literally (what I call) "breaking the barriers of the mind" to these lengths is what separates the good from the greats. You'd be surprised how many of the greats through history have gone to these extremes to achieve their goals. (Again....not to be practiced or inspire others to do....just a ""by any means" mentality for themselves)

[u/Bioniclefucker]

I'm not gonna mince words - I hate this kid and every time this video comes up in my recommended. I'm wouldn't dare attack his motivation behind doing this, he and his youtube channel seem genuine, he seems like a good kid, and on paper being this academically responsible is a good thing to encourage overall.

But I am going to raise the idea that he doesn't actually seem to be learning much in those 12 hours and the appearance of this study "grindset mindset" will inevitably convince other students that they're failures if they don't match his level. Academic demands are already pushing entire generations of students to self-loathing, depression and at worst suicide, because they feel so much pressure, which I imagine is being exacerbated by seeing other kids somehow make that sacrifice. I imagine if I was exactly his age (i'm a little older) and didn't already feel confident in my studying abilities, I would feel incredibly insecure about my inability to do something like this, I would hate myself for not being able to meet the insane demands of my school while other kids did it voluntarily.

What's worse is that it doesn't actually seem that efficient. If it works for him, that's great, but the vast vast majority of people benefit from the same basic principles: active learning, taking breaks, spaced repetition, etc. and literally don't get anything out of 12 hours of sitting at their desk. By putting out these 12 hour streams on the same channel that goes viral, he is inadvertently promoting bad study habits and pushing students to work harder and less efficiently.

[u/BL098]

I can see how this can be toxic, but I respect James's work ethic and purpose. It seems like his way of being presently focused and fulfilling his purpose. This definitely seems unsustainable and is in no way something that the everyday joe should be trying.

[u/OnAniara]

i have a very hard time believing much of the information was absorbed or integrated in any lasting way. unless he’s an extreme outlier, genetically, it’s kind of impossible.

[u/NFC818231]

You only study for 12 hours if you can't efficiently digest information

[u/[deleted]]

I'd rather fail.

[u/xR4M4x]

I would say also that, from watching this video at least, his motivation doesnt come from trying to achieve his goals, his motivation comes from how much he hates himself (in my opinion). Like if giving himself a break would be so dishonoring and shameful, so he cant allow it.

[u/RemCogito]

I wish that he spent some of that time studying English vernacular, as he keeps using the wrong words in his idioms. (even though he sounds like a native speaker) Its incredibly distracting and I'm having a hard time watching the video all the way though.

I know I saw some major improvements in my life when I changed the way that I look at ending a work session. Rather than counting down to the last repetition I can handle, I get to the point that I am fed up with doing something, where I would normally quit, and try to do "just 1 more thing". Over time this has improved my resiliency. Much like the most important part for growth in a physical workout is pushing yourself through the last rep or two, I find that ultimately motivation and attention and resiliency are the same way. And forcing myself to just do one more thing, or just read one more thing has lead to it being easier to do more when I need it.

However, working out 12 hours per day will not lead to significant gains over 6 hours per day, and I find my mind is the same way.