While finishing off the fourth chapter of my book (in which I explore the links between happiness and grades) I came across an interesting academic paper written by Nattavudh Powdthavee, a socio-economist at the University of York. The paper is titled, ‘Putting a Price Tag on Friends, Relatives and Neighbours’ and in it, Powdthavee uses a method called shadow pricing to assign monetary values to a number of social phenomenon.
Shadow Pricing Explained
How does shadow pricing work? The statistical maths behind it is a little complicated but the basic idea can be illustrated with the following example: Let’s say you are earning £10,000 a year. At this point you may rate your happiness to be a six, on a scale of one to ten. However, the following year you get promoted and your salary is increased to £30,000. When you are asked how happy you are, you now reply with a happiness rating of eight. Assuming nothing else contributed to your happiness, one could infer that to increase your happiness by two points you require £20,000. Now, what if in another situation instead of an increase in salary, you got married and your happiness did also move from six to eight. One could then infer that the shadow price of marriage is £20,000.
Powdthavee’s methadology is more sophisticated than my example implies, and uses data from the British Household Panel Survery, which includes over 10,000 randomly selected individuals. What you get from such enormous data are estimates and valuations which are eye-opening. Powdthavee estimates, for instance, that if you move from seeing your friends or relatives less than once a month to seeing them on most days (more than twice a week), your life satisfaction could improve just as much as if you were handed £85,000!
What is the significance of this number? And why should we put ‘price-tags’ on friends? Well, for one, this figure is a reminder of how important it is to have a healthy social life if you want to be happy (and don’t forget, happy people often outperform sad people in a number of fields, including education). Secondly, such estimates can help with decision making. For example, when you graduate you might be faced with the dilemma of choosing between a high-paying job which requires you to relocate far away from your friends and relatives, and a lower-paying job nearer home. But with a monetary estimate of how much your social life is worth, you can make better-informed decisions in situations such as these.
Here are few other interesting estimates in Powdthavee’s paper (the reds are negative values):
Seeing friends/relatives once or twice a month: £57,500
Seeing friends/relatives once or twice a week: £69,500
Random fact: just by smiling now you can alter your emotional state; try it. The effect is called affective inference (or facial feedback theory). This is where the physical changes the mental. So it ain’t always about mind over matter, sometimes it’s about matter over mind.
Before you complain about not succeeding ask yourself how many times you have actually tried and failed. If this number is less than 100 then you don’t want it bad enough. Remember success is also numbers game.
You’re more attractive if you’re already in a relationship. You’re more employable if you already got a job. In fact you’ll make a lot more money once you have lots of money. It seems to me that in life, all you have to do is make a name for yourself just a few times before you can take advantage of the snowball effect of success. You can then sit back and reel in opportunities that feed off of each other.
In my final year of University, I managed to go out 2-4 times a month (in terms 1 and 2), co-founded and run an entrepreneur’s society where I acted as the Vice President and despite maintaining a fairly active social life and being involved with organizing numerous society events, I still managed to graduate with a first class degree in Accounting and Finance (2010), taking home the prize for the highest dissertation mark, as well as sharing a prize for the highest mark in a challenging Finance module.
Could it be that I am some kind of super-smart-naturally-talented-student? Not really. My IQ is only slightly above average and on numerous topics, I had to ask my classmates for help, whereas in other areas I resorted to 12 hour days in the library in the final term to really grasp the more difficult topics. To a number of friends, the fact that I got a first was surprising because in my first and second years (where I had a lot more non-academic pursuits), I actually averaged a mid-level 2.1.
Some people think that to get a first, you either have to be naturally very smart, or you need to spend every living hour in the library. I would argue that both of these premises do not need to hold and that a student of average intelligence can do extremely well without leading a boring student life where they spend every free moment studying.
Reflecting back on my time at University, I have identified a number of behaviours, ideas, and principles that helped me succeed, and I believe that if other students adopt them, their chances of achieving a first class would be greatly enhanced. These are as follows:
Choose the ‘Right’ Degree.
This is perhaps the most important of all the points but yet also the most ambiguous. The ‘right’ degree could be a subject area you enjoy, one where your strengths lie, or one you believe will help you enter a certain field of work. Either way, you should do a degree in which finding the motivation to work your ass off is not a problem. To me, this is a key factor in determining the ‘right degree’.
Have the ‘Right’ Mindset.
When people ask, what are you aiming for, you may lie and say; “I am aiming for a first so that worst comes to worst, I will get a 2.1″. But when you talk to yourself, never beat around the bush. If you want a first, you must believe that by putting in the effort, you will get it. As corny as it sounds, positive self-talk works. Believe that by putting in the effort you can do it, and you will. Think otherwise, and you will probably not get a first.
Get Study Buddies.
What worked really well for me was that I had a core group of friends with whom I went to the library and study zones with on a regular basis; not necessarily to work and study together in a group (we only did this once or twice a month for 2 hours to discuss some topics), but to know that we were not at it alone. We would go into the library and sit in a quite zone to work solo, only getting up to ask each other questions when we were really really stuck. The main advantage of having such buddies is that they can motivate you to work harder and to focus again if you start to get lazy. For example in the final term, there were days when I would get up to leave the library early, only to sit back down after being mocked by a friend: “You only been here 6 hours and you are leaving already?!?! You are getting lazy man!”. Having study buddies also means you can moan about how hard things are and do a bit of venting about the struggle from time to time, which is healthy.
Don’t Study at Home; Study at University.
80%-90% of my studying was done at University in a quiet zone. You have to get yourself in a good environment to study effectively. It’s like going to the gym. You work harder there than you do at home because in a gym you see other people sweating it out on the bench and treadmills and automatically you are motivated to push harder. Therefore, stay at University as long as you can to cover all the work that needs to get done such that when you get home, you can relax and enjoy the rest of the night.
Attend All Lectures in the Final Year.
I will admit, I did not attend all of my lectures and missed quite a few in years 1 and 2. But in your final year, you should aim to attend all lectures and take as many notes as you can. When taking notes, it does not matter if understand them at the time or not, write them down anyway. As you return to revise, armed with more knowledge, those once illusive notes will begin to make sense. Also, by attending all lectures, you will pick up hints as to what could come up in the exams. The lecturers usually emphasize these topic areas, or say things like, “this would make a nice exam question”. If you have to miss a lecture, then ask a friend to record them for you on a usb recorder to listen to later, or at least copy some notes from a friend.
Have a Healthy Body.
Tony Buzan, a world leading expert on the brain and learning who has experience advising Olympic athletes suggests that having a healthy mind requires a healthy body. This means that you should aim to get enough sleep, drink plenty of water, and minimize the amount of junk food in your diet. In terms 1 and 2, I would hit the gym 3-4 times a week and in term 3, I cut it down to 2-3 times a week. Spending time on the treadmill and lifting weights made the crucial revision period near the end of the year less monotonous and boring, and I felt much more energized after breaking a sweat.
Maintain an Active Social Life.
In the first and second terms of my final year, I went out on most Saturday nights and hardly ever said no to invites to parties, as long as they were on days that did not result in me missing lectures. Human beings are very social animals and it appears that the more we lock ourselves away to study all alone and isolated, the more we become miserable and this ends up affecting our work. If you are not the going out type, there are many other things you can do with friends and family on the weekends. Having a day, once a week, where you can simply relax and enjoy the company of friends and family can do wonders for your efforts in achieving a first.
Always Do More.
Do more than is expected in all the work that you do. For example, do more reading. This is particularly important in subjects that involve essays and a fair bit of writing. I recommend however that you first understand and learn all that is taught within the syllabus and then complement that information with additional knowledge that you may not be expected to know. For example, when I was revising certain topics in my final year, I would go the the eLibrary and search for all journals and articles related to the topic, pick out the interesting ones and with a pen in one hand, start to read them while taking notes. Lecturers are always impressed by a student who mentions relevant knowledge not taught directly in the lectures.
If you made it to the end of this rather long article and found it useful, perhaps you can help me assess whether it would be appealing to write a much more extensive purchasable guide as an eBook. This would be over 100 pages long and consist of more detailed strategies, ideas and motivational tips to greatly increase your chances of getting a first class. By voting below, you can help me identify the level of interest.
Many generations ago, the work ethic of successful rice farmers in Southern China revolved around the following proverb: “No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich.” We are all familiar with other similar proverbs, among them, the well known English saying: “the early bird gets the worm.”
So here I am reading this month’s issue of the Harvard Business Review when I come across an article titled “The Early Bird Really Does Get the Worm“. In it, Christopher Randler, a professor of biology at the University of Education in Heidelberg, Germany, discusses his scientific quest which puts such proverbs to the test.
In a number of studies, including one where Randler surveyed 367 university students, he found the following:
“Though evening people do have some advantages—other studies reveal they tend to be smarter and more creative than morning types, have a better sense of humor, and are more outgoing—they’re out of sync with the typical corporate schedule. When it comes to business success, morning people hold the important cards. My earlier research showed that they tend to get better grades in school, which get them into better colleges, which then lead to better job opportunities. Morning people also anticipate problems and try to minimize them, my survey showed. They’re proactive. A number of studies have linked this trait, proactivity, with better job performance, greater career success, and higher wages.”
So how do you know if you are a morning person or evening person? And can you alter your “chronotype” (the preference for morningness or eveningness)?
In answering the first question, Randler points out that morning people have a the tendency to wake up around the same time on weekends as they do on weekdays, while evening people tend to get up at later times on the weekend. For example, in Randler’s study of college students, he found that evening people on average will wake up two hours later on the weekend than during the weekday.
As for whether you can change your chronotype, our efforts are limited because around 50% of it is determined by genetics.
Randler admits some obvious limitations to his findings and other research in this area. The data merely shows a correlation over a large sample, so you do get morning and evening people who deviate from the above characteristics. Additionally, the exact reasons why morning people are more proactive are yet to be determined. Randler suggests that perhaps it is because they get up early and have more time to prepare for the day—as the successful rice farmers in Southern China did—or it is the result of something more inherent, such as the personality trait of conscientiousness (a tendency to show self-discipline and a love for schedules). As a morning person, I suspect that proactivity stems from something more inherent because there are many mornings where I get nothing done, and equally, many evenings where I accomplish a lot.
The diagram below highlights a number of traits that morning people enjoy but it is conceivable that there are those of us who fall somewhere in-between, sharing some of the traits that evening people have (both the negative and positive). For example, I tend to enjoy writing and reading in the morning, while I enjoy music production (an activity I feel more creative in) more in the evenings and well into the early mornings (9pm-4am). Which side of the following diagram do you fall on? And do you find that you have any of the following traits?
Source: Harvard Business Review (July-August 2010) pg. 31 Note: This diagram appears to miss out on some of the negative aspects and dangers of being a morning person; such as not getting enough sleep in some instances.
This website acts as my online home and contains a collection of my favourite excerpts from various literary works, essays that I write in my spare time, as well as links to my other projects and ventures.
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