Why high-performance students Follow these 7 habits?

Hey, read out this full story to know about the 7 habit students follow for high performance and to achieve high grades in the exam.

“You see, I was talking to one of my friends and asked him, ‘Why, how many streams of income do you have? He said, ‘In high school, I’ve really struggled with procrastination. I couldn’t focus for more than 30 minutes of studying without getting distracted. As a result, I graduated with a D plus, equivalent to a 1.3 GPA.

I left high school, and I was depressed. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I fell into a dead-end job, standing shelves in the supermarket, doing night shifts from 9 at night until 4:00 in the morning. But honestly, I didn’t enjoy my job. I didn’t enjoy my life. I knew that I was capable of achieving so much more than what I was doing.

And then one morning, I woke up and thought, ‘Hey, why don’t I go to university?’ After sitting on the idea for a while, I thought, ‘But this time, I’ve got to give it absolutely everything.’ A few more weeks passed, and I started to increasingly warm to the idea of going to university. But then, it got me thinking, how does an A-grade student actually get A grades?

I went on to spend three years studying high-performance students. Their behavioral traits, their morning and nighttime routines, their daily schedules, their daily habits, their intrinsic motivations, their extrinsic motivations. And eventually, after studying high-performance people for so long, I was ready. I was ready to put into practice everything I had learned. I finally mustered up the courage to apply for university.

Fast forward a few years, and I graduated with a first-class honors degree. I also graduated in the top 5% of my class. With the undergraduate degree classification in the United Kingdom, anything above 70% is equivalent to a 4.0 GPA. And I actually got an average of 75.5%. So at high school, I graduated with a 1.3 GPA. At university, I graduated with a 4.0 GPA.

Also Read:- Top 5 key points stay focused while studying

So, what did I do differently? What happened in those years in between? Well, I spent years studying exactly how high-performance people become high-performance people. But more specifically, how high-performance students become high-performance students.

So what exactly do they do differently that differentiates them from an average performing student? The easy answer is they study more, right? But that’s a bit of a cop-out. Because it’s fairly obvious that, on average, someone getting good grades will probably study more than someone getting poor grades. But I eventually boiled it down to seven habits. Because, as Aristotle said, ‘90% of everything you do is the result of habit.’

So these are seven incredibly powerful habits. I noticed that the vast majority of high-performance students have implemented into their daily lives. That help them achieve high grades consistently. And that’s important—consistently, every exam, every assignment, every presentation.

And if you implement these habits into your life. You too can be in the top 5% of your class. Just like I implemented these into my life and managed to transform my grades into a 4.0 GPA.

Top 7 Habits

Let’s discuss about these 7 habits.

Habit 1:

When high-performance students study, they enter into a flow state. Have you ever been so involved in a task, where you’re so in the zone that you completely lose track of time? You can stay 100% laser-focused on that one task for hours, and you’re so focused on that task at hand that you even forget to eat.

Now, this is a concept originally named in 1975 by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, outlining his theory that a flow state is a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation. It is a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.

In an interview with Wired magazine, Csikszentmihalyi described flow as being ‘completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away; time flies; every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.’

And when you’re in the state of flow, you are completely focused on the task at hand. You forget about yourself, about others, about the world around you. You lose track of time, you feel happy and in control, and become creative and productive. And now imagine this. Imagine if you could actively turn on this level of focus, almost like flicking on a switch every time you sit down to study.

What if I told you that you can train yourself to reach this flow state? Because that’s exactly what high-performance students are able to do. They have trained themselves to enter this state of flow where nothing else matters, only the work they are doing in front of them.

So how do you train yourself to enter into a state of flow? The first thing you need to do is find a quiet study place. It’s fairly obvious, right?

Clear away all distractions, and yes, that includes your phone and any desktop notifications from Instagram or Facebook or emails or anything else that might pop up or make noise to interrupt your thoughts.

I also find it helpful to have a clear desk, even if that means sweeping papers that I don’t need immediately into a folder to be sorted through later. And actually, all the habits that I’m going to go through in this video will help you reach that flow state. And once you hit that flow state, particularly when you’re able to just switch it on every time you study, it’s an absolute game-changer.

And that’s how I was able to transform my grades from 1.3 to a 4.0 GPA. I was able to train myself to reach this state of flow whenever I needed to.

Habit 2.

High-performance students have a productive daily routine. Now, this is such an important step in being able to achieve peak flow. It’s to create a productive daily routine that fits around your lifestyle. So at high school, I never had a daily routine, and I just kind of did what I wanted to do.

I woke up, rushed to the bathroom, grabbed something to eat on the way out of the door, and hurried to school because often in the morning, I would be late. And that was pretty much my morning routine at high school.

At university, that all changed, though. So when I finally created a routine for myself, it reduced the need to make decisions throughout the day, and it enabled me to know exactly what tasks I needed to do for that day. For example, as soon as I woke up, I would go to the gym straight away.

So I would train my body to know that that’s just what I do, that’s just what my body does. I wake up, and I go to the gym. It’s non-negotiable, no questions asked. And I didn’t have to contemplate or think too much about things; I just did it.

And after a few weeks, it was hard, but after a few weeks of implementing the habit of going to the gym in the morning, it became standardized, and it became a lot easier as a result. So my daily routine at university was pretty straightforward.

I wake up at 5:00 AM, leave the house at six, arrive at the gym at 6:30, then go to the library at 7:45, and go to class at 9:00. Finish at 3:00, go to the library at 3:30, go home at 6:00, usually to do some video editing, and then spend time relaxing at 8:00 and be in bed by 9:00. And that was pretty much my routine seven days a week for university.

Habit 3:

High-performance students surround themselves with greatness. You’ll hear me mention this quite often on this channel: You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Or as Jim Rohn would say, ‘Show me your friends, and I’ll show you your future.’ Wasting your time with people who drag you down will only hold you back. It’s crucial to surround yourself with those who inspire, motivate, and challenge you to be better.

I had a bit of an epiphany after graduating from high school. I spent about two years working at a dead-end job, stacking shelves in the supermarket. I saved up enough money and quit my job to go backpacking around Asia for six months. In this six months, I met some phenomenal people—scientists, musicians, lawyers, pilots, businesspeople, some owning Ferraris, some owning Lamborghinis.

I had this realization: If these seemingly ordinary people can make such a positive impact on the planet to the point where they’re able to generate that level of wealth, then what’s stopping me from also making the same level of impact? It really helped me lift my self-limiting beliefs.

You see, through high school, I was surrounded by average-performing people, average grades, average everything. And it wasn’t until I stepped out of this bubble and started rubbing shoulders with people far more successful than me that I actually started to believe that I was capable of achieving phenomenal things.

So, I brought this mindset to university. At university, I was naturally drawn to students who were high-performance students. I would talk to them, observe them, watch how they studied, and how long they studied for, and I would learn so much from them.

But what if you don’t really know anyone that is a high-performing person, someone that is incredibly successful in whatever field they might be in? Because I had this problem too, and probably a lot of you watching this right now might be in a similar position. That’s when you can take advantage of all this amazing technology that we have around us—endless hours of videos, podcasts, documentaries, and books that have been produced or written by some of the most successful people on the planet.

So, there really is no excuse not to learn from the most successful people, whatever your field is. Whether it’s medicine—some of the best doctors and surgeons on the planet have written books and even got their own YouTube channels. The same goes for lawyers, accountants, entrepreneurs. Whatever it is that you want to be great in, you can learn from the most successful people on the planet in that particular field. It really is easy to take all the wealth of knowledge we have around us and take it for granted because there’s literally so much of it.

Habit 4:

High-performance students practice gratitude. This is something that I started doing probably 3 ½, four years ago now. First and foremost, I’m a lot happier, and my life is a lot more meaningful and fulfilling as a direct result of consciously practicing gratitude on a daily basis.

I was watching an interview by Tony Robbins a few years ago, and he practices his gratitude every single morning as soon as he wakes up. He calls it priming, and part of his priming process is to think of all the incredible things that are happening in his life that he’s grateful for and step in like he’s there so he can feel it within himself. He can feel the gratitude deep within himself.

Facts Check

I think it’s more important now more than ever to practice gratitude. Because we’re bombarded with negativity and suffering in the media and pretty much every digital platform. We’re coming on the air with breaking news. ‘Very sad news tonight, the end of a catastrophic year, hopes and fears for 2021.’

If you think back over 2020, you’ll probably automatically think about the coronavirus, the Black Lives Matter riots, the Beirut explosion, Kobe Bryant’s death, for example. Because this is the news that sells, that’s what people actually want to hear.

In fact, in 2014, researchers Mark Trussler and Stuart Soroka set up an experiment run at McGill University in Canada. In the study, the volunteers were asked to select some stories about politics to read from the news websites and were asked to answer questions on the kind of political news they prefer to read.

Interestingly, the results showed that participants actually chose stories with negative topics, such as corruption, setbacks, and hypocrisy, and they tended to stay away from neutral and positive stories. People who were more interested in current affairs and politics were even more likely to choose bad news over good news.

The researchers explained this with a theory that we have evolved to react quickly to potential threats because bad news could be a signal that we need to change what we do and to avoid danger. And it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.

With all this negativity in the media. It’s important to remember that you have so many things in your life to be grateful for. The fact that you even woke up in the morning because the reality is that thousands of people, unfortunately, didn’t. It can be easy to forget and take for granted that tomorrow will be here. And the truth is that none of us know how long we’re going to be alive for.

For me, since practicing gratitude more often. It’s a phenomenal antidote for pretty much all the negative emotions and situations I have in my life. For example, it’s difficult to feel grateful and sad at the same time or difficult to feel grateful and angry at the same time.

There’s a video on YouTube where Tom Bilyeu is interviewing Ed Mylett, and Ed Mylett. If you didn’t know, is a performance coach, author, and entrepreneur. In the interview, he talked about how everyone has something to be grateful for, even if you don’t think that you do.

‘I had a really good friend of mine. I went to lunch, and he goes, ‘Let me ask you a question, honestly. Right now, what are you grateful for?’ At the lunch, I said, ‘Jack, nothing, brother. There’s nothing good in my life right now.’ And I’m not exaggerating this to you when I tell you this.

As I’m mouthing these words, two people walked in—an older man and a lady, both clearly fighting cancer. Somehow, both had lost their hair. One of the ladies had a bonnet on, and they were barely moving. Both walked by our table and gave me the warmest greeting, the warmest smile as strangers. He goes, ‘That’s pretty freaking pathetic. You can’t find anything in your life to be grateful for right now.’

“If you can stack gratitude, even more so when you don’t think things are going that well for you. If you can stack gratitude during these times, then your life is going to be so meaningful and abundant.

When you do manage to turn things around, there are even bigger external things to be grateful for. I’m slowly wiring myself to really think about the small things, just like being able to attend university.

For example, because there are millions of people out there that would have loved to go to university but they don’t have the opportunity to. Other things, like having good health, for example, or having an apartment to live in, or having a group of supportive and positive people around me that allow me to keep growing and staying on track.

As a result, because I am happier and more productive, I can get more studying done. I can also get more work done, and I just achieve more in general.

Habit 5:

• High-performance students are willing to pay the price. If you ask any of your classmates, any of your friends, even anyone at your university, what grade they want to graduate with at university. They’ll probably all say they want to graduate with a 4.0 GPA, right?
• Or the equivalent of a 4.0 GPA. A lot of them will also probably say that that’s what they’re aiming for. But I can bet that the vast majority of them are not willing to pay the price, to sacrifice what needs to be sacrificed in order to get to that top 5%, even that top 1%.
• I was in that position at university because I knew what I needed to do to give up in order to achieve a 4.0 GPA. I knew that I would spend so much time studying that my social life would have to be cut down, and that my time in the gym would have to be cut down, that the time I spent running a couple of businesses that I had had to be reduced, resulting in having less of an impact and having less money to spend.
• But I made that decision before I was even accepted into university. I made that decision that I was willing to do that, that it was worth it to sacrifice all of those things.

Habit 6:

High-performance students adopt a growth mindset. They never stop learning and striving to become better every single day, just small incremental improvements day by day that snowball into huge results over 1-2, even five or ten years.

So there’s a book called ‘Rich Habits: The Daily Success Habits of Wealthy Individuals,’ written by Thomas Corley. But it’s really interesting because the author spent five years studying the daily activities of 233 wealthy people and 128 people in poverty.

He realized that there was a huge difference between the daily habits of the wealthy and the daily habits of the poor. One of the biggest differences between the wealthy and the poor was that the wealthy group had adopted a growth mindset.

He found that 88% of them said that they devoted at least 30 minutes a day to either education or self-development through reading. He also found that most of them preferred to read nonfiction rather than fiction—biographies, history, and self-help books.

In university, I noticed the same thing. The students that were working at a 4.0 GPA level, they were all hungry for knowledge. They were all eager to learn and improve their grades and just generally improve themselves in every way that they could.

So they enjoyed reading and watching documentaries and listening to podcasts. It makes sense because the more knowledgeable you become, the better decisions you can make, and the more successful you can be.

The next time you fail an exam, don’t see it as a failure. Instead, adopt a growth mindset and be brutally honest with yourself. Ask what you could have done better and what you could improve for the next exam.

Habit 7:

• High-performance students know exactly what they want at university. You exactly what I wanted. I made a decision that I would do whatever it took in order to graduate with a 4.0 GPA.
• If that means studying 12/13/14 hours a day sometimes, then so be it. Because my grades at high school were so bad, at least in terms of what I was capable of, and I felt so defeated and depressed. This was my last chance, the last opportunity I’d get to make up for it.
• I was 100% clear and 100% focused on what I wanted to get out of university. But a lot of students, they don’t get what they want because they don’t know what they want.
• So I knew exactly what I wanted, but I had to set some daily goals and put some daily habits in place in order to achieve it.
• One of my goals was to study for at least eight hours a day, six days a week. On the 7th day, I’d study for four hours. So whatever happened, I would always study for at least eight hours.
• Now, during exam time, I would often be studying for 12 or 13 hours. But even after exams, when everyone else was relaxing, I’d still be getting 8 hours in and preparing for the next set of exams, even if those exams were in two or three or four.

Conclusion

Hope you enjoyed and learned something from this article. You should also follow these 7 habits to become high performance student.