Motivation and the art of studying
Motivation (n): “Something that motivates; inducement; incentive.”
If you look up motivation in a dictionary, other words inevitably swarm around it like bees around honey: reward, incentive, goal… and so it goes on. The same words appear whenever you look at an article about motivation, about how to get motivated, how to stay motivated, how to be motivated. They’ll tell you to reward yourself, to set goals, to bribe yourself with incentives. They’ll tell you to ignore the suffering of study, that laborious chain students wear around their necks while they shovel information into their heads for weeks on end, to see it as part of some bigger plan or, to borrow from Machiavelli, they’ll suggest it’s the means to some desirable end.
Without a doubt motivation is a vital part of examination success. The keen learner, the motivated learner, will more actively engage with their studies, be more likely to retain information consumed and be more likely to form interconnections between the various strands of learning and be able to put those discoveries to creative and effective use.
I had a flip through a number of books in the “how to study shelf” at a local library and looked for tips on motivation. Boy were they dull. To save you a lot of time (and possibly money), the conventional wisdom can be summarized thus:
- Reward yourself when you achieve your goals.
- Establish a routine.
- Remind yourself why you are doing the exams.
So far, so…safe, and a little inane. That’s not to suggest for one moment motivation is not important, because it is, incredibly so. Motivation is important for those studying for exams because:
- There’s a lot of stuff to absorb, digest and get thinking freshly about.
- Studying can be lonely, with hours spent on your own in a room with limited social contact.
- Lack of it and a sense of a looming revision mountain getting ever bigger can be frightening and stressful
But treating yourself rather like a plant that bends toward light does not, I believe, create the type of motivation that helps forge exceptional candidates.
So here’s my approach. It worked very nicely for me and you are welcome to give it some thought, ignore it completely or pull it apart (I’d be most pleased if you did the latter, though not at the expense of your studying time!!!).
Let’s ask ourselves a simple (though absolutely essential) question:
Why do we study?
And we’ll follow that up with an answer:
It’s simple – to get the best grades we can.
Why do we need the best grades we can get?
To get to the best university or get the best job we can?
Why does that matter?
Because then I’ll have more options in life, more money and that would be a good thing.
That’s how thousands of your fellow students will be approaching their exams. They’ve followed the conventional wisdom about having “a grand plan” and their Mummies and Daddies will, once their child becomes a lawyer or a doctor, be very proud and enjoy telling all their friends how wonderfully well little Johnny has done. And their friends will all nod politely.
But striving after something like an “A” grade, purely for its own sake, just to “get” it, while very achievable, is not much of a motivational tool. Salmon can swim upstream but they probably wouldn’t if there was a more rewarding way of getting to fresh water.
So, let’s try that Q and A again, but this time, like free-thinking salmon, we’ll take a different route.
Why do we study?
Because the world is a fascinating place.
What’s fascinating about it?
The fact that characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are as relevant today as they ever were, that the earth keeps on spinning, that some deep sea animals can flourish without oxygen near thermal vents, that Scottish theorists immediately after the French Revolution saw events of 1789 not as “modern” but in fact quite the reverse, that while we don’t know who in a crowd will cheer when a football team scores there will nevertheless be a cheer and so on and so forth.
Erm… and how will that help you get an “A”?
Who cares, I’m just really enjoying thinking about what I’m studying, broadening my field of reference, learning what it is to be human, approaching the world critically and having my own thoughts rather than trying to remember how my teacher said she would answer that question I just answered in a test paper.
So you’re revision doesn’t really have a purpose or a goal?
Of course it does, the goal is to learn, to learn how to think, to learn how to write, to enjoy having my own thoughts on what I’m learning and reading.
And so on. The point I’m trying to make is really rather simple: set goals by all means, but try and enjoy the actual process of achieving them, the route, the endeavour or, cliche coming, adventure. The most able and highest achieving students I’ve encountered are more “route” oriented than grade orientated. Two of them got double firsts at
This is something adult learners, those who study when the kids have gone to bed or early in the morning when everybody else is asleep, know all too well. Studying is valuable for its own sake. It is an opportunity to grow, to learn about yourself, to connect with a magical past and present. Studying is something they enjoy, something their own, something that allows them to reach beyond the normal confines of day-to-day life.
And this approach to studies often yields the highest grades because it shines through in exam scripts. And even if it doesn’t – who has learnt more? The clever crammer who’ll forget everything they’ve read in a year’s time or the girl who got a C grade who’ll enjoy a lifetime re-reading Pride and Prejudice?
Why we study is an important question, and one very few students ask themselves. Ask it, and you might just find a motivational force far more powerful than you'll find in a how-to-study book or, dare I say it, The Exam Shack...
