Best Books Student Should Read
- Deep Work Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport
One of my biggest daily struggles is focusing intently on my work — and judging by the hundreds of emails I get from students each month, I’m not alone. Deep Work is by far the best and most effective book I’ve read on this topic, and it’s helped me to become much better at resisting the temptation of distractions and remaining concentrated. This is one of my most highly recommended books.
2. A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra)
If you’re looking for practical techniques you can use to increase your ability to learn new information effectively, you should read this book. Contrary to what the title would imply, Dr. Barbara Oakley’s A Mind for Numbers is applicable to any learning discipline — not just math and science. This book will quickly give you an understanding of how your brain learns and encodes new information, and will also equip you with strategies for learning more while studying less.
3. Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain
I firmly believe that a solid foundation of nutrition, exercise, and sleep will help you succeed in college better than any study hack, which is why I recommend this book. Reading it will educate you on how exercise affects your brain, which in turn will give you more mental ammunition that you can use to shoot down excuses when you’re feeling lazy or “busy”, and don’t want to work out. By the way, how much exercise have you gotten today?
4. How to Win at College Surprising Secrets for Success from the Country’s Top Students by Cal Newport
It’s 12 years old now, but Cal Newport’s How to Win at College is still one of the best primers for college success I’ve ever read — especially when it comes to things beyond your grades. It’s a short read (I read it in about four hours), split into 75 “tips” that each take up 1–4 pages. I read this book as a freshman, and it’s one of the biggest reasons I was so focused on success in college; the book provides a great foundation for becoming a remarkable student and doesn’t weigh you down with idle words.
How to Become a Straight-A Student
Whereas How to Win at College is a general, tip-based overview on ways you can become successful in college, this book gets its hands dirty by giving you an in-depth, well thought out method for pulling epic grades in all of your classes. The book is based around that fact that there are many college students who get straight A’s, yet don’t study for more than a couple hours a day and still have plenty of other things going on in their lives. It lays out effective strategies for note-taking, quizzing yourself, writing papers, and more. If you want to be like one of the aforementioned students, get this book.
5. Your Money: The Missing Manual
Learning to effectively manage your money should be priority #1 if you haven’t done it already. You’re most likely in college so you can get a degree and gain access to jobs with greater earning potential; make sure your degree goes as far as it should by learning what to do with the money once you have it. Your Money: The Missing Manual is a fantastic general overview of personal finance, and it’ll show you just how to keep those bills in the bank rather than blowing them on random crap.
6. Personal Investing: The Missing Manual
This is a great is a great follow-up to Your Money: The Missing Manual, and I’d recommend that you save reading this book until you’ve read the former. Once you have a solid grounding in personal finance, though, you should start taking the next step and get into investing. The book is a great tool to learn how to do that; it goes over the types of investments — Roth IRA’s, index funds, common stock, bonds, the works — and gives a good overview of which ones you’ll want to utilize based on your goals and lifestyle.
The 4-Hour Work Week
This is the book that got me into lifestyle design — the idea that we don’t have to simply graduate and just get a job, but that we are instead free to pursue the life we want, as long as we can set up the necessary systems to make it work. It also was partly responsible for giving me the confidence to try turning College Info Geek into my full-time job — which worked out
