How to Become a Straight A Student

How to Become a Straight-A Student by Cal Newport — Book Summary

The Phi Beta Kappa Surprise

In the winter of his senior year at Dartmouth, Cal Newport walked into a Phi Beta Kappa induction ceremony expecting to spend a long afternoon with the people he had been avoiding for four years. The top thirty or so GPAs from a class of more than a thousand. Bookworms, presumably. Eye-rubbing nerds with stooped shoulders. He braced for a small, joyless room full of strangers who had spent every Saturday night in a carrel.

The room was full of his friends.

There were the magazine editors he drank with on weekends. The frat boys. The crunchy environmentalists who organized hiking trips up Mount Moosilauke. They were the same people he saw at parties, at orientation events, at the late-night pizza place on Main Street. None of them looked like grinds. Most of them, in fact, were the opposite of grinds. They had social lives, hobbies, romantic entanglements, hangovers. And somehow they had also collected almost exclusively perfect grades for four years at one of the most demanding colleges in America.

Newport, sitting in that room, realized something he could have used as a freshman. The straight-A students at the best schools in the country were not, as a group, the people you would have predicted. They were not the ones in the library at three in the morning with the empty Red Bull cans. The students at three in the morning with the empty Red Bull cans were, more often than not, getting B-pluses and complaining about it. The Phi Beta Kappa crowd had figured out something different. And almost none of them could articulate it well enough to teach it.