It's the summer holidays now. Time for academics to catch up on writing papers, and for undergraduate students to get out and enjoy themselves after a year's study.

Except, that is, for the students who failed their exams in June. They are indoors, studying for resits. One such student contacted me the other day.

Good question.

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Don't believe the propaganda that study is easy and fun. It isn't. Study is often difficult and boring and makes you feel like your head is being crushed by a giant hand. So let's consider three reasons that anybody might do something that is difficult, boring, and hurts:

• For love.
• By habit.
• For the sake of a plan.

Let me go into that in more detail:

• Love.

  Some people love fishing. They sit in the rain for hours for the possibility of dispensing death to a fish. I'd go mad from boredom in five minutes, but I don't love fishing.

  Some people love stamps. They'll spend hours, days, years on them. I'd sell the collection and spend the money on a subscription to Scientific American, but I have no interest in stamps.

  Some people love their children. They'll put up with the most astonishing nonsense (shitty nappies, teething, teenage rebellion, ...). I know some kids that I'd slit my own wrists to escape. By the grace of love, parents endure their offspring. May God be praised for this, for otherwise the human race could not have survived.

  When I was an undergraduate I was motivated by love of doing maths problems. They were like crosswords to me. I couldn't get enough of them. My undergraduate career was one long bliss of doings undergraduate maths problems.

  What's that you say?

  “Jamie, thanks for that, but I do not find the same passion burning in my heart — and, by the way, fishing is the best thing I've ever done.”
  Well, know this: you can teach yourself to love something. More on that below.

• Habit.

  Some men work a boring office job from nine to five every day, simply because that is what people do and that is what they have always done. It is boring, maybe even desperate and soul-destroying. And yet, they continue. It's a habit.

  Do not underestimate the force of a habit. When a mountain-climber reaches the top of a mountain he is not motivated. He is in an exhausted stupor and continues to puts one foot in front of the other because he can't think to stop. So long as our hypothetical climber can avoid starving or freezing or having a heart attack — in short, so long as he can persist biologically — then he will keep on climbing. Looked at in this way, the hypothetical man in the office is doing something similar, but without the glamour.

  For better or for worse, for glory or for empty banality, people perform amazing feats of endurance, by habit.

• A plan.

  My brother took up martial arts. He was determined to learn how to kick people's heads off (a useful skill if you're being mugged; I wish I had it). Within a fortnight he had broken his foot during a class. Now, if he had broken his foot carrying a heavy cupboard for a neighbour, he might have screamed and cursed and spent a week in bed. However, because he was learning to fight, he did not do this. He accepted this as a reasonable hazard of his plan. He picked himself up and continued with the lesson on a broken foot.

  I know a rugby player who broke his finger during a match. He strapped it to another finger to stop it flapping around too much, and continued playing. I asked him why he did this and he answered “because we didn't have a substitute”. His plan was to play rugby. This was more important than the pain of a broken finger. This was more important even than the pain of catching a rugby ball with a broken finger. His plan made the pain irrelevant.

  The man in the office mentioned above might be there for a different reason. He might be doing what is necessary to support his family. Keeping them clothed and fed is his plan.

  Pain, boredom, humiliation, and similar discomforts, are just sensations. They do not necessarily stop you doing something, and they are not even necessarily uncomfortable, if you suffer them willingly for the sake of a plan in which you can believe.

Study is hard. Just like bringing up a child, or climbing a mountain, or running around with a broken foot or finger, it requires determination and perseverence. But you can do it if you have love, a habit, or a plan — you might even enjoy it.

Let's discuss my own opinions on love, habit, and plans, loosely based on my undergraduate experiences:

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Loving my subject. It is common to hear students say things like

This is simply false. Closer to the truth would be but to be precise they should say Attitudes change. When I was a child my parents told me to “learn to love it”. This puzzled me — how do you learn to love something? — and I also found it threatening — what is more scary than somebody reaching into your head to change your likes and dislikes (they write science fiction horror about that, for example). I did not appreciate that attitudes can change easily, and that failing to see relevance and interest in a subject is always down to lack of imagination. Every subject is interesting; otherwise, people would not have gone to the trouble of identifying it as a distinct object of study. You just have to find the hook that makes it interesting to you. To do that you must know yourself (I cannot do it for you), but here are some suggestions:

As a student, it is tempting to approach the courses at face value. Do not do this. A university course exists in the context of a social and historical reality. Somebody designed your course, based on factors including technical significance and what they believe constitutes an ‘educated graduate’. This gets refined to a syllabus. Then, a lecturer creates course materials based on that syllabus. By then, little of the original context may remain. It helps a lot to look for the meaning behind the course. For example I taught ‘parsing’ (an important topic in Computer Science) to a hundred students last year. I wonder how many of them really considered the following questions:

Your teacher has a syllabus to get through and perhaps a hundred students. He cannot know what floats your individual boat. Do you? Here, computer Science enjoys an advantage because it is a very modern subject. If it's in your course, then it's there for a very modern reason. You can probably find it on the internet, if you look.

I'll give you another example. I had trouble studying English in school. I liked a rattling good story as much as anybody else — but I did not get the point of earnest discussion in class about people doing things that never happened in places that do not exist. Then one day, years later, I had a flash of insight. I realised that every person has a model of other people in their mind, and that an interest of literature is that, by means of a story, the author constructs a model of a certain kind of person in a certain kind of situation, and then runs that model. A book is like a weather simulation: not real, but indicative of reality and a tool by which to study it. I had thought that those discussions in English classes had been about the characters in the book, but they were not: we understand our lives through narrative, so by the construction of narratives, we throw light on our lives. For me, literature went from being really boring and confusing to being really interesting and stimulating, in an instant. I had found the hook that worked for me.

Do not expect to ‘be motivated’ by your teachers. Do not blame them for ‘being boring’. Empower yourself. Rely on no-one. Do not be a victim. Find out for yourself how to love.

Getting into the habit.

I read a self-help book on motivation once. It discussed ‘rewards’. The idea was to study for a while, and then give yourself a reward. I find this ineffective; three hours of grinding slog is not worth one piece of chocolate and a half hour of television.

Study is its own reward, always, even when it hurts (especially when it hurts). The difficult bit is most often getting started. What works for me, is to associate study with an existing habit. For example, every morning I get out of bed and have breakfast. That's a habit. So if I have to get something done, I get out of bed, study for half-an-hour, and then have breakfast. This is a convenient way to manufacture a new habit; I attach it to an existing routine.

I usually find that once I've studied for half-an-hour, I will happily keep going for another fifteen minutes or longer. I also find that after breakfast — so long as there are no interruptions — I can keep going all morning. That early morning start got me in the mood. It's never as bad as you think, if you can get going.

Do you spend your evenings watching YouTube? That's a habit. Now get into the habit of studying for an hour and then watching YouTube. You may find yourself getting into the swing of things and studying for an hour and a half. Concentration, for me, comes in forty-five minute chunks.

If you want to get into a new habit, build on an existing one.

Also, prioritise. Studying takes time. By all means go to bed at 3am if this is your habit. However, if there is more studying then there will inevitably be less YouTube. This is good. Studying is a slog but it's important. Get used to it.

The plan.

Something that I have learned from teaching is to distinguish goals and plans.

• A goal is something general that you want to achieve. Examples of goals include ‘getting rich’, ‘doing well in the exams so I don't have a poor job after’, or ‘achieving fame’.
• A plan is a more detailed recipe for doing something.

Goals make lousy plans and I believe that the typical student, if pressed, may enunciate a few goals but no plans; it should be the other way round. Goals provide no way to measure progress, and no information as to how to attain them. They may serve only to depress you.

In my opinion plans should be simple, systematic, and easy to carry out. For example, my plans as an undergraduate included the following: I had a plan to do every question on the exercise sheets; I had another plan to understand everything the lecturer had said in the last lecture before I went into the next one. Revising for exams, my plan was to go back at least five years in the past papers — preferably ten. I usually managed it.

I had faith that if I stuck to my plans, then any goals of later life would be easier to achieve. I stand by this today. Pick a set of good plans, carry them out, and let the goals come when they're ready.

As I said, I like plans that are simple, systematic, and easy to carry out. Progress should be indisputable: either you have done all the questions, or you have not; either you have gone back five years, or you have not. This made it easy for me to just keep chipping away at my plan every time I had a spare hour. I got the same kick out of racking up the questions, that people get from watching the score mount on an arcade game. Everybody likes to accumulate points.

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So that's it. Love; habit; a plan. Don't worry if you look back over a few weeks and don't notice progress. These things are deceptive. If you keep chipping away then you'll look back over a longer time period, like four or five years, and be astonished at how much you have achieved. Such a period is too long to motivate yourself with adrenaline. Therein lies a difficulty for the undergraduate student: quite possibly for the first time, he or she faces the challenge of sustaining a process that is genuinely difficult and offers for the most part only long term rewards. Love, habit, or a plan may help you to sustain this kind of effort. Learn how to fall in love, how get into the habit, and how to make plans that you can have faith in. Good luck.

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