“It’s more than a guide to doing well in college... It’s a guide through life.”

First of all, let’s get this college thing into perspective. Some of you are waaay too impressed by the place you are going to spend the next four years or so.

If you experience fear, awe or confusion when you think about attending College, prepare to ditch all of that…

More Specifics from Chapter I

A government study in 1995 and determined that the average college graduate makes 74 percent more than somebody with only a high school diploma. And this earnings gap is widening (in 1974 there was only a 38 percent difference). You are reading this because you are committed to being on the right side of this grim divide.

Good for you!

More Specifics from Chapter II

Two kinds of students will read and benefit from Kick Ass in College. The first group bought this guide to get an edge on the pack. These students may be brimming with self-confidence, and eager to break curves and break hearts. Fair enough. There are crucial lessons for them within these pages.

My other group of readers probably do not identify with the confident, empowered student I am telling them they will be. I understand this skepticism. But to them I say this:

I will show you the handful of critical techniques and approaches of people who succeed brilliantly in college. They are not complicated or mysterious. They are easily modeled by anyone with a desire for success. They mainly involve advanced planning, high-quality information, and a discipline that will grow naturally from the seed of success planted early in the span of a college career.

More Specifics from Chapter III

The number one difference between a person who succeeds and one who doesn’t is the quality of his or her planning. Without a plan, motivation – the engine of success – is not easy to ignite. Plans and goals give context to hard work. I’m not going to lie to you. Hard work is the basis of success. Period. But …

With a plan, hard work becomes satisfying, meaningful work. You begin to require it in your life, like a race horse requires hard riding. When hard work translates into tangible results and rewards, it ceases to be something to be avoided like so much pointless suffering. In this sense, success gets easier to accomplish. A good plan, broken down into realistic, manageable steps, makes it possible to visualize successful results. If you can see, feel and taste the results of your plan, you will live and work with enthusiasm and purpose.

More Specifics from Chapter IV

The next couple of chapters cover study skills. You’ll find some kick-ass study tips here, as well as some essential advice to help you get your mind right. It’s important for you to know that for a particular tip to be included here it had to be:

highly effective;

something you’ll actually use; and

something you’ll actually use consistently.

People are always full of bright ideas, like telling you to draw lines down the middle of the page when you take notes for God-knows-what reason, or insisting that you should use six different colors of highlighters.

I’m not here to overwhelm and demoralize you with outlandish tactics you’ll never apply. This chapter is supposed to make your life easier. Again, if you see a tip in here it made the cut because it’s field-tested and practical.  In other words, it's as easy to use as a screwdriver!

More Specifics from Chapter V

During the transition to college, freshmen must adjust to a new place, to new people and to new responsibilities. No longer will the student live within a structured family setting, with set wake-up times, bed times and meal times. Nor will the student’s clothes get mysteriously washed, folded and deposited in drawers. Most importantly, no one will be breathing down his or her neck to roll out of bed and into class. These changes in your life all fit under the category of freedom… How do successful students cope with this new-found freedom?

More Specifics from Chapter VI

The best antidote to test anxiety is knowing that you are prepared. And whether you are prepared is largely up to you. You can study in a calm, consistent, savvy manner… or you can cram and choke. It’s just that simple. But many students just can’t seem to accept the power they have over tests. Their attitude is that test days are always bad days – opportunities to fail. In fact, test days are opportunities to kick ass. Accept control and don’t let tests just happen to you.

More Specifics from Chapter VII

There are a few simple ways to improve any written assignment beyond your professor’s wildest dreams.

My Mini-Guide to Effective Writing will quickly teach you all the tricks of the trade.

More Specifics from Chapter VIII

You’ve heard it before:

"Time management is critical in college… You must schedule carefully so that the 86,400 seconds in each day don’t slip through your fingers like sands through the hourglass, blah, blah, blah…"

Well, take heart because I’m not about to make you suffer through a hypothetical series of pages out of somebody’s daily calendar, with 47 minutes set aside for lunch, 21 minutes for folding the laundry and 2 minutes for flossing.

Let me break it down for you: the main reasons students bite the dust in college are: (a) poor study skills and (b) not spending enough time studying.

More Specifics from Chapter IX

Your memory is perfect. The trick is learning to move short-term memories into your long-term memory bank.

I like to remind students about a bizarre incident that occurred some 25 years ago in which a woman awoke to find her husband talking in his sleep – in a foreign tongue of some kind. The odd thing was that the man had no foreign language skills. Fortunately, his wife had the presence of mind to record her husband’s lengthy nocturnal ramblings. It was later determined that the man was speaking perfect, unaccented Russian. It seems that at some point in his life he had been within earshot of two people having a mundane conversation in Russian. For whatever reason, his brain had absorbed this information and randomly accessed it in his sleep, causing him to recite the conversation perfectly. Similarly astonishing results can be obtained through hypnosis.

Gee, I wonder if your memory is good enough to get you through your next Geography test. Ya think?

More Specifics from Chapter X

You are not in this thing alone. You can’t swing a cat without hitting a helpful, well-intentioned member of your campus community. They care about you. They have made education their lives. You should thank heaven for these people every day. These members of the faculty and staff will be all-too-eager to serve as members of your own personal brain trust. Over time you will assemble your own success team, building key relationships that will make your life approximately 37% easier.

But you must call out to them for help or nobody will hear you.

More Specifics from Chapter XI

Extracurricular activities should provide valuable experience in leadership and administration. By your in-depth participation you are also demonstrating to prospective employers and graduate schools that you can juggle several responsibilities at once. This is important.

Juggling, after all, is what adulthood is all about: juggling your job, your family, and everything else in your life. In college, you must demonstrate the ability to juggle your grades, your extracurricular activities, any work obligations, your relationships, and all of the other potential responsibilities foisted upon you by college life. Of course, part of a successful juggling act means knowing when to juggle only six chainsaws rather than seven.

More Specifics from Chapter XII

For some students, the most intimidating aspect of college life is relating to the faculty and staff. They watch their college’s officials from afar, never approaching them for help, or even just to offer a simple "hello."

And yet professors, for example, are just like you and me. (Granted, they undergo periodic molting periods and have two spinal columns, but aside from that, they’re just regular folks.) They aren’t gods. They have families and lives and run-of-the-mill problems with their cars and plumbing.

There are many reasons for you to get to know the people running your institution and grading your performance. Intuitively, you know that a good relationship with your professor will benefit you. You realize that while it won't guarantee you an A, it will guarantee you an edge… and little edges here and there are the stuff that A's are made of.

More Specifics from Chapter XIII

You may hear people tell you not to worry if you haven’t chosen a major yet. "Let a couple of years pass and wait to see if something leaps out at you." Needless to say, you can fertilize your lawn with this kind of advice and it will grow green, lush and pretty. Yup, it’s what we used to call "ca-ca" when I was a kid.

There's nothing wrong with not knowing exactly what your major will be. But you must avoid taking a laissez faire approach to any aspect of your life (laissez faire, of course, is French for "sitting around on your can and watching the world go by"). Rather, you need to invest a great deal of conscious energy in exploring your aptitudes, interests and dreams. You can’t expect your future career to fall out of the sky and bonk you on the head.

More Specifics from Chapter XIV

I want to provide you with some useful ideas for success in life outside of the classroom – during your college years and beyond. There are many important things we are not taught in school, among them:

• How to be a good husband or wife
• How to raise kids, and
• How to manage money.

I won’t presume to try to give you a plan to deal with these three daunting areas in the next few pages (especially since I have no idea about the first two things). I only mention these conspicuous educational gaps to emphasize just how much critical knowledge society expects you to acquire on your own. Because of this, most successful people have done a lot of self-education. Come to think of it, you’re self-educating right now.

More Specifics from Chapter XV