The 3 Fatal Studying Mistakes Smart Students Make

I’ve heard this all the time: “Just study more!” or “You’re so smart you can figure this out!” and finally “if you memorize this, you’ll crush the test,” and, to be honest, these are some of the worst pieces of advice a smart student can ever get.

I made those mistakes, huge mistakes, and fell into the same traps that smart students across the world make every single day. With that advice, I failed my first ever quiz in medical school. Here are the 3 critical studying traps:

• The Brute Force Trap
• The Fixed Intelligence Trap
• The Memorization Trap

Let’s talk about how to avoid these, so no matter the difficulty of subject you take, no matter what class you take, you can always get As. After fixing these issues, I went from failing an anatomy exam, to scoring among the top 10% of all my medical school classmates.

The Brute Force Trap

More hours studying does not always equal higher grades.

“If I put in more hours, review more flashcards, do more practice questions, stay up all night, reread the chapter again, or work harder than everyone else, I’ll score better.”

The problem with this mindset is that everything outside of studying accounts for up to ~50% of academic performance.

• Sleep: In one study, 100 students in a chemistry class were given wearable sleep trackers for one month and their quiz and exam performance was measured. The worst sleepers across the month scored about 25% lower than the best sleepers! Sleep alone can account for 2 letter grades!¹ One study showed being awake for 17 hours is equivalent to having a blood-alcohol level of 0.05.²
• Exercise and Diet: Multiple studies show memory and cognitive function can vary up to 25% between those that have good exercise and diet compared to those with poor exercise and diet in randomized controlled clinical trials.^3,4

After tutoring 100s of students from C→A students and personally going from low B’s to high A’s among medical students, I learned most students wouldn’t benefit from more time studying, but from simply using their study time more effectively.

The problem is, when top students try to “brute force” studying with all nighters or skipping the gym or meals, it nearly always results in lower grades as shown by academic evidence. The brain can’t consolidate the studying without sleep, neurons connect and adapt more slowly with an improper diet, mental health suffers without any exercise, and then life isn’t as enjoyable, the body isn’t functioning properly, and grades go down.

Most students would benefit greatly from actually studying less, getting their life in order, and then optimizing their specific study habits with a priority on sleep, diet, medical conditions, and exercise.

Here are the highest yield tips based on evidence:

• Sleep 8 hours minimum: Set a bedtime alarm on your phone for 8 hours before you need to wake up. Put phone across room so you can’t snooze. Do this Sunday-Thursday at the exact same time. One all-nighter drops your IQ by 10 points for 4 days.
• Walk 30 minutes daily outside: Break up the 150-300 minute weekly exercise requirement into daily 30-min walks between classes or after dinner. Outside > inside (23% better mood + vitamin D). Listen to music/podcasts to make it automatic. No gym required.
• Eat protein within 2 hours of waking: Eggs, Greek yogurt, or protein shake + any carb. Skipping breakfast = 20% worse memory and attention. Prep the night before if you’re rushed. This stabilizes blood sugar for 4+ hours of focus.
• Drink half your body weight in ounces of water daily: 150 lbs = 75 oz water. Buy a water bottle, know its size, calculate how many refills you need. Coffee doesn’t count. Dehydration drops test performance by 15%. Put rubber band on bottle for each refill to track.
• Schedule one thing you enjoy for Wednesday: Book it now – coffee with friend, guitar playing, basketball, anything fun for 1 hour. Students who take one real break midweek score 18% higher than those who grind nonstop. Your brain needs joy to consolidate memories.

Sleep is just the beginning of where smart students struggle; the next is likely the most damaging trap of them all. The fixed intelligence trap.

The Fixed Intelligence Trap

Once smart does not mean always smart, especially in different subjects and different intensities of classes.

Let me tell you about one of my college friends whom I’ll call “Laura.”

Laura was a student who breezed through high school without ever needing to study. She was always told she was “gifted” and “naturally smart.” She was the valedictorian of her school and seemed to crush all classes without any effort. But then, Laura enters pre-med courses in college, and encounters the dreaded organic chemistry.

Unfortunately organic chemistry doesn’t care about your high school GPA.

Suddenly, school doesn’t come naturally. She hadn’t taken any “tough” classes so far in college because she didn’t want to spoil here 4.0 GPA. But, because she wanted to be a doctor, she was forced to take this class.

When she gets her first C on an exam, instead of thinking “I need to develop better study strategies,” or, “maybe I need to approach this differently,” she thinks “Maybe I’m not smart enough for medical school.” She attributes the poor grade to that she “isn’t meant to be a doctor,” and decides to drop out of the class and the premedical tract there and then.

The smartest students who coasted through high school are actually in the most danger of performing poorly in college or graduate-level classes, because they were never forced to work hard to perform well. They were complimented for their natural smarts as opposed to their grit or effort. And when they hit their first roadblock, a “C” in Organic Chemistry, a “B-” in college-level calculus, their world crumbles. This happened to me in my first class in medical school.

Let’s look at the science: In six experiments, 412 fifth-grade students were given puzzles and then randomly assigned to receive either praise for intelligence (“You must be smart”), praise for effort (“You must have worked hard”), or neutral feedback.

After the feedback, they were given impossible problems that they couldn’t solve, the intelligence-praised students showed dramatic negative effects: they became more focused on proving their ability rather than learning, showed less energy to trying to complete the problems, enjoyed tasks less after failure, and most critically—their performance on a final set of problems actually was below their initial baseline. In contrast, effort-praised students maintained their performance and motivation even after experiencing failure.⁵ (If you want to dive deep into this I recommend the books Grit or Mindset).

I saw it in medical school and college. Those with a fixed mindset struggled and crashed out at the first sign of things not going to plan, while those with a growth mindset may have struggled initially, but eventually turned their performance around.

The study methods from high school might not work out. You might fail a test. You might struggle to learn from this new professor. Evidence says instead of wallowing in the sadness at your first ever “C,” you would be much better off by treating this as a challenge, and a personal challenge to study better or differently and grow. You could do this by:

• Trying different study methods
• Asking high performing students or advisers or teachers for help
• Critically assessing yourself, are you studying right? What could you do better?

Yes, of course there will be external factors that are playing a role, but what benefit is there to you to focus on it? You cannot get your professor replaced with a different professor, you can’t change the content you need to learn, and you can’t add 3 hours to your day. What you can do is try your best to learn from your professor and their materials and their different teaching style, prioritize content to learn or not learn based on your knowledge gaps, and teleport into a black hole to gain unlimited time in the fourth dimension (ok maybe not the last one…).

Here are some tips on how to cultivate a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset:

• The “Yet” Sticky Note: Write “YET” on a sticky note and put it on your laptop/notebook. Every time you think “I don’t understand this,” physically touch the note and say out loud “I don’t understand this YET.” Do this minimum 5 times daily to make growth mindset physical and habitual.
• The 3-Before-Me Rule: Before asking for help or giving up on any problem, try 3 different approaches: YouTube video, different textbook, or explain it out loud to yourself. Document all 3 attempts in your notes. This builds problem-solving resilience and proves there’s always another way to learn.
• Daily Effort Score (Not Grade Tracking): Each night, rate your effort 1-10 for that day’s studying and write it in your planner. Friday, review which effort scores led to better understanding (not grades). Focus on beating yesterday’s effort, not classmates. Shifts focus from outcomes to process.
• The Mistake Highlighter: Get a bright highlighter specifically for mistakes. Instead of hiding errors on assignments, highlight them and add one sentence about what you learned. Make mistakes visible and valuable. Aim for 5 highlighted mistakes this week to celebrate learning opportunities.
• Strategy Steal Thursday: This Thursday, ask one classmate who did well: “HOW did you study for this?” Write down their exact method and try it for 30 minutes. Even if it doesn’t work for you, you’ve proven that ability isn’t fixed—it’s about finding the right approach.

Finally, let’s talk about the easiest trap to fall into, the memorization trap.

The Memorization Trap

In medical school, I remember dedicating two weeks to memorizing all the drug names, their mechanism of action, and their disease indication. It was a waste of time. I forgot them all in a month or two.

Even with the magic of Anki, this information didn’t stick in my head and my exam performance suffered.

After that exam, a great doctor and mentor told me, “Stop trying to memorize this stuff! Understand it! Link everything you learn to a patient you actually see in the hospital.” This was magical advice.

If you look at the taxonomy of learning pyramid below, for nearly all school, if you excel at 2 and 3 you will blow every other student out of the water.

The highest performing students I’ve ever met, sure can fit a bunch of stuff in their brain, but, more so, are so amazingly impressive and understanding and explaining concepts simply in their own words.

Some of the lowest performing students simply try and memorize every single thing they see on a slideshow or on class notes without actually making sense of it in their own heads.

If you understand the way the heart pumps blood through the body, and the physics around blood flow, you don’t need to memorize all the pathologies of the heart because you can simply figure them out. What if you are asked a question about the pressure of left atrium during systole and mitral valve prolapse. Will the pressure go up or down during systole in the left atrium compared to physiologic mitral valve? This sounds like a scary question!

But if you know that the mitral valve is just a hole that is meant to allows blood from the top of the left side of the heart (left atrium) to the bottom of the left side of the heart (left ventricle) if the hole stays open longer than it’s meant to and blood goes backwards (into the left atrium) doesn’t it make sense that the pressure would increase in that upper compartment if more blood than usual goes into it?

My biggest gains in studying ever came from actually understanding first and then integrating the more complicated memorizations and problems.

A great way to test this is to use the Feynman technique and see if you can explain the topic or question answer in simple terms. An even better way? Try and teach it to a classmate and see if they actually understand you!

Here are some actionable tips for you:

• Explain today’s hardest concept to a rubber duck: Put a toy/object on your desk and teach it one concept you’re struggling with, out loud, in simple words. If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it. Record yourself on your phone to catch where you stumble. Do this for 10 minutes after each study session.
• Draw every process as a silly diagram: Turn abstract concepts into ridiculous visuals – the Krebs cycle as a ferris wheel, the immune system as bouncers at a club. Ugly drawings are better than pretty notes. Understanding means you can illustrate it. This week: 5 concepts turned into drawings.
• Create “Why?” chains for every fact: For each fact you’d normally memorize, ask “why?” three times. Drug X treats disease Y. Why? Because it blocks receptor Z. Why does that help? Because… If you can’t answer 3 whys, you’re memorizing, not learning. Write these chains in your notes.
• Connect new info to something you already know: Before memorizing anything new, write “This is like…” and compare it to something familiar. Sodium-potassium pump is like a bouncer trading 3 troublemakers for 2 VIPs. The weirder the connection, the better you’ll remember AND understand it.
• Friday Quiz Swap: This Friday, trade topics with a classmate – you teach them your hardest topic, they teach you theirs. If they don’t get it, you don’t understand it well enough. Schedule this now. The fear of looking dumb will force you to actually understand, not just memorize.

BONUS TIP: The Destination not The Journey Trap

To get meta here, why are you doing what you are doing?

Mark Manson has absolutely no productivity techniques or strategies yet he is one of the most read authors of the 21st century. His big productivity hack, “I work on what I’m excited to work on.” In the morning, he says, he is excited to sit down at his computer and go to work.

He doesn’t need alarms, or cold plunges, or 17 supplements, he just works on what he cares about.

In high school, college, and graduate school, many of us are doing this because “it’s what we are meant to do,” and, the trap is even harder to escape if you are a smart student because you are constantly being peppered with praise, “wow you are so smart!” “you’re studying to be a doctor that’s so cool!” “Wow you are going to do great things!”

When’s the last time you thought about what you actually wanted to do? What do you want your everyday to be? Instead of constantly working towards an end goal of “this degree,” or “this career,” have you thought about what your goal of “daily life” is? Of course we all need to make money and survive, but if you are lucky enough to be in school and learning, likely any path you follow has some career that will give you enough money to survive (some obviously more than others, and if you are optimizing for $ you can, but it’s a fast way to burnout).

Importantly, if you do figure this out (kudos because I’m still trying to) you can create a life path around what makes you happy. Do you need to get an A+++ in chemistry if you don’t like science at all? Probably not. Instead of studying 20+ hours in one day for your chemistry exam, maybe you would benefit more from working on different coursework, or trying out a new activity like writing, or even getting some sleep or having a nice dinner with your friend and just doing what you need to get a high B or A on the exam.

One of the hardest exercises I ever did was ask myself “why” 5 times in a row when I was a resident internal medicine doctor, “why am I becoming a doctor,” … “why? … “why?” … this led to me quitting medicine. Why are you doing what you do?

Bottom Line

Ok, overall, smart students are at the biggest risk of:

• Studying Harder (and not smarter)
• Having a fixed mindset (and not growing)
• Trying to memorize everything (instead of understanding)
• Box-checking for others (instead of life-checking for themselves)

Want to level up your studying forever? I have a 90-minute course on absolutely everything I’ve learned about evidence-based studying and becoming an A student. Most students grades jump 10% just after implementing my exam prep method! Check it out here!