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TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1: Super-Charging Your Motivation
CHAPTER 2: Vanquishing Procrastination
CHAPTER 3: Boosting Your Memory
CHAPTER 4: Acing Your Exams
CHAPTER 5: Keep up the inspiration

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CHAPTER 1: Super-Charging Your Motivation

Motivation will almost always beat mere talent Anon.

The first step on the pathway to academic success is motivation. Motivation

however is more than a spark, which inspires you into action. Motivation is a
mindset that allows you to sustain action, and remain focused and energised
throughout Year 12.
Motivation is consequently essential to ensure that you equip yourself to study and
prepare consistently in the lead up to your Trials and HSC Exams. Typically, the
commonly recommended strategy to develop motivation is to sit down and
develop goals a goal for a particular ATAR, or specific subject goals, e.g. 90% in
Advanced English. While setting a goal is an important step to creating direction,
and a long term focus, based on our research with 98+ ATAR students, and
working with tens of thousands of students, large goals like an ATAR, or a mark in
a subject are not necessarily the most effective way to developing motivation that
empowers you to take consistent action every day.
Why? There are two key problems with large over-arching goals.
1. They are long-term
2. They are intangible

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When you have set a goal for the future, like scoring a particular ATAR, often
there is no effort to chart a pathway in the short term to achieve this long term
goal. As a result, a goal like a particular ATAR can seem very far away, and
not always very relevant to your day to day activities.
Because an ATAR goal feels far away and not necessarily relevant to your day
to day activities, when you are studying during the year, and feel like
procrastinating and taking the day off, typically the large goal of an ATAR
(which is essentially an abstract number) will not be sufficient to keep you
motivated and inspire you to continue working. This is because the goal is not
something you touch, feel, or experience within your immediate future.
The key therefore to super-charging your motivation lies in setting short-term
goals tangible goals that during the year you will be able to see, feel and
experience, so that when you feel like procrastinating, and avoiding study, you
have something in your immediate future to inspire you to consistent action.
What types of short term goals can you set?
Short term tangible goals need to be things that are:
1. Fun something that you really enjoy doing
2. An experience something you can experience in some way

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Examples of short term goals that top performing students set themselves
included:

Going to a friends party on the weekend

Taking a weekend off to go surfing

Playing Sport, or going to gym

Talking to a girlfriend/boyfriend

Watching a movie, or favorite TV show

Top students would set a goal to go a party, or play sport, or watch a movie
to reach this goal however, they would need to complete a pre-determined
amount of study (in terms of output, and not time).
If they did not complete the pre-determined amount of study, they would not
reach their goal, and would not take the weekend off to go surfing, or to their
friends party.
Why did this work as a way to encourage consistent, daily motivation and
action?
Because top students set goals to participate in activities that they loved,
where immediate, and they could experience, whenever they felt like
procrastinating, and not studying, they realized that they would lose out on the
opportunity to participate in the event or experience, and this motivated them

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to study. In other words, by setting short term goals to do something they

loved, they could harness their motivation to have fun, to stay energized, and
focused to study!
While this might seem counter intuitive to set goals to schedule in fun
activities during Year 12 (especially when most people will encourage you to
quit extra-curricular activities), this is something that top students regularly did
throughout Year 12 to help them remain motivated so they could excel
academically.

HSC Success Strategy:

Set yourself short term tangible goals so goals that you can enjoy,
and experience. Make a commitment that you will not engage in this
experience unless you complete a pre-determined amount of study.

Schedule in a minimum of one short term goal each week to help you
remain focused, and energized on a daily basis.

For more tools and strategies to help you stay super-motivated during the lead up
to your Trials and HSC Exams, get your tickets today for our 1-day exclusive HSC
Success Summit, on 5th July at Epping.
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CHAPTER 2: Vanquishing Procrastination

Procrastination is the thief of time Edward Young

The second step on the pathway to achieving academic excellence is

vanquishing procrastination. While you may be motivated, and want to work
with high levels of intensity, inevitably, as you become tired, and the year
stretches on, that old enemy, procrastination begins to creep into your
schedule. With over 10 units to prepare for during Year 12, time is a valuable
commodity, and vanquishing procrastination and maximizing your use of time
is therefore vital to help you prepare adequately across all your subjects so
that you excel in your HSC.
To successfully vanquish procrastination, it is important to first understand
what procrastination is, and why is occurs.
What is procrastination?
Procrastination essentially is the postponement of high priority activities or low
priority activities. For example, it is where you will postpone creating study
notes for a subject to instead chat to a friend on Facebook.
Why does it occur?
Procrastination can be best understood by Parkinsons Law. Parkinsons law
states that:
-

Work will expand to fill available time

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What does this mean?

Let us illustrate with an example. You come home from school at about 4pm.
You take a moment to plan your afternoon. You realize that because its a
Monday, you have nothing planned all afternoon (in terms of extra-curricular
activities), and therefore have about 4-5 hours across the afternoon/night to
study (roughly from 4pm 10pm).
What happens?
Typically, you begin studying and then because you know that you have lots
of time to complete your study, when you get a little bored, you stop studying,
and surf the net. You then return and study for another 20 minutes, and then
get hungry and stop studying (because you have lots of time), and visit the
kitchen to eat some food.
This pattern of starting and stopping studying continues all night, and by the
time you reach 10pm, you feel drained (from your 4-5 hours of study), but
you havent really achieved all that much.
Does this sound familiar? Has this happened to you before?
This is a prime example of the impact of Parkinsons Law. While your actual
study in the above example may have only taken 2-3 hours if you were
working effectively and efficiently without procrastinating, it has taken you 4-5
hours (the whole night). Your work, or study, has expanded to fill the available
time you have given yourself. Additionally, because you have been
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procrastinating, you have not really studied effectively, or relaxed completely,

causing you to be drained.
How can you use Parkinsons Law to your advantage?
Give yourself less time to study!
We are going to repeat this as it is so important.
Give yourself less time to study.
Now you might be thinking LESS TIME!!! I already dont have enough time
to complete my study, homework, and prepare for exams across 10 units.
How will giving myself less time solve anything?
Giving yourself less time to study will create the following 3 benefits:
1) Reduce Impact of Parkinsons Law
By giving yourself less time to study, according to Parkinsons Law, your work
will now only expand to your smaller time frame.
For example; If you came home on a school night and instead of just sitting
down and studying for the whole night, you allocated yourself a strict 2 hour
study time period, and then scheduled in other fun/extra-curricular activities
after, even if you sit down to study and begin procrastinating, because you
had a new, 2 hour deadline, the work you have allocated will only expand to fill
this time. Hence, limiting your time is a great way to limit your procrastination!
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2) Increase Intensity and Urgency of Study

When you train for sport, and you are trying to improve your fitness, do you
run really slowly for a long time, or do you try and push yourself, and improve
your speed within shorter and shorter time limits?
Effective studying is just like effective training for sport. The higher intensity
you study at the more you will remember and recall. By reducing your time
frame for studying, you are forcing yourself to increase the intensity of your
study, and what you achieve in the time period.
3) Enjoy Leisure Time
Finally, by giving yourself specific and limited time period for study, you are
creating distinct periods of study, and leisure. This is very important, as often
what happens is you begin studying, and then procrastinate by watching TV,
or surfing the internet, but you are not really truly relaxing, because, in the
back of your mind you know that you really should be studying. The result is
that you end up having lots of dead time. Time that is not being used
productively to study or relax is dead time it has no purpose. By limiting your
study time, and scheduling in leisure time afterwards you will be able to
recharge and relax more effectively, which is necessary to ensure you do not
burn out across Year 12.

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HSC Success Strategy:

Reduce the time you give yourself to study. Focus on short, sharp
intense periods of study.

Reducing your study time will allow you to reduce procrastination and
minimize Parkinsons Law.

Parkinsons Law states that work expands to fill available time.

Reducing your study time period will also help you reduce dead time,
and relax more effectively preventing burn-out.

For more tools and strategies to help minimize your procrastination and increase
the intensity of your study during the lead up to your Trials and HSC Exams, get
your tickets today for our 1-day exclusive HSC Success Summit, on 5th July at
Epping.
www.geniusacademy.com.au

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CHAPTER 3: Boosting you memory

We do not remember days, we remember moments Cesare Pavese

The third thing we can do to move us ahead into academic success is to

remember what we have studied and learned effectively. We have found that this
is a great challenge many students face and is a very common problem even for
university students. So the good news is that you are not alone, in fact, chances
are that by the time you have read this chapter, you would have forgotten most of
what you have read in the last 2 chapters in detail already.
Now our memory works in a very specific way and if we train it to work effectively,
it can perform much better than we expect it to. So its important to train your mind
so that it works effectively for you. Before we look at practical ways to train our
mind to recall better, lets look at how our memory works very briefly.
How memory works
The way memory first works is like walking around your school for the first time,
remember that? When you first walked around the school, everything is new and
so its the first time your minds is taking in the information and are exposed to it.
Everything would be very unfamiliar, the classes, the office, the gym, the canteen
are all unfamiliar. On the second day though, you get the idea but may not still be
familiar with the layout of the school. Over time though, you get use to it and I bet
you could literally walk around your school blindfolded now. Why, because we
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have built enough connections in our minds for it to be second nature. Now our
memory works similarly, and so, information that is fed to the mind becomes more
and more familiar/ makes more connections and we remember more of it when we
have been exposed to it long enough. These connections in your brain are called
synaptic gaps. Without going too much in detail, they are basically formed when
one cell gets an electric impulse and forms a thread and makes a connection with
another. The more times the connection is made, the stronger the connection
becomes and the easier it becomes to travel that path again. So the key here is to
build strong connections.
There are 2 basic ways to do this:
1) Through repetition or rote memorisation while this is the most commonly
used method, smart learners realise that repetition can be useful if time is
on their side. Time however is often a luxury, and I am sure you may not
feel that way when studying in the lead up to your exams. This strategy of
rote learning is based on the theory that our minds function like computers
really however our minds work best when the information makes sense
and is understood.
2) Through the creation of relationships and connections this involves
making each connection make sense and linking ideas to current
information and experiences to understand the information better. These
connections create a web of knowledge that can be very useful when
recalling what was learned. This also means that you give it the best
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opportunity to make strong connections every time you commit to learning

or studying. A cognitive scientist and researcher Marvin Minsky once
quoted, If you understand something in only one way, then you dont really
understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends
on how weve connected it to all other things we know. Well-connected
representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things
from many perspectives until you find one that works
How to further boost your memory
1) Involve as many senses.
According to research,
We retain:

10% to what we read,

20% of what we hear
30% of what we see
50% of what we hear and see
70% of what we say
And a whopping 90% of what we say and do!

The idea here is to then do more than just read your notes. The key here is to
involve as many of your senses when studying. One way is to ask yourself which
way you actually prefer studying. If you feel that you are more a visual person and
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prefer to read your notes, make sure you spend time imagining the study notes
and see it playing out in your mind or diagramming what you study using pictures,
mind maps or basic models and pictures. This process is called visualisation. At
the summit, we actually show you how this is done is greater detail and share with
you studies that are done that show you how visualisation works. If you are more
an auditory person, then reading your notes aloud can sometimes help. What is
really interesting is that the more we involve our senses, the better chances our
minds have in building those connections.
2) Use Metaphors, Analogy and stories
Be creative in creating metaphors, analogies and stories that mean something to
you. This could be an event, a place or a person that you are familiar with. The
more these three things mean to you, the more memorable the facts and figures
will be. We will go in more detail in the summit and show you some real examples
of study notes that are really creative.

3) Apply memory techniques

Memory train/ pegging is a method that we go though in greater detail at the
summit to remember more complex and large amounts of facts or numbers.
Memory champions and really effective learners use these methods as it is good
for both long term and short term memory. We cant go through all memory
techniques here, but at the summit, we will be going through some key and very

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practical memory techniques that works and that are used by students who
achieved high ATAR scores.

HSC Success Strategy:

Focus on developing memory by creating connections and relationships

between ideas and experiences

When you study, make sure you make it as active as possible avoid
simply reading. Try to take notes, talk to someone, or teach a friend. This
will improve your memory retention.

Use visualization techniques including metaphors, analogies, stories, and

memory pegging to improve your recall.

For more tools and strategies to help you study smart, and improve your memory
retention and recall during the lead up to your Trials and HSC Exams, get your
tickets today for our 1-day exclusive HSC Success Summit, on 5th July at Epping.
www.geniusacademy.com.au

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CHAPTER 4: Acing Your Exams

Study while others are sleeping; work while others are loafing; prepare while others are
playing; and dream while others are wishing. ~ William A. Ward

Here are 5 very practical tips you can use to PREPARE for your exams.

1) Get a personal tutor/ coach to help with preparations

A wise teacher once said to me that A journey of a thousand miles begin
with one single step and having someone encourage one to put one foot in
front of the other. You have already started your journey and getting a
personal tutor or coach can be the biggest help in continuing to prepare for
your exams. The next few months is critical to doing well for your HSC and
it is also the easiest time to lose motivation to study. A tutor/ coach can also
be a source of inspiration and great help with keeping you accountable to
study and help in very subject specific questions.

2) Put yourself in as many exam situations as possible

Preparing for the HSC exam is like preparing for a grand final for a sport.
The more experienced a player or a team is in the environment, the better
they perform when the real event happens. It is vital to get familiar with the
time constraints of the exams and the format of the questions. Put yourself
through exam scenarios on a regular basis and make it more regular closer
to the actual exams. Make sure you set yourself time limits and stick to
them.
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3) Do as many past year papers as possible

Building on the last tip, doing past year paper is one of the best strategy to
prepare yourself to acing the exams. When you prepare for a grand final or
any competitive sport, the best teams are usually the ones that have
dedicated most amount of time in simulated or actual games. This helps the
team prepare mentally, physically and emotionally for the game. Similarly
with doing past year papers, you will get familiar with the style of questions
and the format of questions. Schedule so that you do at least 4 past year
papers, completed and checked before the HSC exams. This is where a
coach or tutor can come in handy.

4) Go through summarised and memorised notes

Notes are one of the most important things to get done to a very
satisfactory level before an exam. The reason for this is that you want to be
going through the notes on a high level a week or a few days before the
exams. If you have prepared good notes prior to your exams, you are half
way to acing your HSC. At the Summit, we actually show you how to
prepare your notes using various memory techniques that have been
proven to work and that successful students use to prepare their notes
before an exam. It is never too late to prepare well summarised notes and
notes that use memory techniques.

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5) Learn from successful students

We have found the key ingredient to acing an exam is to find out what
study techniques works for you personally and apply it. Success models
success. We have found that may smart students invest and spend time
studying and learning how other successful students do well. It really isnt
only about studying hard, it is about learning how to study smart and
studying harder! We encourage you to look at workshops and study skills
seminars that can be a really boost to help you in your last few weeks
leading up to your HSC. The more you equip yourself and learn how to best
study, the more advantage you have in applying the strategies to help you
get the edge.

HSC Success Strategy:

Get a coach or tutor to guide you and help you prepare for the HSC

Recreate exam conditions when studying study in timed conditions

Complete at least 4 past HSC Exam questions

Use summarized notes to memorize

Learn from successful students

For more tools and strategies to help you prepare for your Trials and HSC Exams,
get your tickets today for our 1-day exclusive HSC Success Summit, on 5th July at
Epping.
www.geniusacademy.com.au
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CHAPTER 5: Keep up the inspiration

If you love what you do, you will never work another day in your life. ~ Confucius

One of my favourite stories was told by my parents. A long time ago in the
Northern part of Southern China lived a very wise and elderly man. This wise man
was respected for his wisdom and knowledge and was known throughout the
village. People enjoyed coming to listen to him as they always walked away with
lessons in life and felt very inspired after they listened to his stories. One day the
village he lived in experienced an unusually dry season and their crops were all
dying. The villagers got lazy in digging holes for water and became very frustrated
in having to walk for miles to fetch water from a river. Everyone became very
demotivated and started to worry about the future of their village.

So the chief of the village called the people together to come listen to the wise
man. They wanted to know if the village had any hope of surviving this dry season.
He took out a bird from his clasped hand and asked the villagers whether the bird
was dead or alive. Everyone looked at each other and discussed it amongst
themselves and were confused. Some said dead, some alive and many others just
didnt know. The wise man then said, the fate of the bird depends on me. What
do you mean? said a young lady. Well, he said, if you say it is dead, then I let the
live bird go from my hands and hence it is alive. If you said it was alive, I would
squeeze it so hard that it would suffocate and die. The fate of the bird depends on

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me. Just like the destiny and future of your life depends on each of you. Your
future destiny is in your hands. The journey begins now for you, whether you are
fulfilled, happy doing what you love and loving what you do depends on what you
do now.

Remember that along your journey, you may or may not encounter people that
would discourage you from fulfilling your dreams because they may not know
better themselves or they want you to be like them. It is called tall poppy
syndrome. Just remember to keep your mind and heart on your dream. The Real
Challenge is to be your real and true self in a world that tries to encourage you to
be like everyone else. We wish you all the very best in your future destiny and
look forward to one day meeting you in person.

Till then, remember to Get Real, Be Real, Stay Real and keep up the inspiration.
What You Think, You Create
What You Feel, You Attract
What You Imagine, You Become
You can BE, DO and HAVE Anything You Set Your Heart and Mind To.
All the best for your HSC and beyond,
Rowan Kunz and Colin Lee

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