6 High Performance Habits of Successful Students

I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot recently.

What’s the difference between a high-performance student and a high-performance person?

By high-performance person, I mean someone who has already graduated and is making a living doing whatever they’re doing, but they’re EXTREMELY successful at it.

They’re likely incredibly wealthy, at the top of their game in their industry, and have their life in check. You can see they’re having a massive positive impact and, as a result, achieving massive success.

It’s quite a controversial subject – just because someone is getting good grades and is successful at school and university, are those skills transferable? Just because someone achieved really high grades at university, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee them success in the real world, right?

I’m going to go through 6 high-performance habits of successful students that ALSO translate to high-performance habits in the real world. If you’re doing these things at school or university, then there’s a good chance – if you continue carrying out these habits regularly – that you’re going to be successful after you graduate too.

Study to Learn, Not for the Exam

High-performance students are not just studying because they want to memorize just enough information to do well in the exam. They are studying because they genuinely want to learn.

They are hungry for knowledge.

This is equally true for people who are incredibly successful in the ‘real world.’ It’s just a different form of education. At university, you’re studying a formal education with a set curriculum and exams, whereas in the real world, you’re studying an informal education with no set curriculum.

For example, I studied economics and finance at university. I studied economics because I’m interested in the world economy, the trade war between the US and China, global inequality and unequal economic development. I’m also interested in money – in stocks and shares, in personal finance, in how corporates handle and manage their money.

Throughout my economics and finance degree, I was always relating what I was learning at university to the real world. And that leads me nicely onto habit number 2.

Keep up to Date With Current Affairs

I’ve never met a single person who is incredibly successful AND doesn’t know what’s going on around the world. They all know vast amounts of knowledge in their industry, but they also know about global conflicts and current events, like the latest spending plans set out by President Biden.

Every single morning for the last 6 or 7 years, the first thing I do after my alarm goes off is open the BBC news app on my phone to update myself with what’s going on around the world.

The benefits I find in reading the news – just for 10 minutes in a morning – is that it keeps me up to date with current affairs and gives me more perspective. There’s more going on around the world than what I’m seeing in my own life.

It was particularly beneficial for me as someone who studied for an Economics degree because it provides news about countries’ economic situations and trade wars going on around the world. A lot of the theory I was learning at university, I could apply in real life and almost see things play out with real countries and real economies.

Invest in Themselves

High-performance students are not afraid to invest in themselves – to spend money or other resources to build their skillset. They know that one of the biggest investments they can make is in themselves.

That’s why I created Luminous Academy, where I, along with other experts in the fields of education, health, and neuroscience, guide you on how to achieve higher grades with less stress.

In a nutshell, we enable you to achieve one grade higher with expert holistic support in 90 days. We supplement traditional education with a 3-tier holistic approach to help you form sustainable study habits and avoid burnout.

We limit the cohorts to just 20 students because we want you to have one-on-one time with each of our experts. You’ll receive personalized plans to power your performance with smart study schedules that help organize workload, tackle procrastination and manage stress.

If you are interested in enrolling, you can click the button at the top of this page to find out more information.

I love talking to high-performance students. I can see the inspiration, motivation, and drive they have in their voices – it really is incredible. It’s incredibly inspiring for me just to talk to them.

They’re not afraid to invest in themselves because they know that the more they invest, the more they buy courses, read books, hire a tutor or study coach, and go to networking events, the closer they move toward achieving their goals.

Calculated Risks

High-performance students take risks. Just like in the real world, in order to achieve massive success, you can’t achieve that by staying in your comfort zone.

For example, I’ve never been good at maths. Throughout high school, maths was one of my weakest subjects. But there was one problem: I wanted to study Economics and Finance, which was extremely maths intensive.

I could have chosen a different degree like Business Administration or Marketing or something that involved less maths. Instead, I chose to bite the bullet, take the risk, and study Economics and Finance anyway – but double down on my weakness – double down on the maths.

Economics was also a far more demanding and intensive course compared with other subjects like Business and Marketing. The percentage of people that graduated with a 4.0 GPA in Economics was less than 5%, whereas the 4.0 GPA rate in Business and Marketing courses was over 10%.

I could have gone the easier route in so many ways – but I chose not to. And I’m so glad I didn’t. I genuinely believe I have grown so much more as a person BECAUSE my university course was so difficult. If it was easy – there’s no growth in that.

Self-Care

High-performance students look after themselves. They get 7 to 8 hours of sleep a night, they eat healthily, they exercise regularly, they socialize regularly, and they prioritize their mental and physical health above everything.

If their studying is prioritized in second place, their health comes in first place.

This is because they’re looking at the big picture. They have long-term goals they want to achieve. They’re not living like animals, living every day as it comes and not thinking about or preparing or building themselves up for the future.

They know that they need to be healthy in order to achieve their goals. They know that they need to be healthy to achieve incredible success in the long term.

Everyone can pull an all-nighter, everyone can cram in their revision the night before an exam, but for how long? How long can they keep doing that until they start getting burned out?

A high-performance student makes sure that their life is balanced. They prioritize their studying and study INTENSELY when it IS time to study, which gives them time to do extra things like hang out with friends and network and exercise – because they know that for their mental and physical health – these things are essential.

Visualization

Visualization is an incredibly powerful success strategy, and it’s used by some of the most successful businesspeople, millionaires, billionaires, world leaders, and Olympic athletes.

Take an Olympic runner as an example. Right before a race, when there are thousands, or even millions of people staring at them, they know that the worst thing they can do is to visualize all the things that could possibly go wrong.

Well-trained athletes know not to visualize the failures because imagining poor performance increases the likelihood that the runner will actually do those things during the race.

Instead, they visualize their goals right before the race. They visualize themselves winning the race, they visualize themselves smashing the world record, and by focusing on the positives, that outcome is far more likely to happen.

Throughout university, I was doing this without even realizing it. I was visualizing opening the letter with my grades on it and seeing that 4.0 GPA; there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that THAT wouldn’t happen.

At NO point in the 3 years studying for my degree did I think that I WASN’T going to achieve my main goal of achieving a 4.0 GPA.

Dan Pena, an American businessman who made his success in the oil industry in the 80s, talks quite a lot about visualization. When he was young, he’d go into luxury car dealerships like Ferrari and Rolls Royce and sit in the cars and visualize himself buying them in the future when he becomes successful.

He called this process “smelling the leather” because when he was visualizing buying the luxury vehicles, he could literally smell the brand-new leather.

Grant Cardone did a similar thing, where he would go to luxury estates and find massive mansions that were for sale and pretend that he was going to buy them. Even though at the time he was – in his words poor and had no money – it was the idea of visualizing something so deeply that you match your actions with that visualization, and you make it happen.

A lot of being a high-performance person is just self-belief. You really need to vehemently believe that you can achieve whatever you’re aiming for.

If you genuinely believe – I mean if you REALLY believe that you can graduate in the top 1% of your class, and you study towards it, but not only towards that goal, but you study BEYOND it, you study on a level that is HIGHER that is BEYOND your goal, then there’s no doubt that you’ll achieve it.

If you want to become a high-performance student and achieve the top grades in your class, or even if you just want to level up your studying and achieve the next grade up, at Luminous Academy, we help you do exactly that. You can find out more information by clicking the button at the top of this page.