What Did They Read?

How to Become a Straight-A Student

Cal Newport

Mentions4 mentions
First heard3 August 2026
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Episodes about this book

4 episodes

Kids Should *Not* Use Chatbots! (You Should Be Wary, Too…)

Deep Questions with Cal Newport, 28 September 2026. The author is the guest. The book comes up at 56 min 17 sec in. It comes up in passing.

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Rethinking the Deep Life Stack (Again!) | Monday Advice

Deep Questions with Cal Newport, 31 August 2026. The author is the guest. The book comes up at 1 hr 19 min in. It comes up in passing.

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How to Build a Cognitive Training Plan | Monday Advice

Deep Questions with Cal Newport, 24 August 2026. The author is the guest. The book comes up at 11 min 22 sec in.

While discussing Theodore Roosevelt's approach to intense concentration, Cal Newport briefly references his older book How to Become a Straight-A Student, citing the formula it contains — "Total work produced equals time spent times intensity of focus" — as the underlying principle behind Roosevelt's efficiency.

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Classic Episode: How Do I Learn Hard Things? | Monday Advice

Deep Questions with Cal Newport, 3 August 2026. The author is the guest. The book comes up at 33 min 10 sec in.

Cal Newport promotes his own student advice book while arguing that books have better incentive structures than YouTube because their success depends on actually working for readers. He describes the book's practical, brass-tacks coverage of academic tasks—learning from textbooks, writing papers, studying for math exams—and says sales are approaching 250,000 copies entirely via word of mouth with no major promotion or social-media footprint.

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All summaries are AI generated based on the original transcript.