When studying, it’s important to set goals for yourself that you can look forward to achieving.
You are shooting for 80 hours of SAT prep before you start to see reliable score improvements.
Set goals and make sure you believe that you can achieve them.
Your goals should be meaningful, challenging, and within your reach.
This is Step 8 of Alyssa the SAT Expert’s 9 Steps to Forming an SAT Prep Habit series. Read the rest.

Step 8: Set goals for yourself - so that you have an achievement you look forward to celebrating!

When I was an opera singer, if I had an audition, everything I did took on a lot more significance; practicing meant a measurable outcome - a good audition and, hopefully, work would follow. So it wasn’t hard to motivate myself to practice - in fact, I was often motivated by an acute sense of fear which, while likely quite unhealthy, was an excellent engineer of work ethic.

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If I didn’t have an audition coming up, though, it was really hard to motivate myself to practice and really easy to skip a day, even though I knew that long term, daily practice was the best thing for me. Because if I knew I was not going to have an audition anytime soon, did it matter if I practiced that day? There was always something more fun to do than lock myself in a room, away from everyone else, and try to put more “uh” in my “ee” vowel for 90 minutes. Especially when the neighbor would hammer on the wall for 45 minutes straight. (That’s a different, but true, story about living in Germany as an opera singer).

So there’s an easy corollary to the SAT: It’s easy to motivate yourself to study for the SAT when you have one coming up later this month. The problem is that, similarly to studying opera, you won’t accomplish much in a few weeks. It takes years of practice for opera singing - and frequently from 6 months to a year for SAT prep - to really show significant improvement.

Remember that with SAT prep, you are shooting for 80 hours before you start to see reliable improvements of over 100 points (on average).

And getting to 80 hours in a month is a lot - that’s almost 3 hours/day, with no days off. And don’t forget - you’ll also need to make time to take practice tests.

If you give yourself a goal to achieve - something that is both a stretch for you and you have confidence that, if you DO work hard, you CAN achieve it - you will be much more excited about working towards it. That motivates you to sit down every day. That motivates you to power through when you don’t feel like putting in the effort, or when you’ve just gotten a bunch of problems wrong.

This, of course, rests on the foundation of two things:

You need a goal to achieve that is truly within your reach.
You need to honestly believe that your study has the potential to improve you.

You would be shocked out of your socks at the number of people who do a thing that they don’t believe in.

Sometimes it’s a parent that pushes a child particularly hard out of a combination of fear and love, but I think most of the time, students just haven’t stopped to consider WHETHER they can achieve a goal - or WHETHER there will be a payoff. They just sort of assume that they have to do this thing because they’re being told to. And so they step through the process, but without commitment, which means without a sense of internal drive and responsibility. It’s not our kids’ faults - they are used to being told to do things, and just having to do them. They don’t have to question WHY they’re doing schoolwork on the daily, so why would they dig deep about “WHY I’m doing this” with SAT prep?

I think a lot of times the key is to have an honest conversation with yourself about whether or not you think you’re capable of improvement and, if you don’t think you are, why not. If you think another method will work but not this one, talk to the person who is giving you the method and see if they will [a] switch or [b] if they can compellingly argue that they’ve thought of something you haven’t. Everyone is able to improve with hard work, so if you don’t think you can improve, you should solve that problem before you proceed with SAT prep.

So what’s the big takeaway from this? Always have something to work towards in your SAT prep, and keep making progress towards that goal every day. Make sure that you believe you can achieve the goal you’ve set for yourself.

Sometimes that means making really small goals. As an opera singer, if I didn’t have an audition, I needed to have something to strive for - sometimes I would schedule a coaching with someone to force myself to prepare an aria, or invite another singer to come to one of my lessons.

Make that for yourself with SAT prep - maybe it’s:

making a date to go head-to-head with a friend on hard math problems
trying to do your challenge section on Khan Academy, and get none wrong for 10 minutes straight - where you reset the timer every time you get one wrong
trying to set a speed+accuracy record for the easy math problems or the most nearly means problems on the reading section

Whatever is meaningful to you - something that is both challenging and within your reach - is what your goal should be.

And don’t forget to be proud of yourself!

We talk about the importance of measuring goals and setting egg timers and measuring process and progress, but don’t forget that it’s important for you to feel like this is more than just grinding work. If you’re working hard, you have the right to celebrate that - a celebration of your success.

And find little reasons to be proud of yourself - it’s about progress, not achievement. You deserve to be proud of yourself for working so hard. You deserve to be made much of. I’m asking you to do something that’s hard; know that it is hard and that if you’re doing it, you should be proud of doing something challenging.

Find someone in your life, besides just your accountability buddy, who is your cheerleader.

Maybe it’s your grandma or your mom who is really proud of you for all your hard work. Surround yourself with people who are proud of you for working hard, because hard work is really the only thing that matters - just ask Carol Dweck.