Every single day in life each of the 7 BILLION humans on the planet face a choice. The choice to improve quality of life or the choice to not do anything seems simple, but what about the choice to study or play video games? Not as simple anymore! This choice repeats itself throughout everyone's day, sneaking around and taking different forms. Should you sleep in Spanish class, especially if there's nothing graded anyway? Why study for that math test if it's probably easy? These kind of questions are common in school, and that's why people fall off of the right path.
    

Imagine this: you are a student with perfect grades, who studies and does all the work, but when you come to school every day you see others sleeping, ignoring the teacher's notes, and skimping on homework. They all attempt to cheat at the tests (unfortunately I witness this firsthand too much), and may occasionally succeed, but learn nothing! Whether or not they succeed doesn't matter though; when everyone else is sleeping you will either sleep too or feel isolated.  You may start sleeping in class, which makes homework harder to do. Then you realize that if you don't need in class, you can just not do it; you're doing fine on tests anyway right? All of a sudden a test comes and you don't know the material. Combined with the points lost from sleeping and not working, this caps your grade for the class at a B, even if you stay on track after this, no matter how hard you work.
    

This is just one of the numerous reasons why many people in school lose points from their GPA (basically the average of your grades); the material itself isn't very difficult besides for a little rote memorization most of the time, but laziness gets in the way of success.
    

The good news is with proper balancing of routine this issue can be fixed very easily! Some people attempt to do one large cram session to improve grades, but this is scientifically proven not to work as well. According to a UCLA(a world renowned university) cramming that causes loss of sleep will not help on that test as much as you hope it will! In the study they followed for 14 days, students reported lower academic achievement on days with more study hours, likely because of less Uj sleep.

“ ‘No one is suggesting that students shouldn't study,’ said Fuligni, the study's senior author. "But an adequate amount of sleep is also critical for academic success. These results are consistent with emerging research suggesting that sleep deprivation impedes learning."
  

So what does this mean? Should students lower study time for better results? Not exactly; there is a better way. With a balanced plan to study for say 30 minutes a day, the need for late night cram sessions is eliminated! Students knowing that they never have to cram to get good grades leads to a lot lower stress levels, more sleep, and even higher test scores if the studying is performed correctly.
    

This guide is intended to give students (at any level of school, or even unchallenged adults) a structured plan to improve their life slowly, with a focus on the improvement of GPA(high school grade point average- more on this soon). The process will not be immediate, but as soon as the habits begin to appear you will feel the differences. Contrary to popular belief, the hardest part is not starting but coming back, day after day, until it becomes a habit; that's not the end though, because if you continue those habits until they become a part of you you will have successfully changed your life forever.
    

How long will it take for the methods to work? This depends on how hard you are willing to work, how much you will keep coming back no matter how hard it is. The honest answer though is that it won’t ever end; after all, success is addicting and you won’t want it to end! Eventually the tough grind will become fun, and a solid part of your life that you would feel wrong leaving. I am assuming that because you are in high school you probably hope to live a long life; if you didn’t then you would have tried to use your time better by now! This means that you have a lot of time in your life to improve, and after an initial few months of challenges the rest of it becomes an easy grind!

One example I believe many people will know is the game Skyrim. The game, for those who don't know, is one of the main RPG games out there. The game is practically endless, and it continues evolving as your character does, through many quests and fights etc. The game is insanely entertaining, and some people spend weeks playing(I once saw a review that had a steam tag saying 4000 hours played!). But behind the monster success of the game, what kept players coming back? The game offered no real benefits to them, yet they dedicated a lot of their life to it! The game has a heavy focus on grinding; do more quests, get more gold, buy more items, go on harder quests. It may have been time consuming  and challenging, but the constant stream of new challenges made it entertaining, and the satisfaction of defeating a boss or getting an item rewarded kept a player motivated to keep playing!
   

Now, you may be wondering why I am going on about a video game in an article about life improvements. Games are fun and relaxed, while making improvements has to be hard right? What if you took the principles that made Skyrim and many other megahit games successful and applied it to your own life? Imagine a slightly revised version of the aforementioned cycle; Study hard, get a good grade on a test, reward yourself, and go onto a harder subject? Still sounds boring right, it is studying after all? But the fun of the game isn’t derived from the meaningless grinding and grunt fights(studying), or even the boss fights(tests); the fun is derived from the feeling of success afterwards, the rewards you give yourself, the benefits(think a new set of armor)!  If you harness the power of habits, motivation, rewards, and steady improvement the path to a higher GPA can become clear! 

For now take this general idea, and keep it in mind that soon this will all just feel like another video game- but this time you are the main character! If you keep the ball rolling, soon rewards will come, but this time in real life!

Schoolwork and videogames are great, but just those 2 items would still leave a gaping hole in a persons life; fitness! Without a solid body the mind has a harder time working, and video game playing for too long can become dangerous(people have died of blood clots for playing video games for long stretches of time- think 20 hours straight!). To fix this, just imagine a cycle of exercise similar to the ones above:

You train with a daily workout, then get stronger over time. Use that built up stregnth to fight a 'boss' by learning a new skill(clap pushups for example) then reap the larger benefits by training the new skill! After that, repeat from the daily workout grind!

Notice how for each of these cycles(school, video games, and exercise) , they will become harder at higher levels(harder classes, harder boss fights, and harder workouts!); that's part of the fun! Challenges become tasks you overcame, and the harder it is at the time, the more fun it is to look back on it! Right now it may seem like a lot of work, and it will not become easy quickly. The work will be worth it though. Imagine the characters in an RPG game- they aren't in the game because they do nothing- they are their because you can do things with them! Now think- what if you were the RPG player, sitting in 3rd person, controlling your body- would you want your life to be average or amazing. Everyone wants amazing, but few people put in the needed work. 

As a motivator, imagine that there are always competitors training harder than you to get the goal you are aiming for! Train as if that person was side by side with you, competing on how well you can understand if the goal is a test score! How much you can lift if you are bodybuilding! How high your high score can go if you are playing a video game!  There is always competition, and the only thing stopping you from being the winner is hard work, and the only thing between you and hard work is motivation- so if you can automate your system with habits and rewards to bypass motivation, you are straight on the path to victory, in whatever form it may come.
It is important to emphasize the importance of not rushing through the cycle in hopes of ‘leveling up’ sooner. The most important phase to spend time in is phase 1, because that phase is where you set up all the success of the future phases. Think about this; how would someone get better at pushups? The answer is clearly by training push ups! Now what about writing, how would someone improve at that? Again, you just need to write. In skyrim, how would you level up your spells? By using them! The common trend for almost everything in life is that the more you move out of your comfort zone when training the better it will get fixed.

A final example is the SAT test. Some people prepare by studying what is on the test. Others, the ones who have a better chance at doing super well, are the ones who don’t just study what is on the test; they study what is on the test that they don’t know yet. It’s about attacking the gaps in your ability where you want improvement, so you don’t spend study time on things that are already clear to you for the sole sake of avoiding topics that look scary. It should be topics that you look at and don’t understand, so when you finally do get it you can be sure that the time invested in learning was spent actually expanding your knowledge, instead of just sitting and reviewing concepts you are comfortable with.

Now that a few of the theories about how this will work are out there, take (small) action; start by rewarding yourself for things you already do. That is it for now! Did your homework for Science? Take a 10 minute(make sure to set good and realistic limits to these rewards) break before math! The second action that will be vital to your progress is to read a little of this book every day. Not much is required daily, just set aside 5 minutes. There are people who work 16-18 hour workdays, and get very little sleep! There are people undergoing insanely harsh military training, there are people up all night studying. Compared to the hardest working people in the world, the things us normal people do seem easy- after all, if they can workout for hours at a time, you can start with a few minutes of reading a book every once in awhile!

Why put in a little everyday? Would a one hour study session be more productive because it is harder? Let's do some math (ugh, don't worry, i’ll do it for you): if you don’t study, and cram for a test you may get to spend 2-3 hours on studying the night before the test, and the material will not have time to sink. While better than nothing, it’s harder to get a good grade(depending on the test difficulty) with that method. On the other side, a smarter student will be studying 30 minutes a day, each day, for the week before. This would remove the pressure and pain of a cram session, while still getting an extra 30 minutes of studying compared to a 3 hour cram! The material will also stay in memory easier due to repetition- the more you see/do something the easier it is to recall it offhand(repetition techniques allow memory to be stronger, and improve memory retention). If you spend these 30 minutes filling in content gaps, and reviewing once you know it all, you will know and be able to recall easily everything you need to for the test! Some people have trouble being consistent, but that can be fixed by using rewards- give yourself a one hour nap after a focused study session, it will improve memory retention and be a great motivator to work hard the next day!The most important part though: DO NOT forget to reward yourself. If you enjoy it, and it helps you, their is a higher chance you will go back and do it again the next day!
Thank you for reading, and good luck taking the very first steps on this journey of transformation!
 

Key points to take away from this article:
-It will not be easy to improve
-It will be worth it to improve
-There are ways to make this improvement of life easier and more fun
-To start, begin to reward yourself for good things you already have been doing!