Ditching Textbooks

How do you save a couple thousand dollars in college? Don’t buy textbooks.

I stumbled on this when I took a Biology class. For the first test, I took notes in class and studied and read the book. After the test, I looked over the material on the exam. My notes covered almost all of it. I got a B+.

For the next test, I didn’t even open my textbook. Instead, I studied my notes. I had a lot less material to cover, since my notes were smaller than the corresponding chapters in the book. As a result, I had more time to learn what really mattered for the test. Overall, since I didn’t trudge through the book, I cut two-thirds of my study time. On that test, I got an A.

So began the greatest textbook ditch in the history of… Marshall. Eventually (maybe in a month or two), I’ll write a quick guide covering all the ins and outs of pulling off this move. It’ll have less than 30 pages in it. And of course you won’t have to pay for it. That would seem to defeat the purpose.

Until then, the information I’ve already given is enough to get you started. I learned the rest on my own. The real breakthrough occurred when I discovered I could ditch the textbooks and thrive, not just survive, in college doing it.

Until Roger Bannister on May 6, 1954, no one had run a mile in under four minutes. Forty-six days later, though, John Landy broke the record again.

Ditching textbooks isn’t nearly as hard as running a four-minute mile. Sometimes it takes someone else to prove it’s possible.