Five Before Five Podcast

Which of these college applicants sounds more interesting to you?

* Faisal: He is taking an unprecedented 6 AP courses his senior year, and his report card is a sea of A’s. He is a member of the debate team and VP of the science club. Last summer, he took a demanding (and expensive!) computer science course at Harvard Summer School. To keep up with his taxing schedule, his days are meticulously planned with very little downtime. From the time he gets home to when he goes to bed at 1am, he is knocking items off his to-do list like an academic robot. He just got his scores back from his fifth attempt at the SAT: 1570.

* Mariam: She became obsessed with beekeeping when she visited an apiary in Nova Scotia when she was in middle school and decided devote her Saturday mornings throughout high school to exploring this passion. After suffering hundreds of stings, she eventually transformed her backyard into a thriving haven for bees. Her venture into beekeeping blossomed into a small business, and Mariam sells her honey at the farmer’s market every Saturday. She even started a YouTube channel that has inspired countless girls to explore beekeeping. She has not pursued as many APs as her peers, has a few B’s on her transcript, earned a 1410 on the SAT, but is almost always in bed before 10pm.

While they are both strong candidates, I think we can all agree that Mariam is having a much more enjoyable and fulfilling high school career. During the 5-7 minutes that the admissions officers spend with each application, there’s a far greater chance that Mariam’s story will rise to the top.

And yet most families put academic grinders like Faisal on a pedestal and assume that students like Mariam don’t actually exist. No one could possibly have the time to pursue a passion so deeply given the demands of high school, right?

Wrong.

I have met countless Mariams over the years who have leveraged “Saturday morning projects” to college admissions success. One of my private clients created an NGO to virtually tutor Kashmiri children, another one raised thousands of dollars for Palestine by selling handmade hummus door to door, and a former student wrote poetry about growing up as a hijaabi in America that landed her on a TEDx stage.

These were all strong students, but none was at the top of their class. Their applications and essays, however, were dripping with personality, and each sailed into their top choice colleges.

Just today, I read about the “Newton of Gaza” who has figured out how to harness the wind to provide electricity for his family’s tent after their home was destroyed by the Israeli bombardment.

There are two questions we should ask ourselves at this point:

* How do these students come up with such out-of-the-box ideas?

* How do they possibly have time to pursue these interests while completing a demanding course load.

Today’s FBF endeavors to answer both questions.

1) Thinking Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel-prize winning behavioral economist, wrote an amazing book called Thinking Fast and Slow. In it, he introduces the concept of dual-process thinking. System 1 (“Fast”) is instinctual and emotional while System 2 (“Slow”) is more methodical and logical.

Most “good students” are so caught up in doing the things they have to do and cramming information into their brain that they never make time for System 1 thinking.

To tap into their creativity and intuition and generate innovative ideas, teens need to carve out time to give free reign to System 1, allowing it to freely associate and brainstorm.

Once a pool of ideas is generated, they can methodically sift through them using System 2 thinking to evaluate which of them is most feasible and has the deepest impact. This shift from free-flowing ideation to critical assessment is the key to generating and implementing out-of-the-box ideas.

2) The Power of Walking

The question that remains, of course, is how to tap into System 1 thinking.

One of the best ways to see the forest for the trees is to go for a walk in the forest, as Gail Goodwin reminds us. Humans are bipeds; walking is built into our operating system. Modern sedentary lifestyles, however, have prevented most teenagers from using their two feet for what they were designed for.

The single best way I have found to tap into creativity is to go out for a walk and let my brain roam freely. I will sometimes bring a journal or open my notes app and spend 15 minutes jotting down every thought that comes into my head as I walk through the woods.

At other times, I listen to podcasts and audiobooks, and often make connections between something I hear with some challenge I am facing in a different part of my life.

Before I began this Substack, I published a few articles on Medium, including “30 Minutes a Day: The Surprisingly Simple Way to Stand Out in the College Admissions Game,” where I share a few other ideas about how to discover ideas.

3) Prophetic Strategies to Expand Your Minutes into Hours

Even if they manage to make the time to come up with out-of-the-box ideas, how can teenagers find the time to explore them in depth while juggling a demanding course load?

The answer is that they need to unlock barakah in their study time.

There are two ways to do this: harnessing the power of prophetic teachings and learning to leverage the science of learning.

As for the former, one of the most important ways to unlock barakah in your time is to take advantage of the early morning hours by not sleeping after fajr salaat. The salaf used to call this sleep “Naum an-Nadamah” or “the remorseful sleep.” By using the early morning hours on weekdays for schoolwork and on weekends for pursuing their passion projects, students can find time that most kids don’t know exists.

Students should also study in a state of wudu, pray two rakaats before exams, and, perhaps most importantly of all, make du’a for barakah in their time and success in their studies. Look at this beautiful du’a of my good friend Hafiz Na’eel Cajee:

4) Active Recall

Most students have no real idea of how learning works and resort to incredibly inefficient techniques like excessive highlighting and re-reading the textbook.

I am currently teaching a course called “Barakah-Boosted Study Skills,” and the single concept that keeps coming up is active recall, Active Recall, ACTIVE RECALL!

Active recall means that we must constantly ask ourselves questions about what we are studying with the textbook closed. Students think that learning is about stuffing facts into our brains; in reality, it is what we can pull out that counts.

Google sheets, that humble program that many students may have never used, can become an amazing tool for active learning as Ali Abdaal teaches in this video. The core idea is that you put all the big picture questions about what you are learning in column A and the answers to these questions in column B… in white ink.

When you want to review, simply fire up the google sheet and ask yourself the questions in Column A and then check then hidden answers in column B. Color code the questions using traffic light signals indicating whether a question is easy, “ya’nee,” or hard. That allows you to review only the material that you are struggling with.

5) Use ChatGPT to Pour Kerosene on Your Learning

To show my students the power of the google sheets method, I entered in this prompt:

“Create a list of 10 critical thinking questions about the Mayflower compact that will help me understand the topic thoroughly. Provide just the questions, no commentary. I will ask for the answers in a separate prompt.”

Within seconds, I had created this google sheet that would, I dare say, help a student get a 5 on their AP US History exam with just a few minutes of studying and review.

Indeed, as I indicated in last week's FBF, students MUST learn to harness the power of AI to cut down on their study time and have more time for their moonshots and Saturday morning projects. Here are a few prompts you can try right now.

a. Role play

You are a world-class biology professor trained in the Socratic method and the Feynman technique. Ask me questions about [topic] and then evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of my answers.

b. Create tests

I have just finished studying [topic] and I want to see what I remembered. Ask me a series of questions to test my ability to actively recall what I learned. Ask both critical thinking and multiple-choice questions. Assess my answers and give me a grade.

c. Mnemonic creator

I know every [Taylor Swift lyric] but I can’t understand [the Krebs cycle]. Create a mnemonic by attaching this concept to TS lyrics.

d. Language partner

I want you to become a [humorous French waiter] and have a conversation with me knowing that I have only done two years of French. Gently correct my mistakes or suggest how I could have spoken more fluently.

I hope this week’s edition has taught you why Mariam’s style of high school excellence is more effective than Faisal’s at ensuring admissions success, how to start coming up with ideas for your out-of-the box passion projects, and how to unlock barakah in your time to actually implement your ideas.

If you found this article insightful, join the thousands of readers just like you on my Five Before College email list. Every Monday and Thursday I send out college and education tips interspersed with Islamic wisdom to help teenagers succeed in this world and the next.

And, oh yeah, please hit the like button as well!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hamzahhenshaw.substack.com

Five Before Five turns one this week! When I was contemplating starting my own online business, I researched how long it would take to gain traction on the internet. The answer I heard last January: two years. I was told that if you put out high quality information on the internet every week for two years, you will have built a tribe of 1000 true fans, and you’ll never have to rely on a paycheck to support yourself again.

Reading that and living it are two different things, of course. It was scary to leave the familiarity of a paycheck and jump into the unknown world of entrepreneurship. Getting this newsletter out every week requires discipline and determination (and a speaking gig in Cincinnati pushed my release date to Saturday this week).

I am just one year in, but alhamdulillah, things are starting to pick up steam. We just launched our latest online Masterclass, Barakah-Boosted Study Skills (BBSS), and it is our best-selling product yet. We sold 23 of the 25 seats, and the course has mashAllah brought in nearly $11K in revenue.

I imagine some readers may be contemplating starting their own online business or wondering how to launch a course. I know I have benefited tremendously from articles where entrepreneurs take you behind the scenes and share the anatomy of their launches.

Thus, for this week's FBF, I will share the playbook we used for our first 5-figure course.

1) Email List as the Backbone of the Business

In the influencer era, many people think that amassing a huge social media following is the key to monetization. While there is no doubt that social media can build brand awareness, the reality is if you build your empire based on the back of Insta, YouTube, Medium, or TikTok, it's a house upon the sand. You can be de-platformed and lose your entire audience overnight.

The key to building a sustainable business is remarkably simple: grow a high-quality email list. People have been predicting the death of email for decades, but the fact remains that email has the single highest ROI of any medium. When you build an email list, you own access to your customers that nobody can take away.

Of course, you must nurture your list and provide value; that's why I send a high-quality email with expert college admissions tips with an Islamic flavor every Monday & Thursday.

By frequently reaching out and, inshAllah, providing value, I want to go from an unwelcome pest to a welcome guest. Alhamdullilah, based on our open rate and click-throughs, we seem to be on the right track.

2) Webinars as Lead Magnets

The natural question that follows is how to build an email list. The most potent tool I have found is webinars.

In the lead-up to launching BBSS, I hosted 3 webinars:

* Barakah Secrets Series 1: Five Key Steps for Smarter Studying (390 registrants)

* Barakah Secrets Series 2: Insights from Three Academic All-Stars (366 registrants)

* Barakah Secrets Series 3: Learning How to Learn with Imam Zaid Shakir (276 registrants)

We had a combined 1032 registrants with more than 50% live attendance. These webinars grew my email list by nearly 40% to more than 2K subs. These are mostly high-quality leads of my exact target demographic: American Muslims with high school age children who are thinking about college.

The other benefit of webinars is they are an opportunity to sell your product. Roughly half of the course sales came directly from the webinars in which we explained the benefits of the class. I am not done with it yet, but the best book I have come across about how to structure webinars is Jason Fladlien’s One to Many.

3) WhatsApp as Distribution Platform

You have to know where your customer lives, and Muslims live on WhatsApp. Nearly every Muslim I know is in dozens of WhatsApp groups.

The key to WhatsApp marketing is you need your messages to look different than everything else. Most masjid events are quickly thrown together flyers that are often missing critical info.

There are formatting tricks (bold, italics, bullet points) that can make your messages visually appealing.

Most important of all, the content needs to be genuinely appealing, clearly highlighting the benefits event participants will take away.

I write, rewrite, and edit my WhatsApp messages, agonizing over every word. Once it’s ready, I send the message to all my groups roughly 3 days before the event. On the day of, I send out a short reminder message with a flyer and the registration link.

For this last round, I added a game-changing wrinkle by building a broadcast list of all my Muslim contacts on WhatsApp. Unlike group messages which often get lost in the daily deluge of posts, broadcast messages get delivered individually to everyone who has saved your name as a contact.

Zoom allows you to include a pixel to track where registrations are coming from. As you can see from this data from one webinar, our WhatsApp broadcasts were the most effective way to get the word out.

4) The Wisdom of Tiered Pricing

Once you've gotten as many people as possible into your event, you need to actually sell the class. This is probably the part of the process I'm least comfortable with and have the most room for improvement.

One change that I made for the latest class was the introduction of a tiered pricing model. We had 3 levels of the class:

* Do-it-Yourself ($447: live attendance at the class)

* Do-it-Together ($597: accountability partner, working session, instructor feedback on assignments)

* Do-it-One-on-One ($1097: all of the above plus weekly 30 min one-on-ones)

As I might have predicted, the middle tier was the most popular. But we sold 4 out of the 5 seats for the Do-It-One-on-One tier as well.

We also offered a pay-what-you-can price for Tier 1, which allowed students from Nigeria and Pakistan to attend as well as a 7th grade boy who is using his Eid money to pay his own way.

Overall, this 3-tiered pricing model worked well, and I anticipate using it in future launches.

5) Read, Read, Read

Far harder than launching a course is figuring out how to solve the most pressing problems for your target audience.

In this case, my wife and I decided to teach study skills with an Islamic twist. Academic success often comes at a major cost. The pursuit of top grades takes over the lives of many top students, sucking up the oxygen from other pursuits. Others lose motivation when they don’t see their studying pay off.

We wanted to teach students how they could blend Prophetic wisdom with modern science-backed study skills to unlock barakah in their studies that would allow them to get twice the results in half the time. Learning how to learn will help them work smarter, not harder, and win back time to pursue passion projects that are both more fun and more interesting to admissions officers.

To prepare for the class, we spent months reading books on the topic. Here are a few of the best:

1) Productive Muslim by Mohamed Faris

2) How to Be a High School Superstar by Cal Newport

3) Learning How to Learn by Barbara Oakley

4) Feel-Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal

5) How to Become a Straight-A Student by Cal Newport

6) Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter Brown et al.

To have a truly successful course launch, the most important ingredient is to design a truly beneficial course. Long before your first webinar, you need to put in the work by reading, researching, building, and constantly adding value.

May Allah put barakah in our students’ time and may He fulfill the amana they have entrusted us with. May He allow all parents to invest in building their children’s skills so they can thrive in this world and the next. Ameen.

Until next Friday, inshAllah.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hamzahhenshaw.substack.com

College admissions coaches like me don’t exist in most parts of the world.

In other countries, the university admissions process is straightforward and transparent. Here in the States, however, the process is opaque and confusing. Contradictory advice abounds, and it is easy to get buried by information overload.

Muslim families are faced with additional challenges. Even though their children are American born and bred, many Muslim parents did not attend college in the States and thus do not have a sophisticated understanding of the nuances of the American educational system.

Many Muslim families additionally struggle with the balancing act between preserving one's faith and identity and embracing the opportunities that higher education offers.

While many challenges of applying to college are faith agnostic, after working with hundreds of Muslim families over the last decade, I have seen the same missteps made again and again.

For this week’s FBF, I have broken away from my usual five point format and instead extracted the 11 most common “mistakes” I see Muslim families make during the college application process.

1) Insisting on living at home

One of the distinctive features of the college search for many Muslim families is the insistence that their children live at home during the college years. By restricting their applications solely to local institutions, these students significantly narrow their pool of potential colleges and inadvertently immerse themselves in highly competitive applicant pools.

I understand where they are coming from. College can be a very difficult place to maintain your Muslim identity and practice. Shaytaan has many arrows in his quiver that he deploys during the college years. For a student who has been in the Muslim “bubble” since kindergarten, the transition to a college campus can be disorienting. Depending on the child, staying home to protect your imaan may make sense.

That said, if I had lived at home while studying at Harvard, I would have halved the benefit of my time there. College is about much more than what you learn in the classroom. It is about discovering who you are at your core and building a lifelong network of friends and professional connections. At some point, we have to take the “training wheels” off of our children and let them develop the spiritual backbone to practice the deen when not under our watchful eyes.

2) Not visiting campuses

I am shocked by how haphazard the college search is for many Muslim families. They see some schools listed in US News and World Report, do a few Google searches, and then apply to 15-20 random schools.

The single best way to figure out if a college is right for you is to visit the campus, ideally when classes are in session. During spring break of my junior year, I went on an epic road trip visiting Middlebury, Princeton, Swarthmore, and Haverford with my father. It is one of the first things I remembered when he died last year.

This trip gave me real clarity about what I was looking for in a college. Many colleges have fly-in programs that allow you to visit campuses for free. They are opportunities to add depth to your search. Take advantage of them.

At the very least, be sure to attend the admitted student events at your top 2-3 schools before depositing. NEVER sign away four years of your life to a campus you have never seen in person.

3) Starting too late

Did you know that senior year is the LEAST important of the four years of high school when it comes to admissions decisions? And yet, many Muslim families don’t get serious about the application process until the second half of junior year.

Starting the college process too late is one of the single biggest mistakes that I see families make again and again.

Most students tread a path through high school that consists of haphazard wanderings with little planning. They dabble in many different courses, interests, and extracurriculars and are left scrambling to find a way to present colleges with a cohesive narrative. Getting expert advice during the early high school years can prove invaluable.

The principle of starting early is built into the name of my company, Five Before College. Students and families who start planning for college starting five years before college are infinitely better prepared.

4) Emphasizing resume virtues over eulogy virtues

Résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. Eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest, or faithful.

In admissions terms, the résumé virtues show up on your transcript and activities list in the form of APs and leadership positions, but the eulogy virtues can be found in your essays and recommendation letters.

Résumé virtues are much easier to teach and measure, and most students focus on developing them first. The tweak here is not to discount the importance of résumé virtues—your transcript is the single most important part of your application—but to FIRST develop a rock-solid moral core of eulogy virtues that will be your guiding light when making decisions throughout high school.

One way to achieve this. Every time you see your reflection in the mirror, make the du’a the Prophet (SAWS) recommended, “O Allah, just as you have beautified my body, similarly beautify my character.”

5) Focusing on prestige over fit

One of the biggest mistakes that Muslim families make is one that I was once guilty of myself: focusing on institutional prestige over fit.

My father passed on his addiction to elite education to me. When I first began helping Muslims with the college process, my slogan was that we prepare students for the “Akhira and the Ivy League.”

For some students, an Ivy League school is the perfect fit, but many others would be miserable there even if they managed to gain entrance. There are SO many wonderful, life-changing schools that I have discovered since becoming a college counselor. It is often better to be a “big fish in a small pond” at a school where you can truly excel than to base your decision purely on a set of rankings.

As a Muslim community we need to recognize and move beyond our elitist blind spot when it comes to college education. We need to stop letting status concerns pollute our perceptions of college diplomas and remember that we will not be judged on the Day of Judgement on the prestige of our degree or the number of zeroes in our bank balance. Attending in-state public universities, state colleges, or even community college often makes the most sense, and these paths should be respected.

6) Not researching Muslim campus life

College campuses vary wildly in the quality and depth of their services and support for Muslim students on campus. Some have full-time chaplains, halal food in all the dining halls, and a dynamic MSA. Others don't even have a proper musalla, and Muslims are left to fend for themselves during Ramadan.

Before committing to spend 4 years at a particular college, you should find out how many people attend jumma on campus, the size and structure of the MSA, the ease of access to halal food and local masjids, and whether they have single-sex or substance-free housing options.

Islamophobic incidents have soared since the conflict in Gaza, and some campuses are much more welcoming of Muslim students than others. My good friend Salman Khan runs Muslim Campus Life, an excellent resource for Muslims as they explore college.

7) Dismissing alternative paths

We must never lose sight that there are many pathways to success. Over time, I have come to believe college itself is not the right path for everyone. I reckon a good 20% of the students I have worked with would be much better served by going to trade school or pursuing a vocation.

By the age of 20, someone who has pursued a career as an electrician is already earning a good income. Once they join a union, they are in great shape financially and essentially have job security for life. Blue collar workers are able to get married early, build a significant nest egg, and do a job where success is tangible.

So many Muslim families try to force their child’s square peg into the round hole of college when other, non-academic paths make much more sense.

8) Applying for only the most competitive majors

Applying to college is somewhat of a game, and you need to understand how the game works to succeed. The laws of supply and demand are just as much in play in college admissions as they are in other parts of life.

When you apply to the most popular majors—biology, engineering, computer science—you are stacking the deck against yourself. If you have been coding since the womb, have won national physics competitions, or have spent summers pursuing competitive internships in a healthcare setting, then of course you have a decent shot of getting into one of these majors.

But if your interest in medicine or engineering is more of a vague desire with no coursework and extracurricular experience to support it or if you are only pursuing these things because your parents said you should, you would be much better off pursuing a less common major.

When people ask me to give their children a small piece of advice to help them stand out in college admissions, my simple answer is: “Be different. When they zig, you zag.”

9) Becoming a cook rather than a chef

In the culinary world, there's a critical distinction between being a chef and being a cook. A cook is someone who follows established recipes, relying on tried and tested methods without much room for innovation. A chef is someone who reasons from first principles, like a scientist in a kitchen, experimenting with raw ingredients to create something new and unique.

Most high school students adopt a “cook” mindset towards academic and personal development by looking for predefined formulas for success. While this might yield some short-term success, it's essential to shift your mindset to that of a “chef.”

Becoming a “chef” in high school is a lot like making an award-winning meal on Chopped. You are given a disparate group of “ingredients”—a love of pickleball, social justice, anime, and 14th century Moorish architecture–and are asked to create a cohesive whole. Initially stumped, you eventually organize a pickleball tournament to raise money for Palestinian refugees and create an anime-style YouTube video introducing your classmates to the palace at Al-Hambra.

These recipes could only exist in one cookbook: your own.

10) Focusing on the destination rather than the journey

Many families make the classic mistake of focusing on the destination rather than the journey. They are chasing after the shadow of the Ivy League or other top 20 schools. All their decisions are Machiavellian calculations about what will look best to their dream college.

High school life for these students can be downright miserable. They are weighed down under the tyranny of more—pursuing a grueling path of countless APs, endless extracurriculars, and constant pressure. They are following the same well-worn playbook that every other high school overachiever uses.

So what is the solution? Stop chasing the shadow of college and turn towards your inner light. Stop focusing on the destination, namely a specific admissions outcome, and start focusing on the high school journey.

If you focus on pursuing your authentic intellectual passions, exploring your idiosyncratic quirks, and drinking in the noor of Islam, a happy byproduct will be that colleges will be running after you and begging for you to enroll.

11) Focusing too heavily on academics

Muslim students and parents fundamentally misunderstand the role of grades in college admissions. Grades or board scores might open the door to the top 20 schools, but they alone will NEVER push you through it. Every year Harvard and Yale gleefully boast about how many high school valedictorians and students with 1600s on their SATs they have rejected.

Many immigrant parents are relentless in browbeating their children about grades. This obsession clips their children’s wings and prevents them from developing in other categories that are heavily weighted in “holistic” admissions decisions.

As I like to remind families—“all work and no play make Jalal a dull applicant.”

Until next Friday…

As always, if you made it to the end and found this article beneficial, please click the heart button to show me some love. And I’d love to hear in the comments about any other mistakes you see families making in the admissions process.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hamzahhenshaw.substack.com

This week, I am trying something new: an audio version of the article, read by me. If you like this new feature, please let me know in the comments.

Most of us are drowning in procrastination. It steals our dreams.

Procrastination is delayed goals. It’s dying with a whole lot of wisdom inside of you that never gets released. It’s a silent thief of time leaving behind unrealized potential.

I have been a serial procrastinator for as long as I can remember. Nowhere was this more true than in the realm of writing.

In college, I had a policy: I would not start any paper 10-pages or fewer until midnight the night before it was due. By 8AM I usually had a great essay, but my gas tank was empty. This technique meant that writing activated my fight or flight response, and for years I had been fleeing.

Tim Ferris once said that “your superpower is very often right next to your biggest wound.” Writing is probably my single greatest creative gift, but years of procrastinating had turned it into a festering wound that I avoided at all costs.

Over the past 15 months, however, I have had a major breakthrough. In November 2022, I wrote roughly 30,000 words in my 30 College Essays in 30 Days series. I have published this longform Substack every Friday for the past 50 weeks.

All of this writing helped give me the courage to make other, even bigger changes, such as leaving my job and beginning my own business.

I am about to launch a class called “Barakah-Boosted Study Skills” in which my wife and I translate our insights and research about procrastination and productivity into language and activities that teenagers can use to achieve better results in less time by unlocking the hidden power of barakah.

In today’s edition of Five Before Five, I unveil five “slingshot strategies” I have used to land decisive blows against the Goliath of procrastination.

1. Ready-Fire-Aim

Getting started is the hardest part of any creative endeavor. Blank page syndrome or the feeling of paralysis when beginning a new piece, has aborted countless ideas before they ever saw the light of day.

Writers suffer from blank page syndrome because they are overwhelmed by the pressure to create something great. They have set unreasonably high expectations for themselves and are afraid that they won’t live up to past successes. This fear spirals into anxiety and self-doubt and inevitably leads back to the blinking cursor on a new document.  

One way to short circuit blank page syndrome is to adopt the ready-fire-aim paradigm. Rather than trying to get all your ducks in a row and plan the perfect outline, just begin to write. Let the Ouija board of inspiration take over your pen and see where it leads.

Once you have “fired” and gotten some words on a page, you can better identify your target and refine your “aim” to achieve your desired outcome.

2. Leverage the Inverse of Parkinson’s Law

Many people need the pressure of a deadline to do their best work. Coffee-fueled all-nighters at the Science Center at Harvard were how I got my term papers done. When a deadline is looming, you have no choice but to get down to work—you have sucked all the oxygen away from the procrastination demon.

I used to hate the idea of letting a piece of writing take me weeks when I knew it could be done in a few painful hours if I created sufficient deadline pressure.

What I was really doing was leveraging the inverse of Parkinson’s Law. The law itself, first coined by British historian Cyril Parkinson in 1955, states that “work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” If you give yourself 8 hours to write a Substack, it’s going to take you 8 hours.

The inverse of Parkinson’s law would state “work contracts to fit into the time we allot for it.” This is a powerful concept and one that can greatly improve our productivity.

There are two tricks to leveraging the inverse of Parkinson’s Law:

* Give yourself an internal deadline with teeth. I have created a “personal operating system” that I will publish this Substack every Friday and will send a high-quality email to my Five Before College list every Monday & Thursday. From next week, I plan to add a LinkedIn post every Wednesday.   

* Get busy. There is a paradox that the busier someone is the more time they seem to have to get things done. Humans are remarkable problem solvers. If you paint yourself into a corner, you’ll find a way out.

3. Stop Gilding the Lily

This phrase, coined by Shakespeare in King John, refers to the act of spoiling something that is already beautiful or perfect by trying to improve it.

Many writers become too precious with their work. They bang out a great draft in a burst of productivity, but then fiddle with it endlessly, often adding ornamentation to a piece that was already beautiful in its own right.

Some of the best writing advice I have gotten is “stop polishing, start publishing.”

Editing is, of course, critical to good writing, but it should almost always consist of subtraction, not addition. Chip away all the purple prose and glitzy adverbs until the lily can shine.

4. Steal Like an Artist

Austin Kleon, author of the amazing Show Your Work, begins his 2012 NYTimes bestseller Steal Like an Artist, with a quote from T. S. Eliot:

One of the things that holds writers back is the need to be “original.” They feel pressured to come up with novel ideas that no one has ever thought before. The reality is that all creative work builds on what came before.

Andre Gide once said, “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, it needs to be said again.”

I am part of a Masterclass with internet writing masters Todd Brison and Tim Denning. Their initial free webinar featured a compelling slide that ultimately drew me into their world:

Our ideas have a genealogy—everything is derivative. Every new idea is just a mashup or remix of previous ideas. What I often find myself doing is filtering “western” productivity and business ideas through the lens of Islam to produce something with my own unique flavor.

5. Tap into the Barakah of the Early Morning

One of the best ways to overcome procrastination is to “eat the frog,” the single hardest thing that you have been dreading, first thing in the morning.

The Prophet (SAWS) made a special prayer for the early part of the day:

As Muslims we are encouraged to wake up in the last third of the night and pray tahajjud. At the very least, we are obligated to get up for fajr, the pre-dawn prayer.

One of my best pieces of advice to anyone struggling with procrastination is to write first thing in the morning. Whether it is a gratitude journal, “morning pages,” or an actual article for publication, try to find yourself with pen in hand or fingers on keyboard at sunrise.

If you made it to the end and found this article insightful, please warm my writer soul by clicking the heart button. And if you or anyone you know might be interested in our Barakah-Boosted Study Skills class, you can fill out this form to book a free 15-minute meeting with me to see if the course is right for you.

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Thanks for reading Five Before Five! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hamzahhenshaw.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hamzahhenshaw.substack.com

Thanks for reading Five Before Five! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hamzahhenshaw.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hamzahhenshaw.substack.com

Thank you for listening to Five Before Five. This post is public so feel free to share it.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit hamzahhenshaw.substack.com