What we already know:
- Admissions officers want to admit a rich, diverse group of students who come together like an ecosystem, not clones of the same type of person.
What is the danger of focusing all your energy on being better than anyone else?
For starters, you might not figure out who you really are (and where you would fit in this freshman class ecosystem).
You also might not learn how to go about making the world a better place after you earn that degree.
You won’t make these mistakes after reading this guide, but plenty of your classmates will be hyper-stressed and committed to doing whatever it takes to show they work harder and are smarter than everyone else.
They will sacrifice their sleep, fun, friends, and even their sanity to win the most awards and get the top test scores.
Often, they will look online to see what students who have gotten into prestigious schools have done. If they can copy someone else’s successful resume and actions, then they should be able to get in too, right?
And ultimately, because they are filtering absolutely every decision they make through the filter of “what is most impressive to an admissions officer,” they will have no space or time to think about what matters most to them.
In fact, they probably won’t stop to think about the fact that these impressive successful applicants achieved their impressive resumes because their daily activities were chosen based on core values rather than a subjective “impressiveness scale.”
So, your ambitious peers who never read this guide will be trying to use willpower and self-discipline to duplicate the achievements and resumes of successful candidates.
But if one person wakes up excited for the day, getting recharged as they set out to make a difference in an area that truly matters to them, then that person will have leftover willpower and discipline to go get great grades in classes that they might not care as much about.
And if you copy that person’s activities but use up all your self-discipline and willpower just to try to keep up,
it is not a fair fight.
Any ambitious teen who tries this will eventually realize that they can’t keep up.
They will start to doubt themselves.
And procrastinate.
Then feel guilty, and push harder….
Only to fall short again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
You probably already know that this leads to mental health issues that can be long-lasting and very painful.
This person will almost certainly reach a point where they will choose to disengage from that endless, thankless effort.
They will pretend that everything is okay but will look for ways to cheat or to just simply disengage.
That is a high price to pay for a strategy that will not help you become competitive for your first choice of college.
Part 4 of 7. Case study
