FBF #26: Chasing the Shadow Of College

Five strategies to flip the script and have the colleges come chasing you.

Applying to college can feel a lot like chasing your shadow. Every time you think you’ve made a little progress—you get an A in your AP stats class or your SAT score goes up 100 points—the goal post moves a little further out of reach.

As any child on a playground has learned, however, your shadow is a wily competitor, and no matter how fast you run, it will always be one step ahead.

There is a solution, however, and it is an elegant one at that. Instead of chasing after your shadow, do the opposite. Turn your back, and start walking towards the sun, and your shadow will obediently follow along behind you.

When it comes to college admissions, this is not an idle metaphor but an instructive one. 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 weighted down under the tyranny of more—pursuing a grueling path of countless APs, endless extracurriculars, and constant pressure.

Often, however, their applications blend into the “leaden shadows of sameness” and do not lead to the “sunlit tropics of acceptance.” They are following the same well-worn playbook that every other high school overachiever uses, and just like the child on the playground, their dreams often remain just out of reach.

So what is the solution? Stop chasing your shadow, 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, your idiosyncratic quirks, and all of the things that make you undeniably yourself, a happy byproduct will be that colleges will be running after you and begging for you to enroll.

Here are five ideas about how high school students can stop chasing their shadow and turn towards their inner light.

1) Focus on eulogy virtues before résumé virtues

David Brooks wrote an op-ed in the NYTimes in which he distinguishes between two sets of virtues: résumé virtues and eulogy virtues. “The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest, or faithful.”

In admissions terms, the resume virtues show up on your transcript and activities list, 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 and young professionals focus on developing them first. As Brooks says, “Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character.”

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.

2) Focus on Verbs, not Adjectives

Many of us would love it if our teachers described us as ambitious, reliable, inspirational, versatile, or creative. Each of these words is an adjective, though, and we can’t control what adjectives people use to describe us. What we can do, however, is to focus on our verbs or the actions that we take on a regular basis.

Rather than seeking external validation through flattering adjectives, we should derive a sense of fulfillment through the tangible impact of our deeds. A high school student should not set out to be known as reliable, he should instead make delivering on promises a non-negotiable feature of his personality.

Will Durant famously said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”  Become excellent by focusing on the right verbs.

3) Adopt Attitudes, not Solutions

This is the phrasing of James Clear, who writes, “We want solutions, but what we really need are attitudes. You don't need abs, but rather an attitude of training. You don't need the answer, but rather an attitude of curiosity. You don't need an easier life, but rather an attitude of perseverance.”

So often students get paralyzed by outcomes—I need to get an A on that paper or a 1450+ on the SAT. And when they fall short of these arbitrary measures, their confidence and self-belief plummets. We lionize achievements but sometimes fail to recognize the attitudes to led to these accomplishments.

How we perceive ourselves has more of an impact on how the world sees us than anything else. One of the best exercises a student can implement is to finish the sentence “I’m the sort of person who…” with qualities that they wish to embody.

There’s a sort of alchemy that happens when you implement this idea. Soon after you say, “I’m the sort of person who… finishes whatever he starts … goes for a run every morning … never misses his prayers,” you will indeed be doing all of those things.

4) Learn to be a Chef, not a Cook

In the culinary world, there's a critical distinction between being a chef and being a cook. 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. On the other hand, a cook is someone who follows established recipes, relying on tried and tested methods without much room for innovation.

As a high school student, it's tempting to adopt a “cook-like” approach to academic and personal development. You might look 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 14^th 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.

5) Think Kaleidoscopically

The magic of a kaleidoscope is that it transforms ordinary objects into mesmerizing visual displays. Nearly infinite variations are possible by tilting or shaking the kaleidoscope.

A high school student must learn to think kaleidoscopically to really stand out in the admissions game. Despite pursuing similar courses and extracurriculars as her peers, she must always be looking for a unique perspective.     

One of the best ways to do this is to read and learn across disciplines. If you are an economist, read psychology. If you are a computer scientist, study philosophy or literature to find out what makes humans empathetic.

Imagine how interesting a student is who has mastered Latin, Greek, and machine learning and then applies Aristotelian logic to an artificial intelligence conundrum.

Kaleidoscopes don’t work in the dark, but when you hold them up to the light of your passions, the results can be truly magical.