How To Be A High School Superstar Part 10

What struck me about this experience was that most students would be better off if they simply a.s.sumed they knew nothing about getting good grades. It's their certainty that prevents them from discovering the simpler, more time-effective techniques that actually work.

To begin our study of the art of becoming good, I want to offer this general observation: The Goodness Paradox Most people a.s.sume they know how to become good. Yet most are not good at anything.

The purpose of the goodness paradox is to get you questioning the a.s.sumptions you hold about how to become better at a particular pursuit. These a.s.sumptions, if left unchallenged, might become a roadblock preventing actual progress. I argue that the best strategy for becoming good is the strategy I deployed for Straight-A: Ignore what you think is right and go ask people who are already good. Put another way, a.s.sume you know nothing about your area of focus. Instead, make it your mission to learn from those who do.

Let's return to John for a moment and see how he made use of this strategy. He entered a large public high school in Texas having done "reasonably well" in junior high, but he was far from being an academic standout. "I entered high school with the same mentality as junior high: I would take difficult cla.s.ses and try to do well in them," he recalls. At the end of his freshman year, however, he discovered that through a combination of luck, hard studying, and the lack of rigor in freshman courses, his GPA ranked him fourteenth in his cla.s.s. "Surprised at my ranking, I decided that I would make a go at getting into a good college," John says. Most students in this situation would jump into a strategy of harder work and less sleep, driven by the a.s.sumption that they know what it takes to do better academically.

Not John.

"I made up my mind to learn from students who were older than me," he told me. "I met the valedictorian and the salutatorian of the tenth grade, and I asked them for advice." He learned two key ideas from these interviews. First, he should find students who are the best in his cla.s.s in a specific subject-not necessarily best overall-and learn from them about how to master that subject. Second, he should avoid other students who are also competing to have the best overall GPA, to keep from getting sucked into their compet.i.tive world.

John took this advice to heart. His writing was weaker than his quant.i.tative skills, for example, so he introduced himself to a girl in his English cla.s.s who was known as the best writer of their year. He asked her to help him learn how to write better. "She genuinely liked writing," John recalls. "She was reading novels all the time." Soon he began to a.n.a.lyze her essays to see what made them s.h.i.+ne. He also asked her to look over the essays he wrote to see where they fell short. He and the girl had deep conversations about reading and the art of writing, and John's skills improved at a rapid pace. In return for this a.s.sistance, he helped her with the subjects he was already good at, like math.

Most students in John's situation would either avoid English cla.s.ses or hope that a combination of increased study time plus grade grubbing would generate the needed marks. By contrast, John put himself at the feet of the best and gave himself a crash course in becoming a better writer. Top grades in these courses came easily after these lessons.

He followed the same approach for taming the SAT. "I talked to a friend who had scored a 1600," John told me. "He said to buy the Barron's prep book and the book of real tests published by the College Board. They have the best sample questions." Following his friend's advice, he ignored fancy test strategies and focused exclusively on taking practice tests and memorizing vocabulary words. "When I took the practice tests and graded them, I would rework the problems I had missed, without looking at the explanations at the back.... This is really the best way to learn." After a while, however, his performance hit a plateau. Discussing this issue with his friend, he discovered that the top scorers learn to solve the easier math problems in their head-leaving enough time free to check answers and weed out careless mistakes. (Interestingly, time management, more so than raw smarts, seems to be what separates high scores from perfect scores on these tests.) Using this knowledge, John recruited his sister to quiz him out loud on sample problems so that he could practice solving them quickly in his head. "I wanted the math section to become instinctive," he said.

John deployed similar tactics with his violin playing. "A big part of orchestra was to make sure that I understood specifically where I was messing up," he told me. "After every 'chair test'-where students perform live in front of the cla.s.s for the conductor-I would ask the conductor for written comments. I would then come home after school to ensure that I understood which part I was messing up on." When the conductor told him that he was having pacing trouble, for example, he spent that same evening with a metronome until the problem was solved.

What fascinates me about John is that he has no patience for the idea of natural talent. He entered high school as an above-average, but not stellar, student who was a decent, but not great, violin player. Instead of setting out on a quest to discover his true calling, John decided to get good at the traits he thought would be most important. (Not surprising, he recently revealed to me that he's a big fan of Geoff Colvin's book.) To begin his quest toward this goal, John embraced the truth revealed by the goodness paradox: in every pursuit he eventually mastered, he started by ignoring his own a.s.sumptions and going straight to the experts.

You should follow John's example in your own effort to become good. Once you've decided where to focus, start with a blank slate. Don't dive in under the a.s.sumption that you know what to do. Find the experts at your school. Learn from them. The small time investment required to figure out how to become good will pay for itself many times over.

The Art of Becoming Good, Part 2: The Immersion Hypothesis

John's story taught us that the first step to becoming good is avoiding the temptation to jump right in and start flailing forward. But once you've done this research, what comes next? To answer this question, I want to return to John's story and consider his rise from an average violin player to concert master.

"There were players who were better than me, so I tried to stand out in other ways," John told me. "I demonstrated that I was devoted to the orchestra in more than just performing. I volunteered at orchestra fund-raisers and listened to tons of cla.s.sical music. I accompanied my practice with books about composers. It was fascinating-I became a fan of less well-known composers like Kabalevsky and Berg. I immersed myself in the world of cla.s.sical music."

The key word from John's experience is immersion. Once you have chosen a pursuit to master, and have sought expert advice about how to proceed, dedicate yourself completely to the world of that pursuit. Becoming excellent is not a casual enterprise. That nerdy kid from your high school who won all of those robotics compet.i.tions, and then got into MIT, probably lived and breathed robotics-it wasn't just an isolated activity on a long list of unrelated commitments. To give another example, recall the girl who helped John become a better writer. He noted that she read lots of novels on her own time and liked to write for fun. This immersion helped earn her the status as the cla.s.s's top English student.

I capture this general idea with the following hypothesis: The Immersion Hypothesis The more you immerse yourself in the world surrounding an activity, the more success with the activity you'll experience.

There are three explanations for why this hypothesis holds true. The first concerns commitment. When you dedicate a significant portion of your extracurricular time to a single field, you're signaling true commitment to yourself. Without this commitment, your mind has a way of throwing up obstacles to your progress. If it doesn't trust that you really want to do this, it will defend against potentially wasted effort with procrastination and excuses. If John hadn't surrounded himself with the world of cla.s.sical music, for example, but instead just tried to force himself to practice hard for a few hours every day, he would have faced a tough mental battle. When he instead immersed himself in that world-listening to music, attending performances, reading books about composers-practicing became a natural part of his larger commitment to music. Looking back on this immersion, John agrees, noting: "It was a good way to keep up my motivation."

The second explanation concerns the aggregation of many small bursts of effort. When you're immersed in a world, you end up investing lots of small chunks of time toward improving your craft-even if you don't always realize it. Over time, these can add up to a significant amount of extra practice. To return to John's example, the time he spent listening to music, reading about composers, chatting with the conductor, and in general being around music and people who play music, probably provided lots of micro-boosts to his knowledge of violin playing. The boosts eventually added up to a significant edge over a player who practices in isolation.

The final explanation concerns opportunity. The more you're immersed in a world, the greater the probability that you'll stumble into opportunities to increase your ability. This too proved true in John's story. Because of his immersion in everything having to do with cla.s.sical music, he eventually befriended some players from his county's symphony orchestra. "I went to the concerts, got to know the director, and polished one piece again and again, until it was perfect for auditions," John recalls. Eventually, John performed the piece for the conductor, who then agreed to let John join.

"I was back in the second violin section," John admits, "but it was a blast to be able to play with adults." More important, playing at this level forced John to improve his technique beyond what he was exposed to in the high school orchestra.

The Immersion Hypothesis predicts that good things come from involving yourself in the many small activities and interests surrounding the pursuit you want to master. Of course, when deploying this strategy you must keep the law of focus in mind. You can afford to immerse yourself in one or at most two different fields before the time demands become too intense to sustain. Start by whittling down your interests to a small number of focused pursuits; then immerse yourself in their world.

The Art of Becoming Good, Part 3: The Leveraged-Ability Hypothesis.

We've arrived at the final part of our investigation into the art of becoming good. The previous parts taught you to learn from the experts and then immerse yourself in the pursuit. This final part addresses a more subtle topic: how to increase your perceived ability. Recall that the effects of the law of focus described throughout Part 2 hold once you're unambiguously recognized as being very good at something. Therefore, your perceived ability is as important as your actual ability. We begin, as before, with John's story.

"My junior year, I became first chair of my school's orchestra," John told me. "I then leveraged this accomplishment to start a club, the Nursing Home Orchestra Performance Group. Basically, the members of the orchestra would get together to play at local nursing homes."

There are two things to note about this act of leverage. First, the club wasn't a huge time commitment, as John admits: "The total time to set this up was about twelve hours; it was both fun and easy." Second, it made John appear to be even better at music. On his resume he could list that he was "the director of a performance group." This accomplishment, of course, signals talent.

To pull this off, however, John had to first pa.s.s a relatively high threshold of ability. He was able to start this organization only because he was already the concert master, and therefore the de facto student leader, of his orchestra. He would've had much more difficulty organizing the group as a freshman or soph.o.m.ore with little standing. The key point to notice, therefore, is that he leveraged his ability, once it began to develop, to create opportunities that were unavailable to those without his level of skill. As with the performance group John started, these types of leveraged opportunities typically boost your perceived ability without requiring an excessive time investment-making them a perfect match for the focused lifestyle. (This phenomenon is one of the many specific realizations of the general Matthew Effect.) For another example, consider Michael Silverman. He leveraged his ability in doing sustainability projects to set up a cla.s.sroom program to teach younger students about green energy. Practically, this involved installing a Web interface that allowed students to track the power generated by the solar panels he installed on the school's maintenance shed. This task wasn't particularly time consuming (the power company provided the equipment and software), and it certainly boosted Michael's perceived ability as a sustainability guru. The opportunity was available to him, however, only because of his previous accomplishments in the field.

This phenomenon is common enough to warrant its own hypothesis: The Leveraged-Ability Hypothesis Once you pa.s.s a certain threshold of skill in a field, you'll encounter many opportunities for related activities that will improve your perceived ability without requiring an excessive time commitment.

John took advantage of this reality. So did Michael Silverman. And you can too. Once you begin to become good at your focused pursuit, leverage your burgeoning talent to find the easy opportunities that enhance your image as a star.

Maintaining Focus

Between the years 1912 and 1915, Albert Einstein was a focused man. His earlier work on his special theory of relativity and the quantization of light, among other topics, was starting to gain him notice. Einstein had left the Swiss patent office, and after short stints as a professor in Germany and Prague, ended up, in 1912, at the ETH Inst.i.tute in Zurich. Once there, he worked with the mathematician Marcel Grossman and soon became convinced that if he applied the non-Euclidean math studied by Grossman to his own work on relativity, he could generalize the theory to account for gravity. This advance would be huge-an effective revision to the fundamental laws of Nature.

With a clear focus identified, Einstein set to work.

Between 1912 and 1915, the young scientist became increasingly obsessed in his push to formalize general relativity. As revealed by several sources, including his recently released letters, he worked so hard that his marriage became strained and his hair turned white from the stress. But he got it done. In 1915 he published his full theory. It stands today as one of the greatest scientific accomplishments-if not the single greatest-of the twentieth century.

Einstein's story provides a canonical example of the focused lifestyle. His focused pursuit was theoretical physics. His project within this pursuit was generalizing his special theory of relativity. By pointing his prodigious energies toward this project, he generated ma.s.sively important results. In a perfect world, we would all be Einsteins-our small number of focused pursuits would yield a small number of clearly defined projects on which we could focus our attention like a laser beam. Reality, however, is often much messier.

The big problem is that we don't know in advance which project might turn out to be our own theory of relativity, and which projects are dead ends. Because of this, most ambitious students I know tend to follow a different strategy. They sow lots of project seeds related to their small number of focused pursuits. They e-mail people, read related books and articles, commit to minor projects, set up meetings, and send out feelers to friends and connections regarding their latest brainstorm-the type of exploration described in the Part 1 playbook. They don't know which seed will ultimately take root and grow into something important, so by planting many, they expose themselves to enough randomness to maximize their eventual chance of stumbling into the right project.

My entrance into the world of writing, for example, followed this approach. Over the summer following my freshman year of college, I decided to make writing one of my focused pursuits. I didn't know the best project to get started in this field, so I tried lots of different things. Some of my first steps were to submit op-ed pieces to the student newspaper and start working on a book proposal for an advice-guide idea. The book proposal was a dead end at the time, but my first two op-ed pieces were published. This led me to apply to become a columnist for the school newspaper. Not one for self-seriousness, I gravitated toward a humorous writing style, and this led me to join, and eventually lead, the campus humor magazine. Dozens of similar projects followed. Some paid off; others fizzled. But my writing ability continued to grow, as did my knowledge of the field. It wasn't until the summer after my junior year, when I signed the contract for my first book, How to Win at College, that I was able to develop a clear vision of how a professional writing career could unfold-a vision I've been following ever since. Looking back, I see that it required a lot of experimentation to get to the place where I could focus on a small number of projects with confidence.

As I discovered, the main difficulty with the sow-lots-of-seeds method is that so many of the seeds grow into weeds-time-consuming projects that impede your path to mastery. (My early book proposal idea is one such example.) To maintain an Einstein-style focused lifestyle, therefore, it's crucial to learn how to pull these weeds before they overwhelm the projects that have a chance of meaningful success. If you fail in your weeding, your attempts to stay focused will be thwarted as you find yourself rus.h.i.+ng from obligation to obligation, none of which is really advancing your skill. Below, I offer a simple strategy to help you hone your ability to keep your project garden weeded. I call this method the productivity purge.

The Productivity Purge

This method consists of five steps: At the beginning of each semester, label a sheet of paper with the names of your focused pursuits. Having one or two pursuits is optimal. Three is doable if you happen to have an abundance of free time. If you have more than three pursuits, however, then you need to make some hard choices. Because not every project in your life is tied to a big-picture pursuit (for example, learning to play guitar), add the label "extra" to the sheet to capture these outliers.

Under each label list all of the related projects currently in progress. The word "project," in this context, refers to anything that requires a regular time commitment.

For each list, put a star next to the one or two projects that you think have the greatest chance of returning rewards. For the focused-pursuit lists, "rewards" refers to advances in your ability. For the "extra" list, however, you can star the one or two projects that you enjoy the most.

Next, consider the nonstarred projects that remain on the list. Identify those that you could stop working on right away with no serious consequences. Cross these out and do no further work on them. For each of the projects still left unmarked (i.e., they are neither starred nor crossed out), come up with a one-to-two-week "crunch plan" for finalizing and dispatching them. For example, maybe one of the unmarked projects is a commitment to the school newspaper, which you now recognize as unimportant to advancing you focused pursuits. Your crunch plan for shutting down this project might involve finis.h.i.+ng the article you're currently a.s.signed, and then telling the editor that you can't take on additional articles this semester due to an abundance of other stuff in your life.

Once you complete your crunch plans you'll be left with only a small number of important projects for each of your focused pursuits, plus a couple of enjoyable projects left under your "extra" label. At this point, you have purged your schedule of all but the small number of contenders that have the best chance of becoming your own theory of relativity.

The productivity purge is a great way to maintain a focused lifestyle. By conducting one of these purges at least a few times a year, you'll keep your attention on what's important while avoiding the need to obsess over your schedule on a daily basis. To this day, I do a productivity purge once a month in order to balance my need to experiment with my need for an uncluttered life. The method has worked wonders for me. It will for you too.

Pulling It All Together.

You probably began the Part 2 playbook convinced of the power of focus but unsure of how to make focus a reality in your own life. It's easy to decide to restrict your attention to a few targets, but it's a whole different challenge to put the decision into practice. This playbook has addressed that challenge.

The first section of the playbook tackled the fundamental question, What should I focus on? I told you to use your deep interests, described in Part 1 of the book, to guide you toward your focused pursuits. I also argued that you can ignore your fear of choosing the wrong focus, as most likely there's no perfect focus out there waiting for you to discover. In the second section, I used the story of John, the talented Princeton student, to guide you through the subtle art of becoming good at a pursuit once you've decided to direct your attention toward it. You learned about questioning your a.s.sumptions, immersing yourself in the world, and then leveraging your ability, once it begins to grow, to increase your perceived skills. With these tactics under your belt, the final challenge was to ensure that your pursuits didn't generate too many projects, which could impede meaningful progress. I answered this challenge, in the third section, with the productivity-purge method, a simple technique for keeping your project garden thriving.

Even with these strategies, you still might find your transition into the focused life difficult. Your choice of pursuits, for example, might need to be defined more clearly. You might struggle to make progress or to find the right projects to tackle. Don't worry. Focus is a practiced skill. Most students have trouble when first switching to this way of doing things, but it does get easier over time. You'll improve at defining your pursuits and become more adept at identifying the related projects that will generate the best returns. So have patience. Getting started is the hard part-once your momentum builds, you'll look back with disdainful wonder at the cluttered and unfocused life you used to live.

*SAT Word Alert: leitmotiv-a recurrent theme.

*Keep in mind that the targets of John's focus-academics and violin playing-were risky, as they both have well-defined compet.i.tive structures and are difficult to master. It's because of this difficulty that John's story proves so useful to our purposes here. His tactics for becoming good must have been very effective if he rose to the top in these demanding pursuits.

Part 3.

The Law of Innovation.

Pursue accomplishments that are hard to explain, not hard to do.

The law of innovation will transform your understanding of impressiveness. Most students think they know what makes an accomplishment stand out. If asked, they would say that the accomplishment must demonstrate hard work and talent. The law of innovation, by contrast, highlights the surprising importance of a different factor: how hard an accomplishment is to explain. That is, if I can't simulate in my mind how you did what you did, I'm going to consider you impressive-regardless of the actual difficulty of your feat.

Consider the following two students. The first served on a youth commission for the United Nations and the second is the president of his high school cla.s.s. Who impresses you more? Almost everyone I've asked this question chooses the first student. But why is he more impressive? It's not because he worked harder or had more talent than the cla.s.s president. The student I based this example on, about whom you'll hear more in the playbook, stumbled into the UN opportunity accidentally. The awe you feel reflects the fact that you have no idea how a high school student ends up working with the world's most important governing body. Because the path to becoming student body president, by contrast, is well understood, this accomplishment does not generate a similar impressiveness bonus. The crucial observation here is that whether or not something is hard to explain has little connection to whether or not it's hard to do. Relaxed superstars, understanding this fact, know how to pump up their impressiveness without sacrificing ma.s.sive amounts of time.

In the chapters that follow, I explore this curious effect-from the science that explains it to the rules that describe where it applies. Along the way I'll have you meet three relaxed superstars who used the law of innovation to gain acceptance to their dream schools. You'll hear their stories, learn exactly how they got involved in their innovative pursuits, and then discover how you can follow a similar path.

10.

The Laziest Student at Bella Vista High.

ON A generically sunny California morning, in the fall of 2004, an unexpected event transpired: Maneesh Sethi, the self-described "laziest student at Bella Vista High School," was admitted into Stanford University.

Maneesh isn't lazy in the usual pejorative sense. He appreciates impressive accomplishments and has racked up a few of his own. It's just that he has no tolerance for crowded schedules, all-nighters, or any other sources of mind-numbing work marathons. Perhaps it's an attention-deficit disorder or a long-repressed phobia, but no matter how you describe it, the conclusion is clear: Maneesh Sethi is const.i.tutionally incapable of being a grind.

"There are two types of overachievers," he explained to me when we first met. "Type As, who do ma.s.sive amounts of work, and type Bs, who get type As to do their work for them. I was a type B."

When I asked Maneesh to send me a typical day's schedule from his senior year of high school, he sent one in which the hours from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. were labeled as follows: "Done with school; hang out with friends, read, or more likely browse on the computer." (Maneesh and his friends had somehow convinced the administration to let them leave school before lunch.) In a similar spirit of ultrarelaxation, Maneesh described the period from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. as time to "zone out."

Maneesh wasn't activity-phobic. In fact, he was involved with quite a few clubs off and on throughout high school. But he shunned activities that demanded serious time commitments.

"I guess at some point I had to physically do some work for these activities," Maneesh admitted. "But a lot of the clubs were jokes."

After a moment of consideration, he added: "A few were actual jokes. I started the math club just so I could get money from the school to give away free pie on Pi Day. That was the focus of the club." He laughed at the memory. "We never did a single math activity."

When I asked him to add up the total work time required by his extracurricular commitments, he responded: "I really don't remember spending more than two to five hours per week for everything all together."

There were, however, some isolated exceptions to this no-work rule. As a junior, Maneesh launched a literary journal featuring pieces written by students from area high schools. This required him to find funding and to travel between the schools, pitching the idea and soliciting submissions. The first edition came out during his junior year and the second during his senior year. The journal was well received in the district.

Work-averse Maneesh describes this as one of his biggest endeavors as a student. He recalls that the journal required two months of attention during his junior year and two months of attention during his senior year. During each two-month stretch, the final two weeks were the only hard ones. "In total, the journal generated about four hard weeks over my entire high school career," he concluded. To Maneesh this may have seemed demanding. To the typical elite applicant, however, four hard weeks out of four years is a walk in the park.

The second exception to his no-work rule was the fact that Maneesh played in a rock band between the ages of thirteen and sixteen. The band performed locally and was popular. This endeavor certainly required effort, but nothing overwhelming. Maneesh would practice his guitar frequently, and there were band practices most weeks. But as he summarizes, "It was never a real time sink."

The above reads like the resume of a talented but underachieving high school student. You might expect that Maneesh would have no problem gaining admittance to a solid college (his grades and SAT scores were very good), but elite inst.i.tutions like Stanford should have been out of his reach. Off-and-on club members.h.i.+ps, the literary journal, the rock band: these are all fine, but they don't add up to the type of superstar achievement that can gain admittance to a school with a 10 percent acceptance rate.

But Maneesh did get in-to every school where he applied, including Stanford and Berkeley. Something interesting must be going on here.

From Rocking to Writing