How To Be A High School Superstar Part 2

This brings us back to our original question, which I can now reword as: What was it, exactly, about Olivia and Jessica that made them pop out as compared to students like Peter and Nathan? Here's my suggestion: let's abandon the word "pa.s.sion" once and for all. It's been overused and underdefined for too long. If we are going to crack the relaxed superstar code, we need to start from scratch with something more precise.

With this in mind, I'll begin with the following claim, generated from studying many students like Olivia and Jessica: The Interestingness Hypothesis, Part 1.

When admissions officers say they're looking for students who show "pa.s.sion," what they really mean is that they're looking for the type of student who would appeal to an NPR talk show producer. That is, a student who could sit down and chat about a topic for thirty minutes and hold an educated audience's rapt attention.

I call this trait interestingness. Peter and Nathan didn't have it. It's possible that Peter has some fascinating insights to share about the care of animals, but, more likely, this activity was just the standard reluctant high school volunteering gig taken on because the student thinks it looks good on his resume. An interview with Peter would be dull. The same holds for Nathan: "I like the glockenspiel because, uh, well, it's different, and, well, uh-Do you know when the Harvard admissions deadline is?"

Olivia and Jessica, on the other hand, make fascinating interview subjects. In fact, this is exactly what got Olivia the Jefferson Scholars.h.i.+p: she held the attention of the interviewing committee with her musing on the future of population biology. It was truly interesting stuff! The same holds for Jessica. She spent so much time immersed in the ideas swirling around the new dot-com revolution that she developed thoughts that were actually worth listening to-a fact confirmed by the thirty thousand to forty thousand readers who visit her blog each month.

In other words, Olivia and Jessica did well in the admissions process not because their activities took lots of time, or were unusual, or were outside the structure of the school, but because they transformed Olivia and Jessica into students who possessed the important trait of interestingness. The trait permeated their essays, recommendations, and scholars.h.i.+p interviews, and this made them stand out.

Let's pause for a moment to take stock. I just tossed out the concept of "pa.s.sion" and replaced it with the more precise concept of "interestingness." This solution, however, only gets us halfway there. You might agree that interestingness is important, and that it helped Olivia and Jessica, but this leads to an equally important follow-up question: Why did their activities generate this trait? Or, How does one get interestingness?

Allow me to introduce my second claim:.

The Interestingness Hypothesis, Part 2.

Interestingness cannot be forced or planned in advance. It is generated, instead, as a natural by-product of a "deep interest," which is a long-term pursuit that a student returns to voluntarily and eagerly whenever given a chance.

An easy method to determine whether a pursuit is a deep interest is to apply the Sat.u.r.day-morning test. Imagine you wake up refreshed on a Sat.u.r.day morning and realize you have no obligations for the day. Is your first instinct to spend time on the pursuit in question? If so, it's probably a deep interest. If instead you're happy to have some time to finally relax, then the pursuit is probably something you're doing just because you think it looks good. Peter and Nathan, we imagine, wouldn't rearrange their schedules or give up sleep on Sat.u.r.day morning to volunteer extra hours at the vet or break out the glockenspiel for a good long practice session. Those activities were carefully chosen resume boosters, not true deep interests.

Olivia and Jessica, on the other hand, saw their pursuits as something they wanted to do-the pursuits were inseparable from their definition of relaxation. Reading biology books was Olivia's idea of fun. Whenever financially feasible, Jessica dedicated her school vacations to flying out to Silicon Valley to meet tech entrepreneurs and attend conferences (she gained online notoriety for her ability to gain last-minute access to tech conferences without tickets). During the rest of the year, she had to content herself with having phone conversations and reading articles. In both cases, the pursuits were what these two young women most wanted to do with their free time.

This is an important point, worth reiterating: it's not the activity that matters, but rather the effect the activity has on your personality. This is why the standard definitions of pa.s.sion fail to consistently explain why some students are accepted and some are not. The old definitions focused on the characteristics of the activities, not the traits of the students. If you arbitrarily pick an activity and stick with it to demonstrate your persistence, you're probably wasting your time. Such a.s.sembly-line pa.s.sions are unlikely to generate interestingness, so you'll remain yet another applicant who is showing little more than a strong desire to get accepted into college. For an admissions officer trying to build an interesting cla.s.s, the fact that you're persistent or diligent means little. You might as well use those extra hours to improve your SAT score, which would have a bigger impact in the end. On the other hand, if you have a true deep interest, you'll develop the personality trait of interestingness. This will infuse your application. To this same admissions officer, you'll pop out as exactly the type of person who can make a cla.s.s exciting. The best part, of course, is that this magic trait has nothing to do with hard work or natural talent-recall the easy schedules of Olivia and Jessica-which is why it's so central to the relaxed superstar lifestyle.

So forget pa.s.sion! I've replaced this outdated concept with a much more specific set of marching orders: Develop a deep interest.

But we're not out of the woods yet. Next, I'll disprove the myth that deep interests are not available to all.

The Myth of the Naturally Interest-p.r.o.ne Student.

When most students first encounter a real deep interest-for example, they hear about Olivia's marine biology obsession-they progress through three predictable stages. First, they scan their own life and ask, "What am I interested in that could be transformed into a deep interest?" Second, they fail to find anything. Third, they conclude that students like Olivia and Jessica are somehow just special. Perhaps they were just born more naturally interest-p.r.o.ne than the rest of us poor average mortals. After pa.s.sing through these three stages, most students then sigh in resignation, acknowledge that their only hope is to outwork all the other applicants, and then go join the key club. With this in mind, if I'm going to convince you that interestingness should be a big part of your college admissions strategy, I must first debunk the hypothesis that only special students can develop a deep interest.

Supporters of this hypothesis would not be surprised to hear about an intriguing data set gathered from four school districts in rural Pennsylvania. In 2001, a research team, led by Professor Linda Caldwell of Penn State University, subjected junior high school students from these districts to an alphabet soup of acronymized psychological tests-tests bearing exciting names such as the FTMS-A (Free Time Motivation Scale for Adolescents) and the always-popular LEB-A (Leisure Experience Battery for Adolescents). Each was designed to tease out information about how the students spent their time and for what reasons. On one of the tests, for example, the students faced statement after statement such as "For me, free time just drags on and on," "My freetime activities are very interesting to me," and "[I'm involved with this activity] because I want people to like me." They were asked to a.s.sign a value to each statement from a five-point scale that ranged from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree."

Once the scores were gathered, aggregated, and pushed through sophisticated statistical models, a remarkable finding emerged. Within this group of junior high school students was a smaller subgroup, the subject group, that showed significant differences from their cla.s.smates. As Caldwell later described it in a 2004 paper reporting the results of the study, the subject group showed "higher levels of interest (and thus lower levels of boredom) than the comparison group." Members of the subject group also "scored higher than the comparison group on initiative ... the ability to restructure boring situations ... and the ability to plan and make decisions in free time." These students "reported partic.i.p.ating in new and interesting activities more often than the students in the comparison group" and overall showed "higher levels of well-being" (psychologist-speak for "they were happier").

Put another way, this subject group seems to support the claim that some students are more naturally interest-p.r.o.ne than others-they gravitated toward things that they really liked; they were more likely to take initiative and start new projects; and they were skilled at transforming free time into something productive or exciting. These students remind us of Olivia and Jessica-they are excited by the world and seem destined to develop deep interests. This sounds like bad news for the average student who isn't naturally stumbling into fascinating projects and causes. Perhaps deep interests are just not in the cards for most of us.

Not so fast!

I have a confession. In my above description of the study, I left out a key piece of information. It's true that Caldwell and her team identified a subject group that scored much higher than the comparison group on traits related to interest development. The tests, which were conducted in the spring of 2001, produced results that were clear and conclusive. What I didn't mention, however, was that these same students were also tested six months earlier, in the fall of 2000. Here's where things get interesting. During the first testing session, there were no differences between the subject group and the rest of the students. That is, in the fall of 2000 all of the students exhibited roughly the same low levels of interest and high levels of boredom. This leads to a powerful conclusion: the subject-group students weren't born more naturally interest-p.r.o.ne than the other students. They were transformed. Most remarkably, this transformation required only a few short months. The ability to attract deep interests, therefore, is not necessarily an inborn trait; it can also be learned.

For the students in the subject group, at the core of their transformation was a six-lesson curriculum dubbed TimeWise. The goal of the program was to teach students how to make better use of their leisure time. Its immediate goal was to reduce drug use-bored and uninterested students are more likely to fall into dangerous behaviors. Its larger motivation, however, was the conviction of a growing number of researchers, including Linda Caldwell, that having abundant leisure time, and using this leisure time properly, provides a powerful tool for building a happy, impressive, and healthy life.

The ideas taught in the TimeWise lessons were simple. For example, one lesson gave advice about balancing what one "has to do" with what one "wants to do." Another lesson provided strategies for following up on something that seems interesting. At the start of the program, the students created a diary to track how they spent their time. Later they went back to a.n.a.lyze the diaries and identify places where they should have done things differently. And so on.

Amazingly, these simple lessons made a big difference. Adding basic direction and structure to their free time was enough to turn these bored teenagers into genuinely interesting people. When it comes to living a fascinating life, we're not constrained by our genes. It's instead something that with the right instruction anyone can choose to do.

The Interest-p.r.o.ne Life.

Intrigued by this research, I called Professor Caldwell to find out more about what the average student can do to build an interest-p.r.o.ne life. Though simple, the lessons used in the TimeWise program were too numerous for easy summary. I asked her if she could reduce the approach into something more pithy.

"We know you need to find things that you're truly interested in," she told me. "The problem is that students don't know in advance what these are."

This initial failure to immediately identify a potential deep interest often causes students to abandon their efforts. Caldwell, however, is perhaps the world expert on how students can overcome this initial hurdle and continue to develop toward an interest-p.r.o.ne life. I was eager to learn her secrets.

"You need to be exposed to many things-you should expose yourself even though you might not know if you'll be interested: find out about and attend events on the local college campus and in your community, and ask yourself, 'Did I enjoy this?'"

She added that this exposure should be tempered by what researchers call "casual leisure time": free time dedicated to undistracted reflection and relaxation. Or, as Caldwell describes it, "time when you turn off the phone and the instant messenger and take a walk to appreciate the world without something in your ear."

Unfortunately, in this age of admissions hysteria, many students' instinct is to do the exact opposite of this. Instead of keeping lots of free time open to expose themselves to different things, and sometimes just relax and reflect, they try to fill every free minute with schoolwork and activities, all in an attempt to outdo their admissions compet.i.tion.

Caldwell is not amused.

"I think eliminating leisure time from your schedule is the worst possible thing a student could do," she said. In fact, a 2007 study of students in a suburban high school found that "the greater the amount of time students reported partic.i.p.ating in [structured] activities ... the higher their self-reported level of anxiety."

The researchers found that activities by themselves are not bad; it's the "overscheduling" of these activities that causes problems. They conclude: "These increasing obligations and time demands are cutting into adolescents' leisure experiences, which are critical for helping them discover their ident.i.ties and release stress."

In other words, if you want to be stressed and anxious, then follow the standard strategy of packing as much as possible into your schedule. But if you want to attract deep interests, and therefore maximize your chance of generating both interestingness and a happy life, then, according to Professor Caldwell, you should do the following: Leave plenty of leisure time in your schedule.

Use this time to expose yourself to lots of different things, even if you're not sure in advance whether they'll interest you.

Leave some of this time free to relax and reflect "without something in your ear."

The superstars I interviewed stumbled into this behavior, and were reaping the rewards when they began the college process. But as Caldwell's research shows, it doesn't matter whether you naturally gravitate toward an underscheduled lifestyle or artificially impose it-either way, you'll attract deep interests.

In the next chapter, I return to the stories of Olivia and Jessica. This time, however, I turn back the clock to reveal the sequence of events that led to the development of their deep interests. The goal is to show you what the underscheduled lifestyle looks like in practice.

3.

The Making of a Relaxed Superstar

YOU'VE ALREADY seen how the power of interestingness-generated by deep interests-propelled two underscheduled students into their reach schools. As I noted in Chapter 2, Professor Linda Caldwell explained that deep interests are attracted if you maintain free time and use it to explore. Here, I put these theories to the test by rewinding the stories of Olivia and Jessica back to their start to show you how these two students became superstars.

How Olivia Became a Superstar

Olivia's story begins during the spring of her soph.o.m.ore year of high school. She was a.s.signed a project on New Hamps.h.i.+re's Great Bay tidal estuary, a vast pool of seawater, over 150 miles in diameter, that sits 10 miles inland from the New Hamps.h.i.+re Atlantic coast. Most people have never heard of the Great Bay, but to a marine biologist, the ecosystems of its waters and the surrounding marshes are a source of endless fascination.

For her project-a poster for her chemistry cla.s.s-Olivia was tasked with showing the role of nitrogen in the Great Bay life cycle. The details of her poster elude her today, but what she does remember is that her teacher singled out her work for praise, giving her an A+.

During the course of her work on the chemistry project, her parents had mentioned that their next-door neighbor was a marine biologist at the nearby University of New Hamps.h.i.+re. Olivia didn't know much about his research, but she was aware that "he did something cool with lobsters." Inspired by the praise she received for her project, she decided, on a whim, to send him an e-mail.

"I asked if he needed an unpaid summer volunteer," Olivia recalls. She was fueled by romantic visions of wading through a tidal estuary, the sun dipping low to the horizon, a research notebook in her hand. But her hopes were also balanced with pragmatism. "I a.s.sumed there was probably some sort of policy against bringing in random volunteers."

There wasn't. The professor replied that he would be happy to take on some free help.

A couple of months later, as summer began, Olivia joined her neighbor for the short drive to the Durham campus of the University of New Hamps.h.i.+re. She had arranged to work thirty hours a week as a volunteer, with another twenty hours dedicated to her standard summer waitress job-her only chance to make money for the year. When they arrived at Redmond Hall, home to the biology and zoology departments, she followed the professor up the stairs to his second-floor laboratory.

"Right away he introduced me to this graduate student I would be working with," Olivia recalls. The student, a T-s.h.i.+rted young man in his twenties, led her to a small room. Low tables lining the walls were stacked haphazardly with videotapes. In the center was a TV, a stool, and, strangely enough, a clear plastic ruler. He pointed Olivia toward a seat before saying, "Okay, here's what you're going to do."

He put the first tape in a player wired to the TV. It took Olivia a second to orient herself to the scene. It was the ocean floor-seaweed waving, patterns of diffuse light dancing across the sand. In the middle of the shot was the end of a large-diameter white PVC pipe. A multidigit time code raced furiously in the corner.

Plop.

A lobster fell through the pipe's opening and onto the sand.

"Watch the seaweed," the graduate student said. "When it moves, we need to know how much, and when it happened. See, like there!"

He paused the tape. Ignoring the lobster, which had begun to move out of the frame, he demonstrated how to rewind the recording, frame by frame, and then measure the movement of the seaweed by holding the plastic ruler up to the screen. He showed her how to record the movement in a logbook.

Olivia sneaked a glance at the piles of tapes that littered the room, then turned back to accept the ruler from the graduate student.

It was going to be a long summer.

Sometime during that first week, she ran into an unexpected character in the group's common room. He was a New Hamps.h.i.+re lobsterman. In contrast to the slender, pale students who populated the lab, this visitor stood out. His skin was tanned and weather-beaten, his back knotted with the muscles forged from pulling waterlogged traps from the ocean floor. The professor greeted the man warmly, and the two quickly fell into conversation. Olivia heard them discussing lobster yields. As she later learned, the lobsterman worked with the professor, a.s.sisting in research projects aimed at keeping the local lobster fishery viable. People in the lobster-fis.h.i.+ng community were often suspicious of scientists, whom they a.s.sociated with the heavy-handed and often economically disastrous regulations pa.s.sed down by the New England Fisheries Management Council. But over the years, due to the hundreds of hours that the professor, and more than a few seasick young graduate students, had spent on their boats counting stock and talking shop, trust had formed.

At this point, Olivia's thinking changed. Her volunteer work was not glamorous, but seeing the lobsterman helped her connect the studies to important issues that affected real people's lives. The field of marine biology was transforming from a pa.s.sing interest into something more important. It was no longer the momentary whim of a sixteen-year-old girl excited by a grade on a chemistry poster. It was turning into a true deep interest.

She recommitted to her work, boring as it was, and began to gain the respect of the team. The next winter, she received an unexpected call from the professor. He had discovered that his latest National Science Foundation grant included money for a special program aimed at hiring female and minority high school students to work in the laboratories.

"He asked if I would be interested in coming back to the lab the next summer and actually earning a salary," Olivia recalls. She quickly agreed.

That second summer, Olivia graduated from measuring the movement of seaweed to working on the migration patterns of horseshoe crabs. Over the past few years, the lab had used radio beacons to track the movement of a large number of these crabs across the rocky bottom of the Great Bay. Olivia's job was to connect the movement of the crabs with movement of the tides, as shown in a tide table. If there was a pattern-say, every time the tide went out, the crabs retreated-this would substantiate the professor's hunch that the crabs used the tides to coordinate. If not, it would hint that something else was going on. The work may not have matched her original vision of wading into the brackish bay marshes, observing animals in their natural state, but it was real science as real science is done today: sifting through data and hunting for patterns. Her intellectual confidence grew.

Olivia's second summer culminated with a presentation at the lab's weekly research meeting. She remembers counting the hours before the talk with nervous apprehension. When she finally stood up in front of her PowerPoint slides, however, and began to walk the a.s.sembled students and postdoctoral fellows through her findings on tide levels and crab movements, she soon found her voice.

"I know this stuff," she realized.

The audience treated her like a peer.

By the time Olivia applied to college, and was nominated for the Jefferson Scholars.h.i.+p, her deep interest in marine biology had taken root. When she sat down for her interview, her confidence and enthusiasm for the subject helped her radiate the interestingness that won her the prize, even though her schedule was far less demanding than that of the standard applicant.

Deconstructing Olivia's Story

Olivia's story provides strong support for Linda Caldwell's theory of how deep interests develop. As a soph.o.m.ore, Olivia had an open schedule and an instinct to explore things that caught her attention. When her chemistry teacher praised her project on the Great Bay, Olivia thought, "Maybe I'd like this stuff. I'll give it a try." If she had been an overscheduled student, her summer would already have been filled with expensive international mission trips and sessions at college summer-enrichment programs. But she wasn't that kind of student, and was instead able to easily work the volunteer spot into her schedule when it was offered. From here, the momentary interest eventually transformed into a deep interest, and all the hoped-for benefits followed.

What's important to notice is what didn't happen in Olivia's story. At no point did she sit down and say, "I am pa.s.sionate about marine biology; I will now dedicate my high school life to this cause so I can get into the University of Virginia." She had no idea that this field of study would blossom into such an important part of her life. In fact, if she had originally set up the volunteering gig with the clear intent of improving her admissions chances, it's safe to a.s.sume that she wouldn't have gotten nearly as far. The rapid growth in her lab responsibilities and the abundance of outside reading and thinking she did on related topics-two key factors in the development of the interestingness that got her into UVA-resulted from the authentic interest she radiated toward the lab's work.

What Olivia did do was maintain free time and use it to explore things that seemed interesting. Eventually, as Professor Caldwell would have predicted, something stuck. As we move on to the origin story of Jessica, we find that, as with Olivia, the initial steps toward her deep interest also required a mixture of free time and luck.

How Jessica Became a Superstar

During spring break of her junior year of high school, Jessica visited the tropical island of Jamaica on vacation with her stepdad. On a sun-drenched Caribbean morning, Jessica's stepdad returned from a round of golf with an excited smile on his face. "I met this guy, Morris, on the course," he said. "He's involved in the tech industry. I think you two should meet." Jessica was intrigued. She hadn't given much thought to high-tech entrepreneurs.h.i.+p since her stressful freshman-year experience, but the meeting sounded fun. "Why not?" she thought.

The next day, Jessica and Morris found each other on the beach. It turns out that the young man, still in his late twenties, had just sold his Internet start-up, Racks.p.a.ce.com, for a sizable amount of money. He was vacationing in Jamaica to celebrate. This whiff of high-tech success captivated Jessica. Racks.p.a.ce.com, she discovered, was a larger, more successful version of the same basic business idea she had pursued as a freshman. Meeting Morris was like a glimpse of an alternative reality-what might have happened if she had known what she was doing when she started her server business. Since giving up her company, Jessica had been licking her wounds. She was living an intentionally underscheduled life, wary of letting anything else dominate her schedule as the business had. But that afternoon on the beach, it was as if a misaligned gear had clicked back into place: Jessica's interest in entrepreneurs.h.i.+p was back.

"I did everything I could to pick his brain," she recalls. "I asked him about getting started, about getting funding, about hiring people, about the growing pains, about going to college, about making use of college, about dropping out of college, about everything I could think of." The next day Jessica had lunch with Morris and his brother-in-law (also an entrepreneur, he had cofounded a semiconductor company), and the interrogation continued. Somewhere along the way they began prodding her to get out to the Bay Area, where it was all happening, and experience the heart of the tech industry in person.

Less than two months after returning from Jamaica, Jessica was on a plane to California for her first visit to Silicon Valley. Her itinerary was full. In the preceding six weeks, inspired by her beach encounter, she had been reaching out to every hot tech company in the valley, trying to arrange a meeting or even just get permission to hang around the company offices and experience life in a high-stakes start-up. She sent an e-mail to the founders of Reddit, a popular social news Web site, and ended up spending an afternoon in the Reddit offices. Out of the blue, she contacted Marc Benioff, the famously loudmouthed founder of the influential Salesforce.com. He pa.s.sed her on to a well-connected young CEO he knew, who, in turn, met with Jessica and set her up with many more meetings. At the time, an entertainment start-up, Justin. TV, was beginning to make waves. Jessica convinced them to let her hang out and watch Justin, the star of one of the company's top shows, film a live feed.

"The people I've met through these trips have become incredible mentors," Jessica said. One of these connections, for example, was the president of the Web start-up PBwiki (now PBworks), with whom Jessica arranged an interns.h.i.+p for the upcoming summer.