How To Be A High School Superstar Part 6

For all these reasons, I want you to consider dropping every activity that Activity Andy could do. (If he could do it, then why would anyone care that you could too?) If you're worried that dropping an activity halfway through your school career will make you seem uncommitted, then leave the activity off of your college application altogether. I'm serious. This book is going to teach you how to do things that matter. Leave those lightweight commitments to your anxious and boring peers.

The small number of activities that do pa.s.s this test probably require a talent you've developed over time, or a spark of originality that Activity Andy would never possess. If you're a soccer star or a talented violin player, for example, then keep these pursuits. The same goes for the Web site design business you've launched, or the local comic book club you grew into a serious organization. Activity Andy would be confounded by such talent-driven or original actions, so they're good to stay. The rest, however, should go.

I should hasten to mention that there are two exceptions to observe in applying this test. You should always feel free to keep an Activity Andyfriendly activity on your list if it meets one of the following two criteria. The first is if it's something that requires only a small time investment on your part and that you joined for social reasons-say, to hang out with your friends or impress cute girls or boys. Without friends and flirting, high school wouldn't be high school.

A good example of this exception was my longtime members.h.i.+p in the model UN club. This commitment required a one-hour meeting, after school, once a week. There was also a conference, once a year, held at a hotel, which required a few nights of extra preparation. I joined this club because many of my friends did as well, and we wanted to spend a weekend together in a hotel, causing all sorts of bada.s.s model-UN-style mischief, focused mainly on trying to impress the cute representative from Libya. Sure, Activity Andy could have also joined model UN-the only criterion was showing up for meetings-and I don't think I even listed it on my college applications. But much more important, during my final conference in senior year, I actually convinced a girl I met there to briefly date me-making the entire endeavor worthwhile. I wouldn't want you to miss out on a similar victory.

The second exception applies to activities that align with your core values. If you volunteer at church, for example, because it's a community that is important to your life, then of course forget the Activity Andy test and keep volunteering. If you're doing it only because you think it shows character on your application, however, the exception doesn't apply.

In general, be wary. I mention these exceptions so that you won't remove things that are important to you outside the realm of college admissions. But don't go nuts. Your aim is still to achieve the ideal student workweek, so try to limit the number of activities that don't meet the Activity Andy test.

When the dust has settled, don't freak out. Your activity list may now look empty and forlorn, but this is a necessary starting point if you are to achieve the full power of the underscheduled lifestyle. Your next step is to use this newfound free time to explore-uncovering the deep interests that will, in turn, generate the interestingness that can make you a standout. The second section of this playbook describes strategies for exploration.

Explore

In early January 2009, I wrote a blog post t.i.tled "Start Your Semester Off Right by Quitting Something." It was a plea for underscheduling. I hoped to harness my readers' New Yearinspired self-improvement zeal to remove some time sinkholes from their schedules, and thereby lower their stress and help them open themselves to more potential deep interests. This was not the first time I had preached this message on my blog, and most students were happy for the reminder. But a reader named Kara was not.

"I have to disagree," she began. "Last semester I was very underscheduled and spent a lot of time just hanging out with friends.... Advocating more and more free, unstructured playtime does not work ... for me. My brain operates best on a busy but balanced schedule."

Another student, Phillip, added that if he reduced his work time, his attention would simply transfer to all of the leisure activities competing for it: "sports, video games, TV, friends, and food."

And a student who went by the pseudonym "supergirl" seconded these concerns by admitting: "I dropped lots of things last semester and just spent an embarra.s.sing amount of time online."

This trio of dissenters highlights an important point. Many students fear, and rightly so, that if they reduce the stuff in their schedule, they'll just fill their new free time with laziness-decreasing their impressiveness. As another student reacting to this post put it, there's an "inertia" built from busyness that keeps him rolling through the work that he hopes will eventually get him into college. Clearing out his schedule, he noted, would act like a brake on his forward progress.

Fortunately, the law of underscheduling addresses this concern. While the first half asks that you leave significant amounts of free time in your schedule, the second half adds that you should use this time to explore. It's this exploration clause that will save you from a descent into laziness. If you can direct the free time toward exposure to interesting things, you'll develop deep interests. The deep interests will then generate interestingness, which will make you much more impressive than the overscheduled drones you're competing against for admissions slots.

There is still the question of how to best inject such exploration into your life. The goal of the remaining sections of this playbook is to describe specific strategies for doing so. These strategies will help you transform the ideal student workday into a powerful, deep-interest-attracting magnet.

Cultivating a Reading Habit

I can teach you the secret to scoring in the high 700s on the verbal section of the SAT. In fact, I can isolate a single trait shared by every high scorer on this section whom I've ever met. These students started reading adult-level books around the third or fourth grade.

Memorizing vocabulary lists can improve your verbal score. But the students getting 780s and above are lifelong, precocious readers. I was one of those students. I read my first real novel, Michael Crichton's Jura.s.sic Park, in the third grade. By the time I entered my senior year of high school, the verbal section of the SAT was a breeze. Reading-comprehension questions seemed straightforward, vocabulary words familiar; even the words that I couldn't precisely define still emanated some essence of their meaning. The word "loquacious" might baffle the average seventeen-year-old, but to a reader, even one who doesn't know its exact meaning, its correct definition ("full of excessive talk") will somehow just seem more right than the other options. (A lifelong reader has probably encountered the word enough times in books that some sense of its meaning is buried deep in the folds of his or her brain.) The benefits of this habit, however, extend far beyond SAT scores. Lifelong readers also write better. Through sheer exposure to prose, their sentence structures gain complexity and rhythm. When reviewing e-mails from the students who follow my blog, I can easily sort the readers from the nonreaders. Consider the following two sentences, each taken from a different student e-mail currently in my in-box: "Certainly, I was devastated by the whole thing, but now I realize that it may have been a blessing in disguise."

"I recently stumbled upon your Study Hacks blog and I was mulling whether you will create a post about increasing vocabulary by any chance because I know it is the foundation of good essays."

It doesn't take a professional grammarian to deduce that the first sentence came from a serious reader. (Even more impressive, the student who wrote that e-mail is only a freshman in high school-perhaps a budding relaxed superstar?) Lifelong readers are also better able to focus on complex ideas, and this helps them in a variety of academic situations. In a column that appeared in the New York Times on July 4, 2009, Nicholas Kristof noted that American children who stop reading over summer vacation actually lose IQ points due to the lack of mental exercise.

"A mountain of research points to a central lesson," Kristof wrote. "Pry your kids away from the keyboard and the television this summer, and get them reading."

Put simply, for students, reading acts as a wonder drug.

The reason I mention this habit here, however, is that it also provides a powerful catalyst for the development of deep interests. Reflecting on my own life, I notice that almost every major deep interest driving my student career owes something to books. In high school, I cofounded a small technology company, Princeton Web Solutions, with my good friend Michael Simmons. The superficial interest I'd had in entrepreneurs.h.i.+p became deep enough for me to launch this venture only after I read Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews's biography of Bill Gates. When I arrived at college, I settled on a computer science major because I thought it would support a career in start-up business. But after reading several scientist biographies, notably James Gleick's Genius: The Life and Mind of Richard Feynman and Sylvia Nasar's A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and n.o.bel Laureate John Nash, I developed a deep interest in math and theory that propelled me into the PhD program at MIT.

My compulsive reading habit bathed me in potentially interesting information. After years of this exposure, a few things remained with me long enough to become deep interests-and these changed my life.

The general observation here is that reading is an excellent vehicle for the exploration piece of the law of underscheduling. Cultivating this habit is one of the most important things you can do with the time we freed up in the first section of this playbook.

Some students worry, however, that an obsession with reading is a trait you're either born with or not. Here's my stance: There's no such thing as a natural-born reader. Just because you don't read a lot now doesn't mean that you're missing some key gene. Students become "natural" readers due to environment and luck. Perhaps, when they were growing up, they happened to have access to lots of books, or they came across a t.i.tle exciting enough to propel them into reading more complicated prose. When I was eight, for example, the thrill of dinosaurs devouring paleontologists was enough to drive me through my first novel, even though much of it escaped my understanding. The point here is that there's no magic to becoming a reader. Some are lucky enough to stumble into this category, but there's nothing to stop you from getting there by choice. In this section, I'll teach you how to do it.

Let's start with a common pitfall. Something I've noticed when advising students to start reading is that they believe they should be tackling big, important books. For example, in response to an article I wrote on this topic, a student named Ian wrote me for some book recommendations. He told me that he had been trying to work his way through "Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald" but was falling short.

There's nothing wrong with reading the great authors. But I think the idea that only the canonical texts count keeps a lot of young people away from the shelves. Ian was struggling with these books, and his struggle was preventing him from developing a reading addiction. So I'll throw caution to the wind and say it out loud: Screw the canonical texts! The key to cultivating a strong reading habit is to find books that keep you up late at night reading-whatever they are. They don't have to be novels. Indeed, one of the fastest ways of building the habit is to take a topic you already love-baseball, Star Trek, business-and find nonfiction books about it. Reading doesn't have to be an exercise in self-control where you work through a "good" book because you've been told a thousand times that it will change your life. Search instead for something that captivates you. For your goal of exposing yourself to interesting ideas, it doesn't matter whether or not the book won a Booker Prize.

With this caveat in mind, I have two specific pieces of advice for getting started down the road to reading. First, make a trek to Barnes & n.o.ble, or a similar book megastore. Go alone and give yourself plenty of time. Start browsing the tables of new releases. Seek out sections that match some interest you already have. (Seriously, anything you're interested in has a book written about it somewhere in that store.) Build up a pile of books that pique your curiosity. Remember: Screw quality! Interest rules in this exercise.

Next, take your pile to the in-store cafe. Buy a coffee. Settle in and start reading. When I'm doing a session of this type, I proceed one book at a time. I start by reading the description and the blurbs on the jacket, trying to get a feel for what the book is about and why it's supposedly important. I'll then usually read the introduction and skim through some promising chapters to get a sense of the main ideas. In most cases, I then move on to the next book. If the book really happens to catch my attention, however, I may ignore the rest of the stack and really start reading. I may even go home with the book. I'd estimate that 10 percent of the books I pick up really capture my attention.

This approach is all about exposure. The megastores have a huge selection, and the books are arranged on tables and in shelf end-cap displays to catch your attention. In such an environment, you can quickly gain a sense of exactly which types of books really do hold your attention. These are where you should start.

I suggest making an expedition of this type at least once a month. If you're rolling in money, you can actually bring home your favorite find after each expedition. For most of us, however, this is impractical-which brings me to my second piece of advice: Use your local library. Regardless of the size of your local library, it is undoubtedly plugged into a network of many more branches. If, during one of your bookstore expeditions, you encounter a book you love, you can then request it from your library network. The network will deliver it to your local branch for you to pick up and read for free. If no one else has requested the book, it will arrive in a day or two. If there is a long waiting list, it could take weeks. The key is to continually add books that catch your attention to your request queue. This ensures a steady arrival of t.i.tles at your local branch.

It's this one-two punch-frequent browsing at a big bookstore plus requesting the most interesting books from your library-that can knock you into a serious and addictive reading habit. Try this approach for just a few months, and you'll be surprised by how interested you become in the printed word. What's more, this exposure will become one of your most important sources of deep interest.

The Sat.u.r.day-Morning Project

In my first book, How to Win at College, I introduced the concept of the Grand Project, which I described as follows: A Grand Project is any project that when explained to someone for the first time is likely to elicit a response of "wow!"

Examples of such projects include: Writing a screenplay Trying to get a short story published Launching a microbusiness Mastering an interesting and unusual hobby Building a popular blog Starting an activist movement In How to Win at College, I advised all students to launch a Grand Project, and I offered two main rationales. First, these projects inject excitement and possibility into your life, thus helping to keep you optimistic through the small ups and downs of the standard student experience-a bad grade, a lost boyfriend, etc. It is the second reason, however, that's most relevant to our discussion here about exploration. I noted that Grand Projects have a way of attracting other random and cool opportunities. Once you start down the path to building a popular blog, or firing up a student activist movement, you throw open the door to what Ben Casnocha, mentioned earlier in Part 1, called "bulk positive randomness." In other words, choose a Grand Project because it sounds exciting and will keep your life interesting, but be ready for it to potentially introduce you to a deep interest you had never before considered.

You may object that this scheme could cause a conflict. Projects require time and commitment. The law of underscheduling, by contrast, wants you to reduce your committed time. This is where the "Sat.u.r.day-Morning" piece of this subsection's t.i.tle comes into play. A Sat.u.r.day-Morning Project is a Grand Project with one important addition: you work on the project only on Sat.u.r.day morning, between the time when you wake up and lunch. What's cool about a Sat.u.r.day-Morning Project (or SMP, for short) is that you gain the two benefits of a Grand Project (excitement and exposure to cool things) without introducing a major time sinkhole into your schedule. Sat.u.r.day morning is rarely filled with other obligations, so you're making use of time that would otherwise lie fallow to make consistent progress on something interesting. Of course, if an SMP takes off, you can increase the time you dedicate to it. But if you're lucky enough to get to this point, then the project has probably transformed into a true deep interest, so you can feel comfortable making it one of the small number of things you seriously focus on during the week. Above all, keeping an SMP alive will strengthen the ambitious and confident mind-set necessary for the type of aggressive exploration that makes the law of underscheduling work.

Join Communities

In the introduction to this book, I mentioned Kara, a student from the Bay Area who got accepted into Stanford and MIT, even though she had Bs on her transcript and a spa.r.s.e extracurricular schedule. In Part 3, I'll tell the full story of Kara's remarkable admissions coup, explaining exactly how she got involved in the activities that made her a star. But in this chapter, I want to give you a preview. Specifically, I want to highlight an important component in her improbable rise: community.

As a soph.o.m.ore in high school, Kara, along with a couple of friends, began volunteering at a local community center. The center a.s.signed her to a project that required the videotaping of World War II veterans, to capture their memories of the war. Most weekends that year, Kara and her friends would dutifully lug a video camera to yet another ranch house or bungalow tucked away on some sunny California street, set up the tripod and boom microphone, and then walk the subject through a list of questions.

At this point, there was nothing spectacular about Kara's involvement. There was no deep interest; it was just a volunteer gig with her friends.

But then things changed. One weekend morning, after setting up her camera and asking the first of the standard questions from her list, she realized that her subject was someone special. His natural timing and rich baritone made the interview compelling, and his experiences were unique and infused with insight. Kara edited the interview and showed it to her supervisor. He also thought it was special, and he invited Kara to present the clip at a fund-raiser for the center. This raised her profile within the organization. The executive director, impressed by her professionalism and interest, asked her, "What would you like to work on next?" Kara had a bold suggestion involving the construction of a new health curriculum. (One of the center's other projects was developing technology-based curricula for school.) He told her to do some more research and then get back to him.

As mentioned, you'll encounter the full story of what happened next in Part 3. What's important to know for this chapter is that two years later, by the time Kara's college counselor was balking at the lack of AP courses and club members.h.i.+ps on her application, Kara's curriculum idea had developed at an astonis.h.i.+ng pace-eventually being adopted by schools in ten states. At the core of this exceptional accomplishment was community. Without a community to channel her energy and provide structure and resources for her project, Kara would not have been accepted into Stanford and MIT. As I'll argue below, joining a community is one of the most important things you can do to foster deep interests and then nurture the projects they inspire.

I'll start with the basics. When I say "community," I mean any group of individuals who work together toward a common cause. Communities exist both offline and online. The fans that run the sprawling Lostpedia Web site for ABC's. .h.i.t series Lost, for example, form an online community. The community center where Kara volunteered was an offline community. In Boston, to give another example, there's a group of skeptics who meet most weeks to share a drink and talk science. This is a wonderfully nerdy gathering. It's also a community. As is the group of film buffs who meet every Sunday morning at the historic, single-screen cinema on Brattle Street in Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, to screen independent films making the festival rounds.

Communities act like interestingness incubators. If you join a community, you'll immediately encounter a variety of small projects you can adopt, and little actions you can take to advance them. These small steps generate larger and more exciting opportunities. The community gathers these opportunities, combines them with the resources and support needed to realize them, and then doles them out to its members as they're earned.

Kara benefited from this reality. The community center, with its many members and charismatic founders, attracted a lot of grant money and was engaged in a variety of projects. When Kara joined, she was immediately exposed to small things she could do to help-for example, filming veterans. As she paid her dues on these initial projects, she gained access to larger projects already under way within her community. When she began developing an idea for a health curriculum, the organization could offer her a large amount of support. When she needed to test her lesson plans in a cla.s.sroom, the organization already had programs in place with the local school districts that could easily be repurposed to this cause. And when the curriculum eventually spread to ten states, it should be no surprise that these were ten states where the community service organization already had relations.h.i.+ps with the school districts.

Put another way, Kara could never have come close to her final accomplishment if she had been working on her own. It was not raw brilliance or creativity that made this curriculum happen. It was the combination of her deep interest and hard work with all of the support, focus, and resources provided by her community.

This story of a community acting as an accelerant for an interesting person's rise to prominance is not rare. To give another, somewhat esoteric example, consider the ma.s.sive and well-organized fan community surrounding the Harry Potter books. In 2001, a recently graduated college student named Melissa Anelli moved back home while searching for a job. She wanted to be a writer but didn't know where to get started. To ease the anxiety of her situation, she spent her spare hours posting on the message boards of a popular fan site called The Leaky Cauldron.

As Anelli recalls in her 2008 book, Harry, a History, a single event soon occurred that changed the course of her young life. It started when she broke a "major" story for the fan site. Vanity Fair was scheduled to release the first pictures from the set of the first Harry Potter movie. This was a big deal for Harry Potter fans, as it would provide a glimpse at how the world of Hogwarts would be portrayed on-screen. Melissa persuaded the corner-store grocer in her hometown to sell her a copy of the magazine a day before its official release. She scanned the photos and sent them to The Leaky Cauldron's editors, who promptly posted them. Within the community, it was considered a big score, driving lots of traffic to the site. That raised Melissa's profile. She began to track down more big stories. Among other victories, she was the first fan site writer to get the PR department at Warner Bros., which produces the Harry Potter films, to return her calls and confirm or deny rumors. Eventually she was promoted to Web mistress of the site, and then she took control of the entire enterprise when its founders moved on to other things.

As the fan community surrounding Harry Potter grew, so did the opportunities available for Melissa to act on her deepening interest in writing and reporting. She gained allies within the Warner Bros. studio and at Scholastic, the company that publishes the Harry Potter books. In perhaps her biggest victory, she interviewed and befriended the books' author, J. K. Rowling, herself-and Rowling recorded the opening to The Leaky Cauldron podcast. In 2008, when Anelli published Harry, a History, these connections, and the insider information they afforded her, helped propel the t.i.tle onto the New York Times bestseller list.

Like Kara, Melissa needed a community to channel her energy. Without it, her determination to be a successful writer would probably not have led to the bestseller list. The community made it possible.

Here's my advice for taking advantage of this power: If you have a casual interest in a topic, seek out and join a related community. Partic.i.p.ate regularly in this community, using the abundant free time generated by the underscheduled lifestyle to jump at small projects and opportunities as they arise. At this early stage, follow-through is critical. Every story I've ever encountered about someone being catapulted to prominence involves that person not only volunteering to take on small projects but then also following through to completion-again and again. This is part of the reason why I had you free up so much time from your schedule, so you can tackle challenges like these as they come up, without an overbooked course load or too many boring extracurriculars draining your availability.

In summary, the secret to leveraging communities is simple: Pay your dues, and bigger opportunities will arise. Before you know it, the variety of fascinating, impressive projects available to you will grow. As with Kara and Melissa, getting involved with a community might prove to be the most important single step you take on your path to superstardom.

The Advice-Guide Method

In an essay t.i.tled "The Narrative Idea," written for the Nieman Foundation's annual conference on narrative journalism, the late author David Halberstam offered a powerful suggestion for young journalists: When you find a reporter whose work you admire, break his or her code. Examine the story and figure out what the reporter did, where he or she went, how that reporter constructed the story, and why it worked [emphasis mine].

At the core of this advice is a simple idea: Blind effort, by itself, is worthless. Plenty of people in the world work hard without reaping much reward for their effort. There are tens of thousands of aspiring writers, for example, who invest huge amounts of time in crafting a novel or pitching articles to magazines, yet still never get anywhere. I occasionally hear from students who tell me that they've spent the last year crafting a 100,000-word book, and they want me to connect them with an editor who'll publish it. I ask them if they've tried to sign with an agent (a necessary first step), or, for that matter, if they have any professional writing experience. The answer is invariably no, which, as it turns out, is the answer they then receive from publishers when they send an unsolicited copy of their "masterpiece." It's not that these students aren't capable of producing a good book, it's just that they didn't take the time to learn what's really involved in making this happen. They didn't crack the code of published writers.

This same logic, crafted by Halberstam for the writing world, can also apply to any casual interest that you want to transform into deep interest. Here's a common scenario: In the abundant free time generated by your underscheduled student workweek, you encounter something that piques your curiosity. Perhaps it came up in a book you read or is an opportunity that arose from a community you joined. After a few days pa.s.s, you notice that your excitement about this pursuit remains undiminished, so you decide to go after it seriously. What should you do next? Taking your cue from Halberstam, your best next step is to crack the code-that is, figure out exactly what it takes to succeed in this particular pursuit. By doing so, you'll gain two immediate advantages. First, this knowledge builds confidence that will help you stick with the pursuit during its transformation into a sustained deep interest. Second, you'll discover what next steps to take-a surprisingly difficult question to answer for many pursuits.

I call this approach the advice-guide method, because it asks you, in effect, to research an advice guide for succeeding in a field before you jump into action. If you're seeking real accomplishment, this is unquestionably the best way to proceed.

But how does one conduct this research? In his essay, Halberstam spelled out a method for cracking the code in the specific world of journalism. He suggested that you read the reporters you admire and then try to identify exactly what about their writing, as compared to that of other writers, impresses you. Below, I generalize this idea into a three-step process for accomplis.h.i.+ng something similar in any field of interest: Find examples of people who have succeeded in the field, and examples of people who did not succeed.

Compare the success stories with the failure stories and identify where they differ.

Contact one of the people who have succeeded and ask for specific advice.

These three steps capture the core idea behind Halberstam's advice: Ground yourself in real examples and real people. Unless you draw on specific examples, you run the risk of generalization or falling prey to popular but unsubstantiated myths. It's easy to come up with advice that sounds right. It's much harder to find advice that actually works. That's why you have to start with primary sources.

Consider the rapidly expanding world of blogging-an appealing pursuit for many students. Let's imagine that you're interested in growing a popular blog. If you ignore the advice-guide method, and instead search online for a few tips before diving into action, you risk accepting some of the false beliefs that permeate this field. You might decide, for example, that the key to success is a fancy Web site, or publis.h.i.+ng lists of links that might attract a large number of Digg votes. But if you followed the advice-guide method, and worked with real examples and real people, you might choose a very different course.

In fact, while researching this topic, I decided to put the above claim to the test. Adopting the scenario described-a high school student looking to build a popular blog-I went through all three steps of the advice-guide method. Below, I report the results.

Step 1 asks that I find examples of successes and failures in my field. For my successful blog example, I used J. D. Roth's phenomenally popular Get Rich Slowly personal finance blog-dubbed GRS by its fans. JD has over 70,000 RSS subscribers and attracts over 750,000 monthly visitors. Running GRS is his (lucrative) full-time job.

For my failure example, I wanted something that tackled the same topic as GRS-personal finance-so that I could compare apples to apples. This was easy enough to find. I first did a Google search for "personal finance blogs;" then I scrolled to the dreck hidden deep down in the search results. I quickly stumbled across a typical mediocre blog-it had only a few readers and sporadic postings.

Step 2 of the advice-guide method asks that I compare the two examples to identify exactly what separates them. To keep things fair, I decided to look only at the first two months of postings from each site (the amount of time before GRS became JD's full-time job).

Here are the traits I noticed about GRS: JD posted almost every day during the first two months of the blog.

The articles were professionally crafted and edited. JD would lay out his thesis, offer specific advice-usually accompanied by abundant links to related resources-and then conclude with a list of similar articles the reader might also enjoy.

In his first week, JD covered the following, among other topics: how teens can better manage their money; how to decide whether to repair or junk an ailing car; the best online financial calculators; an innovative strategy for saving money; and traits shared by people who become millionaires. There were no musings about his weekends or apologies for slow posting.

He introduced several regular series, such as "Pep Talk" and "Frugality in Practice," that focused on the topics of articles that his readers seemed to enjoy most.

His advice was often unexpected. Almost every article included a new twist or an idea that went beyond common sense.

By contrast, here are the traits I noticed about the failed personal finance blog: Most of the advice was written in the first person and drew heavily on personal opinions. The style was informal and emoticons were used with distressing frequency.

Only 30 percent of the posts focused on specific advice. The rest were a mix of the author's reactions to other articles, personal notes (e.g., "I'm taking the weekend off," or "Here's a story about something interesting that happened to me"), and random links.

The advice articles reeked of mind dumping; that is, they had the feel of an author just rattling off the first things that came to mind in order to have something to publish. A post on saving money at the grocery store became mired in generic and obvious tips, including: stock up on sale items, cook instead of buying prepared foods, and beware of the expense of organic food.

This comparison exercise, which took me less than an hour to complete, yielded tremendously useful insights about succeeding in the field of advice blogging. I learned, for example, that a successful advice blog requires that you focus almost exclusively on producing a regular series of advice posts, and avoid posts on your personal opinions or lists of random links. I also learned that advice is worthless unless it tells people something they couldn't have thought of on their own. And the advice should be presented in a professional style.

This covers the first two steps of the advice-guide method. The third and final step asks that you actually contact someone involved with a successful example of the pursuit, and then ask for guidance. This step is tricky. By definition, if the person is successful, he or she is probably busy and likely to ignore a rambling or unclear e-mail from some random high school kid. You have to be strategic in your approach.

Here's my advice for making this contact work: Send the person an e-mail. Explain that you're in high school and that you're interested in the person's field and looking for advice.

Be very clear about your expectations. I recommend listing two or three short questions at the bottom of the e-mail. Ask if the person is willing to respond to these queries.

Make your questions specific. Anything too general-"How do I succeed?"-will be ignored. It's easy to answer specific questions. It's hard to ponder general, unclear prompts.