How To Be A High School Superstar Part 9

To conclude, I want to return to the story of Michael Silverman-the focused student described in the opening of Part 2. In the previous chapter, I argued that the Superstar Effect played an important role in Michael's admissions success. Here I'll argue that the Matthew Effect was at work as well.

Let's start by tracing the key steps in Michael's rise to prominence. During his freshman year of high school, Michael and a friend pitched an independent-project idea to their teachers. They proposed a somewhat ambiguous plan to design a house of the future. When discussing this idea, they learned from one of their teachers about a grant program run by a local energy company. The program was intended to fund student groups looking to build sustainable energy projects. The teacher who told them about the project helped them apply for the grant. To improve their chances, however, they abandoned their wishy-washy house design idea for something more concrete: converting a golf cart to run on biodiesel. After winning a $5,000 grant, they found a retired engineer who had the expertise to help them complete the conversion. He was also willing to volunteer unlimited time, which was fortunate, because Michael and his friend knew nothing about engineering. By the time this project was completed, Michael had honed a specific skill: raising money for sustainability projects and then seeing them through to completion. (Remember, he put all of his time into making this project work-avoiding any other extracurricular entanglements.) From this initial ability multiple complementary accomplishments began to blossom. After finis.h.i.+ng the golf cart conversion, Michael submitted a new grant to the energy company. His proposal was to add solar panels to the school's maintenance shed. With a solid track record behind him, he found that the company was quick to award him the second grant. This allowed Michael to start the project, but it soon began clear that more money was needed. At this point, however, he could demonstrate to his school's administration that he had received multiple grants and completed similar projects. This gave him enough credibility to get the additional funding needed to complete the work. Soon the press started to write articles about this environmental wunderkind. People at a nonprofit in California read these articles and invited Michael and his friend to come present their biodiesel golf cart at a major exhibit on alternative energy. By the time he applied to Stanford, Michael was a star.

Michael modestly describes his rise as a sequence of lucky breaks. But we know better. Through our newly trained eyes, we see a core ability attracting complementary opportunities and accomplishments. Because Michael took the time to become good at one thing, lots of impressive achievements began to pile up for free. The same can happen for you. Model your extracurricular career after those of Kevin, Tom, Arnav, Geoffrey, and Michael. Focus on becoming very good at one thing. Have faith that this focus will not translate into a paltry, one-line activity list attached to your college application. The Complementary-Accomplishments Hypothesis says that your focused ability will be rewarded with a pile of complementary accomplishments that will be more impressive than any you could generate by spending more time spread over multiple unrelated projects.

As you go forth and ruthlessly cull your schedule in your quest to master a single skill, you can quell your undercommitment anxiety with the words of Matthew: "For unto every one that hath, more shall be given, and he shall have abundance."

9.

When More Is Less

IN THE fall of 2008, I wrote a blog post about an overloaded high school senior. I discovered him on a popular college discussion bulletin board where he had anonymously posted his extracurricular and course schedules. He was seeking advice on how to reduce the intense stress in his life. "Quite frankly, I don't have room to breathe," he wrote. "I'm feeling the effects of it physically."

Below is his list of commitments. When you read it, you'll understand his woe: Costumer for a school play Plays three instruments Receives private language tutoring Heavy course load (5 AP courses in current semester) Member of the debate team Book fair organizer Multicultural fair organizer Secretary of the French club Member of the honor board Founded and runs his own club Founded and runs his own nonprofit To some readers, this list will seem absurdly packed. To others, it will seem distressingly familiar. This same strategy is replicated tens of thousands of times each year by students hoping to gain admission to top schools. At its core is a simple idea: the more you do, the better.

However, my own instinctive response to reading his anonymous post was: "He's not going to get accepted into his reach schools." I knew nothing else about him-it was just a knee-jerk reaction to his schedule.

My blog readers experienced a similar reaction. A reader named Ryan commented: "All these people I know are filling their lives with ... clubs, unimportant officer positions, etc.... All these students-valedictorians and 2,300+ SAT scorers included-are now being rejected by all the Ivy League schools." And he was not alone in this sentiment. There's just something about that long list of commitments that hits us-and presumably also admissions officers-the wrong way.

This vague, subjective feeling fascinates me because, logically speaking, adding more things to your schedule shouldn't hurt. As a high school student named David told me while attempting to justify a similarly overloaded lifestyle: "I would say that I probably [do] a bunch of unnecessary stuff, but I can handle it and it doesn't take a physical toll, so I'm good for now." He argued that, all things being equal, if you have the time to squeeze in one more club, then why not? It might not help much, but it doesn't seem that it could make things worse.

This sounds rational. Then again, when I read that list of activities, I still feel uneasy about the student. Something deeper must be going on.

The Laundry List Fallacy

I want to try a simple experiment. Imagine that the overloaded high school senior mentioned above drastically reduced his list from eleven commitments to the following two: Founded and runs his own club Founded and runs his own nonprofit From an objective perspective, this edit should make his admission chances slightly worse. All I did was take his original list of commitments and then remove things. Yet for me, and for many students on whom I've tried this experiment, the drastically reduced list reads better. When only these two activities are described, I lose my knee-jerk reaction that this is a student on track for a rejection. Instead, I'm intrigued. I would want to find out more from his essays and recommendations before pa.s.sing final judgment, but he definitely exudes a sense of potential interestingness that piques my curiosity.

Doing more things made this student seem less impressive. This idea is counterintuitive, but it arises often in the admissions process. When we see a long list of activities, we immediately think that this is an average student working as hard as possible to squeak past the acceptance threshold. In other words, that long, exhaustively constructed list shouts: Warning! Grind at work!

This effect is so common that I've captured it in its own hypothesis: The Laundry List Hypothesis Adding to your schedule an activity that could be replicated by any student willing to sign up and invest a reasonable amount of time in it can hurt your impressiveness. It follows that creating a laundry list of mediocre activities reduces your chances of college acceptance.

This hypothesis is hard for many students to accept. There's strong inertia pus.h.i.+ng you to add just one more thing to your schedule. Fighting this force is difficult. It's much easier to default to the sentiments of David, who said, "I can handle it ... I'm good for now." But the truth behind the Laundry List Hypothesis comes from more than just intuition. A pair of economists, working with a statistician, have spent the last half decade studying this effect in a variety of contexts. It's to their work that I turn your attention next.

The Honest Peac.o.c.k

We begin our journey in the Sultanpur National Park, located about 35 kilometers outside New Delhi in Northern India. If you're lucky, among the dense shrubs and twisted trunks of the banyan groves, you might catch sight of the park's most valued resident: the Indian blue peac.o.c.k. If you arrive in the late spring, during the birds' mating season, you'll likely see the males fan their famed ornamental tail feathers. The iridescent greens and blues of the feathers are adorned with eye-shaped spots. The whole display seems to s.h.i.+mmer as if seen through a heat haze-an effect produced by nano-sized structures in the barbules of the feathers that ricochet light waves back to our eyes in a chaotic pattern.

It's an amazing sight.

I've brought you on this ornithological detour because the peac.o.c.k's plumage teaches an important lesson about a fascinating subject: how the most fit among us signal our brilliance to the rest of the world.

As you probably learned in school, peac.o.c.ks use their elaborate feathers to attract mates. The better-looking the male's feathers, the better chance it has of attracting a female. Biologists have observed a wide variety of these feather displays, from stunningly fancy to paltry. Interestingly, the feathers seem to behave as what biologists call "honest signals." That is, they accurately describe the fitness of the animal to which they belong, which is a fancy way of saying that the better birds have better feathers. This basic observation, however, introduces a th.o.r.n.y question: Why didn't these birds evolve to lie? That is, why aren't all birds, regardless of their actual fitness, trying to grow the most elaborate possible feather displays? The most compelling explanation for this honesty was proposed in the late 1970s by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and his Oxford colleague, famed bird expert John R. Krebs. They argued that such signals evolved as an escalating "arms race" between predator and prey. In the case of the peac.o.c.k, the more elaborate the bird's feathers the easier it is for a predator to find and eat it. Therefore, only the birds best able to escape from such a predator-that is, the healthiest and strongest birds-can risk growing an elaborate display. For a weak bird, such boasting would be suicide-the equivalent of hanging a dinner bell around its neck. Evolution, therefore, forges a link between a bird's strength and the elaborateness of its feathers. The signals are honest not because the animals are nice, or, as biologists used to think, because it's good for the species as a whole, but because it's evolution's best solution to the ongoing war between predator and prey-a by-product of a natural world that Tennyson famously called "red in tooth and claw."

This idea eventually expanded into its own field, known as signaling theory. It wasn't until 2002, however, that this theory first intersected with the world of college admissions. In that year, the economists Nick Feltovich and Rick Harbaugh, working with statistician Ted To, used signaling theory as the starting point for answering a simple but vexing question: Why don't the smart kids raise their hands more in cla.s.s?

The Peac.o.c.k in the Cla.s.sroom

When considering the question posed by Feltovich, Harbaugh, and To, ignore the effects of peer pressure (i.e., that students fear it's uncool to look smart). These researchers were interested in the phenomenon occurring in cla.s.srooms where being smart was unambiguously good-for example, at an elite school. In such a setting, cla.s.sical signaling theory says that the dumb kids can't risk raising their hand because they might get called on and give the wrong answer (the equivalent of the unfit bird growing elaborate plumage and then promptly being eaten). It follows that a student who confidently raises his or her hand at every opportunity must actually be smart; therefore the smart kids should constantly volunteer. But that is not what happens in real cla.s.srooms. Teachers report that the brightest students often seem to go out of their way to avoid offering an answer. The researchers set out to explain this observation, and ended up with a counterintuitive answer.

Feltovich, Harbaugh, and To took the cla.s.sical signaling theory model and added a new twist: a side channel that sends extra information about the signaler. The important property of the side channel is that the signaler can't control it. In the world of the peac.o.c.ks, for example, fights between male birds act like a side channel that's more likely to send positive information about better birds. Presumably, winning a fight sends a good signal about a bird's strength to the watching female birds. A male bird can't choose in advance how a fight will turn out, but the stronger he is, the better the chance that he will win.

When the researchers applied this new model to the cla.s.sroom setting, they reasoned that the smarter the student, the higher the chance that her cla.s.smates will have heard about her brainpower indirectly through a side channel-perhaps hallway gossip or overheard conversations. The researchers then captured this idea in a precise mathematical model to deduce the best strategy for the smart students to signal good things about themselves. To their happy surprise, the answer matched what was observed in real cla.s.srooms: the best strategy for the smart kids to signal their intelligence is to rarely answer questions.

When you deconstruct the mathematics driving this result, a simple explanation emerges. The medium-ability students have to signal their skill by answering lots of questions. They can't rely on the side channel to convey information about their smarts, as they aren't actually smart enough for this to be very likely. Their big fear is that if they don't answer questions and the side channel fails to send something positive, they'll appear indistinguishable from the low-ability students (who never volunteer answers or expect anything good about their intelligence to be conveyed through the side channel). It's better to get a few questions wrong and be accurately labeled as medium-ability than it is to be mistaken for low-ability.

The high-ability students, by contrast, are confident that the side channel will send positive information about their intelligence. That is, they a.s.sume their reputation precedes them into the cla.s.sroom. Thus their best strategy to differentiate themselves from the medium-ability students is to rarely answer questions. They deploy this strategy exactly because the medium-ability students can't risk it. Put another way, only a student who is truly confident about her skills can afford to avoid showing them off.

The researchers named this strategy countersignaling because of its counterintuitive conclusion that not signaling can sometimes be the best signal of all. They soon discovered a variety of settings in which their theory explained observed behavior. In a job interview, for example, if you're a top candidate, the theory says it's best not to brag about your grades. Only an applicant truly confident that his reputation for smarts precedes him-for example, in his references-can risk not bragging. Therefore, if you don't make a point of mentioning that you're Phi Beta Kappa, you'll come across as even smarter. Similarly, for a new professor, the better the school where you teach, the less need you have to brag about your PhD-the reputation of the school acts as a side channel that pa.s.ses along positive information about your credentials. This last prediction was verified in an elegant experiment in which the researchers called the voice mail of professors in the California public university system. As predicted, the better the school's ranking, the less likely they were to hear "you've reached Doctor ..." start the voice mail greeting.

The Peac.o.c.k in the Admissions Process

The theory of countersignaling can help explain the Laundry List Hypothesis. Consider the extracurricular activity list you attach to your college application. Every item on this list is a signal of your admissions fitness. You control these signals by choosing what to join. In addition, we can imagine a side channel that is out of your control. In admissions, this side channel might include your recommendations and the report generated by your student interviewer. It might also include your awards and your essay-the best, most interesting students' essays tend to emanate something special. As the theory would have it, the better the student, the more likely that this side channel will say something good about him.

The theory of countersignaling says that the medium-ability applicants should include long activity lists in their applications. They can't trust that their side channel will provide a strong endors.e.m.e.nt, so they need to send lots of positive signals on the channel they do control: their extracurriculars. If they don't, they risk appearing indistinguishable from the automatically rejected low-ability applicants. (The a.s.sumption here is that the low-ability applicants will always have spa.r.s.e activity lists, and their side channel will rarely say something good about them.) The high-ability applicants, by contrast, can trust that their side channel will convey great things. With this in mind, to differentiate themselves from the medium-ability applicants they should send fewer positive signals by way of their activities list. Put another way, the top applicants trust that their reputation as stars precedes them, so they can confidently avoid the mediocre activities that any diligent students could replicate.

This theory explains our reaction to the student from the beginning of this chapter. His long list of activities turned us off because it matched the best strategy for a medium-ability applicant. It made him seem like an average student doing everything possible to try to squeeze himself just above the acceptance threshold. By contrast, the reduced version of his activity list matched what we might expect from a high-ability applicant-the two items it included were impressive enough to convince us that his side channel would likely add something positive. This is why we felt intrigued by his potential.

The theory of countersignaling also explains a surprising discovery I made while researching this book: many students who get accepted into top colleges actually omit activities from their applications. For example, Jessica, whom you met in Part 1, and Maneesh, about whom you'll learn more in Part 3, both admitted that they left off activities. The theory also explains why students like Michael Silverman, who had only a small number of highly focused accomplishments on his resume, did so well during the admissions process. The short activity lists of these students match the template for a high-ability applicant.

The theory of countersignaling provides my final argument for the law of focus. Whereas the previous two chapters described the impressiveness that is generated by doing something very well, this chapter describes the impressiveness lost by the opposing strategy of doing many things kind of well. It leads us to the surprising conclusion that when it comes to college admissions, sometimes less is more.

In the playbook section that follows, I provide some practical advice for following this law. I begin by helping you identify your focused pursuits. Once these pursuits are identified, the task of restricting your attention to them is easy. More difficult, however, is actually mastering them. It's surprisingly common for students to spend a lot of time on an activity without gaining much ability. With this in mind, I next walk you through what I call the art of becoming good. I conclude with advice for maintaining the focused life over the long run. If you combine a commitment to focus with the strategies ahead, you'll ensure yourself a quick transition onto a relaxed superstar trajectory.

Part 2

Playbook

THE LAW of focus asks that you restrict your attention to a small number of pursuits that you stick with throughout your high school career. Eventually this focus should lead to mastery, which acts like a shot of steroids into your impressiveness muscles. In practice, however, this process is not always so straightforward. First you face the challenge of identifying what to focus on. I've met many students who were paralyzed with indecision due to their fear that they might choose the wrong pursuit. a.s.suming you overcome this fear, and are able to identify the target of your focus, there's still no guarantee that simply restricting your attention will lead to the mastery that allows the Superstar Effect and Matthew Effect to work their magic. Spending time on something is not synonymous with becoming good at it. And once you've adopted the focused lifestyle, the small responsibilities of daily life have a way of nudging you back toward a more cluttered existence. The focused student must be vigilant about fighting this complexity creep.

This playbook addresses these concerns. To simplify the presentation, I've divided it into three sections. The first section provides straightforward advice for identifying a focus. The next section contains a series of subsections dedicated to what I call the art of becoming good. Mastering a skill is nontrivial. These subsections will teach you the strategies you need to conquer this art. The final section of the playbook concerns maintaining the focused life. Drawing inspiration from one of history's greatest scientists, I outline a habit that will keep your attention uncluttered.

Identifying a Focus

I frequently preach the gospel of focus on my student advice blog. On the day that I'm editing this chapter (August 19, 2009), half of the articles on my home page emphasize the idea that students should master a small number of things. Jose Quesada, founder of the popular Academic Productivity site, recently called this topic the "leitmotiv" of my blogging.* And he's right. I mention the idea so often that many of my readers have started to preface their e-mailed questions with some variation of the following disclaimer: "I know you're going to tell me that I should be doing less things, but ..."

As you may imagine, therefore, I receive a lot of feedback on this topic-not all of it positive. A reader named Basu, for example, recently commented: "While I certainly agree with the basic idea of focusing your effort, I think it's hard to determine ... what [this] one 'item' is.... Simply doing the same things as other people, even if you do them well, might not be enough." Another reader noted: "I can see the appeal of focusing on a few things; however, I instead try to focus on becoming a really good learner and then apply that skill to become as multifaceted as possible." Along the same lines, several readers recently commented in support of the idea that students should experiment with lots of endeavors and postpone committing to one until college graduation. As one of these students concluded: "To me, [being a student] should be about expanding ident.i.ty, and part of that is to try many, many things and fail at most of them." Behind these comments I detect a common fear: "What if I choose the wrong thing to focus on?" It is often coupled with this concern: "If I prune my activities too soon, I might miss out on my true calling." I want to address this fear and convince you that choosing a focus is easier and less risky than you might think.

When I counsel students on this topic, I begin by noting that underscheduling must precede focus. As I argued in Part 1 of this book, deep interests-pursuits that you return to voluntarily, again and again, whenever you have free time-are near magical in their ability to transform your life from mediocre to interesting. I dedicated many pages in the Part 1 playbook to teaching you how to open your schedule and expose yourself to enough random inputs that a deep interest can arise naturally. (As you'll recall, the key lesson of this part was that such interests cannot be forced or faked; you have to live a lifestyle conducive to their development.) My advice for identifying a focus, therefore, is to start by forming a deep interest. You can then focus your attention on pursuits related to this deep interest. Because the pursuit is based on something deep, you can be a.s.sured that your ability to focus on it will remain strong throughout your student career. On a practical level, it would be wasteful to segregate the advice in Part 1 from that in Part 2. If you used your deep interests only to generate interestingness, and then focused on an unrelated pursuit to generate the Superstar Effect and Matthew Effect, you'd be doubling your efforts. By combining the two, you retain the benefits of both strategies while investing less overall effort.

This first answer is not always enough to calm students' fears. Some might agree that a deep-interest-generated pursuit will provide them with the interestingness factor promoted in Part 1, but they worry that if this interest doesn't coincide with one of their "natural talents," they may never reach the level of skill needed for the benefits of the law of focus to take effect. You may have noticed that I placed "natural talents" in quotation marks. This takes us to the crux of my second answer: the idea that such talents exist is overrated.

To start, let's take a look at ourselves in the proverbial mirror. American society is enamored with the idea of natural ability. In a study conducted by Sun Xuhua of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, for example, a cohort of Chinese and American students, from the tenth and eleventh grades, filled out questionnaires on their att.i.tudes about math. The results showed a striking difference between the two cultures. "Eastern societies tend to highly value effort, perseverance, and hard work," concluded Sun, "whereas Western counterparts tend to view mathematical ability and creativity as the more important contributing factors for success." That is, we in the West think that math talent is something you're born with, while people in the East see it as a skill, like any other, that can be developed through practice. My own experiences match these results. When I tell Americans I have a PhD in theoretical computer science from MIT, for example, they quickly conjure up images of Good Will Huntingstyle geniuses who solve equations by glancing at a chalkboard. (I wish.) Moving beyond math, our culture holds a similar belief about most pursuits, from sports to the arts: you have to match your effort to your natural talents to become great.

A growing body of research, however, challenges this mind-set. To return to my personal experience, I've discovered that most of the people I work with at MIT validate the Eastern model. Maybe early in their lives they showed a slight apt.i.tude for math that was recognized and that built their confidence, but the amazing skills they wield today as professional researchers come from an amazing amount of practice. To give another example, a common phenomenon at universities is for undergraduates to feel that their grad student teaching a.s.sistants are smarter than they are ("He solves these homework problems so easily!"), while the grad students feel that the professors have an even more superior intellect ("She solves these open research problems so easily!"). This effect doesn't highlight a hierarchy of natural ability. It's more easily explained by differences in experience-the longer you've worked in a field, the better you get.

Another compelling argument for this perspective comes from the 2008 book Talent Is Overrated, written by Geoff Colvin, a senior editor at Fortune. Colvin draws on the growing scientific consensus that investing the right type of practice on a focused pursuit is more important than natural ability when it comes to becoming a star performer.

"We a.s.sume that Mozart was born with an astounding gift for music, just as Warren Buffett carries the gene for making brilliant investments," says Colvin. "The trouble is, scientific evidence doesn't support the notion that specific natural talents make great performers-and such talents may not even exist."

The upside of this consensus is that it removes the pressure from your choice of a focused pursuit. According to Colvin, and the scientists he cites, there's probably no right pursuit that best matches some innate talent. You can master almost any pursuit you choose, so long as you practice it in the right sort of way. (Not coincidently, the playbook sections that follow will teach you the secrets to this optimal practice.) With this in mind, you can relax and let your deep interests guide you to something that piques your curiosity. You can then focus your attention in this single direction, free from worries about matching your endeavors to some mythical natural talent. You don't need a perfect pursuit, just one that's good enough to hold your attention. As I like to conclude when advising focus-averse students, the only wrong choice when it comes to focusing is choosing not to focus at all.

The Art of Becoming Good

John is good at what he does. Really good. When he applied to Princeton, where he now studies, he was the valedictorian of his cla.s.s. He also had perfect SAT scores and was the first-chair violinist in his school's orchestra.

If you get to know John, as I have over the past year, it soon becomes apparent that he's a living incarnation of the law of focus. His high school world consisted entirely of academics and the violin-and he eventually got so good at both that the resulting Superstar Effect had admissions officers scrambling to accept him. He also reaped the benefits of the Matthew Effect. John says that his intense focus on improving his academic abilities led to his top SAT scores, high GPA, and the embarra.s.sment of academic awards and honors he eventually accrued. Similarly, his ability as a violinist sp.a.w.ned impressive opportunities. In addition to earning a seat in his county orchestra, he founded a club dedicated to bringing live music into local nursing homes. These accomplishments didn't require much time, but instead arose naturally given his leaders.h.i.+p position in the orchestra. Finally, countersignaling undoubtedly played a role in John's rise to stardom. With an extracurricular resume focused on such a small number of pursuits, he escaped the stigma of sending too many signals.*

I hope that you agree by now that mastering a small number of pursuits generates huge rewards-as it did for John. But becoming good is not always easy. Consider John's accomplishments. You might maintain that even if you focused all of your attention on a small number of pursuits, you would still fall short of John's level of success. When I dove deeper into John's story, however, it became clear that what makes him special is not an abundance of brains or an innate rapport with the violin. Instead, the driving force behind his successes was his mastery of the art of becoming good. He wasn't content to simply spend time on these pursuits. He wanted to spend the right kind of time-hours that were carefully crafted to improve his abilities as fast as possible. In the three sections that follow, I want to convince you that his level of success is available to most students-if you know what you're doing.

The Art of Becoming Good, Part 1: The Goodness Paradox

When I was researching my book How to Become a Straight-A Student, I noticed an intriguing paradox. It became clear that most students think they know how to earn excellent grades, yet few students actually reach this goal. When they try to improve their performance, they deploy the techniques they a.s.sume are right (study longer and harder), and then, when they fail to see much improvement, they concoct various excuses for their failure ("I know how to get better grades, but I would have to give up my social life to have enough time to achieve this goal!"). It rarely crosses their minds that perhaps their strategy is to blame.

As I continued my research for Straight-A, I decided to discard the a.s.sumptions I held about studying and instead start from scratch. I found fifty college students, from a variety of schools and majors, who actually achieved the goal of scoring great grades. I then asked them how they did it. As fans of that book know, the techniques I uncovered differ significantly from the study-longer-and-harder strategy most students think is right. For example, most students study in long stretches at night, usually starting after dinner. Top-scoring students, by contrast, tend to study in short bursts throughout the morning and afternoon. Most students review by reading over their notes, while top students prefer to recall ideas out loud, as if lecturing an imaginary cla.s.s. And so on. Best of all, the techniques I uncovered tend to require less time and produce better results.