How To Be A High School Superstar Part 7

Be succinct. Try not to use more than a line or two before getting to your request. Don't waste two or three paragraphs explaining who you are and what your situation is-the person will skim this at best, and delete the message at worst.

With these points in mind, I crafted and sent the following e-mail: JD,.

I'm a student and a huge fan of your sensible but often unexpected personal finance advice.

I'm writing because I'm serious about building a quality blog that covers similar issues but with a tight focus on my fellow students. I'm a big believer in gathering data before jumping into a new project, so I was hoping-perhaps quixotically-that you might take pity on an eager young student and provide a few words of insight in answer to the 3 questions at the bottom of this e-mail.

Either way, thank you for you contributions to the world of finance advice.

Best, Cal (1) What single factor do you think most helped GRS succeed when so many other personal finance blogs do not?

(2) If you had to write a to-do list for a new blogger serious about investing the time required to build a large audience, what would the top two items be?

(3) What myth about succeeding in blogging do you think is most damaging?

Keep in mind, when I sent this e-mail, JD had no idea who I was. He thought I was just a high school student contacting him out of the blue. Later, when I interviewed JD about my experiment, he admitted that he gets a huge quant.i.ty of e-mail and has to ignore most of it. My message, however, survived this screening and generated the following reply within just a few hours: Hi, Cal.

I'll do my best to answer your questions. Let me know if you need more info!

(1) What single factor do you think most helped GRS succeed when so many other personal finance blogs do not?

I work at it. I work *hard*. I think many people jump into blogging-not just pf [personal finance] blogging, but all blogging-and think it's going to be easy. They think it's no big deal to write a new article every week-or every day. They're wrong. Writing one article is like a sprint. Writing one article a day for years is like many marathons put back to back. To do this well is very difficult. I had lots of practice before I started GRS. I've been writing for the Web since 1997, and keeping a daily blog since 2001. I knew it would be hard work. I think that nearly any blog at which the author spends 60 hours a week will be successful. (Proviso: the author must be able to write marginally well and produce content that is interesting. But those two factors aside, I think hard work will always prevail.) (2) If you had to write a to-do list for a new blogger serious about investing the time required to build a large audience, what would the top two items be?

1. Take a writing cla.s.s. This is number one by a mile. Most bloggers are poor writers. I like to think that I'm a good writer, and I *still* take writing cla.s.ses. There's always something to learn.

2. Read. Read about writing. Read about your subject. Read everything you can get your hands on. Be a sponge.

(3) What myth about succeeding in blogging do you think is most damaging?

I think it's a myth that a successful blog will always be profitable. This isn't the case. While it's certainly possible to make an excellent income through blogging, there are many people who work just as hard as I do who aren't able to do so. Blogs are not an easy road to riches any more than anything else.

Let me know if you need more info, or if you have follow-up questions.

If I was actually a high school student interested in starting a blog, JD has just provided me with some invaluable insider advice-the messages about hard work, how long success should take, and the importance of writing ability are unexpected and immensely useful. And he has concluded his e-mail with the magic line "Let me know if you need more info, or if you have follow-up questions." I have now moved into JD's circle of acquaintances, meaning I can send follow-up questions and expect answers as I pursue blogging success. This single well-crafted e-mail has provided me a huge leg up in my pursuit.

After receiving this reply from JD, I came clean-confessing to him the nature of my experiment. JD, fortunately, was amused. "I've used similar techniques myself to get responses from big names," he told me. "Malcolm Gladwell let me reprint a part of Blink on my site-because I asked. If you ask, you're ahead of ninety-nine percent of the population."

When I asked JD about how he sorts his own e-mail and decides which to reply to and which to delete, he revealed that he replied to my test message because it was short and looked easy to answer-"I try to answer messages I think will be quick." But he still noted, "Yours was actually a little too long." For this busy blogger, his ideal message has "just a few sentences before the questions." Brevity is king!

Reflecting on this experiment, I realized that the advice-guide method provides an incredible head start for the pursuit of an interest. In less than two hours, I was able to use the method to generate targeted insight about building a successful blog. I learned exactly what types of posts work, and what types do not; received specific suggestions from an expert in the field; and also received an open offer to contact this expert with follow-up questions. I've encountered dozens of students who started blogs only to quickly abandon them after losing faith that they'd ever succeed. On one hand, if they had had the advice I'd obtained by applying the advice-guide method, not only would they have gained the confidence to persist, but they would have had a good chance of growing a big audience. On the other hand, they might have been dissuaded from continuing with the pursuit. (JD makes it clear that success does not come easily in this field.) But that could also be a useful outcome, as it might save them the time they'd waste discovering this for themselves over six months of bad posts and no visitors.

Blogging was just an example I chose to test the method in action. The same results can be generated for almost any interest. When I decided to look into book writing, for example, I spent time comparing the top sellers to the flops in my topic area. I then tapped my contact network to set up a phone conversation with an author and a literary agent to get their expert advice on the crafting of a good book pitch. The fact that the book you're holding is my third shows how effective the method can be.

The advice-guide method works. It might require a little more time up front, but it helps you maximize your chances that a pa.s.sing interest will turn into an impressive, accomplishment-generating deep interest.

Go to Interesting Places, Meet Interesting People, Stay in Touch

Earlier in Part 1, I told the story of Ben Casnocha's gap year. His commitment to underscheduling and exploration generated a book deal, an NPR commentator gig, and a speaking tour-all within fifteen months. But what happened after he arrived at college?

"I would say I went to twenty speakers per semester," he told me when I asked him about his first year as an undergraduate. "I got in touch with about half of these speakers after their talk. Of that group, I probably still keep in touch with one or two from each semester.... For example, James Fallows [national correspondent for The Atlantic] spoke here, and I was able to spend time with him, and now we e-mail and I hope to meet him again in the near future."

Beyond going to hear interesting speakers, Ben also makes a point of attending conferences on topics from entrepreneurs.h.i.+p to politics to technology. His strategy is to identify venues with high ticket prices-"If the ticket price is too low, the people probably won't be quality"-and then try to convince the organizers to let him in free (or cheap) because of his student status. They're often surprisingly happy to help a bright, curious young person.

Ben's goal with these conferences is exposure to interesting things. He meets interesting people, he follows up, and this often leads him somewhere else interesting and unexpected.

"I was at a retreat in New Orleans held for ninety people in business, politics, journalism, and technology," Ben told me. "At dinner one night I was sitting next to a guy pretty high up in Democratic politics. He happened to be from Los Angeles. [Ben is also from California.] We stayed in touch over the next year, and then, about a month ago, he invited me to a dinner party. At the dinner were a congresswoman, state senators, movie studio execs, and various other high rollers. It was fascinating."

Ben doesn't know in advance exactly where these random encounters might lead, but he's discovered that it's usually somewhere interesting. I recommend that you adopt this same strategy. Focus on talks and conferences. If you're near a college campus, then monitor the speakers who visit. Such talks are usually open to the public, so you can attend. Also keep an eye on bookstores in your area, as they're a good place to find interesting speakers. Before you attend one of these talks, do some quick research on the person or field, and then think up an interesting question. After the talk, introduce yourself to the speaker and ask the question. There's great novelty in a high school student being engaged with big ideas, so the author is likely to remember you. Within a week or two, follow up with an e-mail.

The same basic approach can be used for conferences. Keep track of which events are coming through your nearest big city or college campus. Forget about buying tickets. Instead, contact the conference organizers directly and explain that you're a high school student and that you have a real interest in the topic. Ask about getting a "discounted" student pa.s.s-which, hopefully, they'll translate as "free." If you blog or write for your school newspaper, mention that you will write about your experience, thereby bringing the conference to the attention of a larger young audience. Another tactic is to get a teacher to agree to let you write a paper about the experience for extra credit or in place of another a.s.signment. Conference organizers are susceptible to the argument that you're an eager young person trying to learn.

These tactics should get you started. In general, however, the more interesting people you meet, and the more conferences you attend, the more unique opportunities will arise. These opportunities, in turn, will build your interestingness to epic levels.

Pulling It All Together

This playbook is by far the largest of the three in this book, and for good reason: it provides the foundation for all of the other ideas and advice offered. Until you have free time in your schedule, and use that time to aggressively expose yourself to interesting things, you won't develop the deep interests needed to apply the advice in the parts of the book that follow. So take this advice seriously. It's among the most important that you'll encounter in these pages.

I want to conclude our discussion by summarizing the big-picture concepts that you've just learned. When you began Part 1, you were probably overworked-often scrambling to keep up with the haphazard mix of activities and hard cla.s.ses that you hoped would impress the admissions staff at your dream school. Perhaps you found yourself frequently staying up late into the night to catch up on schoolwork, or losing whole afternoons and weekends to heavy extracurricular commitments.

Then I offered a radical alternative: the ideal student workweek. The idea is that during the average week you should be done with schoolwork by dinnertime on weekdays, and should work no more than one half day during the weekend.

We began your journey toward this goal with a focus on streamlining. You learned how to shave hours from your homework by taking better notes and rejecting rote review. You learned why paper writing should be spread over three days and why experimenting with your study habits is valuable. You heard my claim that Facebook is the tool of the devil-at least when it comes to procrastination-and learned about the power of environment and timing to get work done fast. You were then exposed to a dead-simple time management system that could eliminate schedule pileups and perhaps even defuse procrastination altogether.

For many students, this streamlining might be enough to get them down to the ideal student workweek. For some, however, even though these strategies will reduce their schedule footprint, their work demands still exceed the ideal. With this in mind, I next taught you the art of quitting, including how to take advantage of the Final-Straw Effect to defang your course load, and how to use the Activity Andy test to filter out activities that eat up time without earning you the respect of admissions officers.

With these strategies in place, you'll hopefully achieve the goal of injecting significant amounts of free time into your schedule. But what should you do with all of these newly liberated hours? This is where the second section of the playbook enters the scene with its advice for aggressive exploration. In it you learned the incredible power of developing a reading habit, and how to use communities to accelerate your path from a pa.s.sing interest to something deep. You then learned about the advice-guide method, which provides step-by-step guidance for how to "crack the code" for a field of interest, jump-starting impressive work. And finally you heard about the power of meeting lots of interesting people and going to lots of interesting places.

All of this playbook advice serves the single simple idea motivating the law of underscheduling: If you want to be an admissions superstar, you need to have a deep interest, and the best way to develop such an interest is to inject large amounts of free time into your schedule and then use this time to aggressively explore things that catch your attention. The playbook spells out exactly how to make this idea a reality. All that's left is for you to get started.

*For more detailed studying advice, I also recommend taking a look at my book How to Become a Straight-A Student. It's written for college students, but many high school students have reported great success in adapting its ideas to their situation.

Part 2.

The Law of Focus.

Master one serious interest. Don't waste time on unrelated activities.

The law of focus asks you to restrict your attention to a single serious extracurricular interest, and then work on this interest consistently over time until you become very good. Many students, however, fear that being good at only one thing is not enough to impress a jaded admissions staff. This law rejects that idea. It argues, instead, that when you focus intensely on a single interest you'll eventually reap significantly more rewards than if you had spread the same time among many things. In other words, being the best at one thing gets you further than being good at multiple things.

Relaxed superstars recognize this reality and use it to their advantage. It's much less stressful to keep your attention fixed on one pursuit than to juggle several. Such focus also happens to be a recipe for a richer, more fulfilling life. There's real pleasure to be gained from long-term mastery. Arguably, their dedication to the art of focus explains a lot about the Zen-like contentment most relaxed superstars seem to exude. This can all be yours as well-less stress, more impressiveness, access to the deepest secrets of happiness-if you're willing to let go of your instinct for doing more things and embrace the power of doing fewer things, and doing them better.

In Chapter 6, you'll hear the story of Michael, who is the personification of focus. He dedicated 100 percent of his extracurricular attention to a series of projects-each started only after the previous one had been completed-all dedicated to the topic of environmental sustainability. He was accepted at Stanford. Michael's story will help us structure our exploration of the law of focus. In subsequent chapters you'll learn how three scientific theories-the Superstar Effect, the Matthew Effect, and countersignaling-help explain why narrow attention yields such broad results. These theories argue, respectively, that you get an impressiveness bonus for being the best in a pursuit; that a high level of accomplishment in a single area generates extra accomplishments for little additional effort; and that in many cases doing more things can come across as less impressive. To emphasize these ideas, I'll tell you about a collection of other relaxed superstars who leveraged these effects to stand out during the admissions process. I'll conclude with a playbook that walks you through practical advice for getting started and then maintaining a focused lifestyle.

6.

Solar Panels, Stress, and Stanford.

IN JANUARY 2009, the one and a half million readers of the Arizona Republic encountered a photo of an increasingly familiar scene for this sun-soaked region: solar panels being installed on a roof. What made this photo stand out, however, was the accompanying article, and more specifically its surprisingly young subject. "Michael Silverman," it starts, "a senior at Phoenix County Day School, has a habit of turning golf carts into green machines." It details how this seventeen-year-old spearheaded the project to install these panels on his school's maintenance shed, where they'll provide renewable power to the school's fleet of golf carts.

Fast-forward a few months to the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the solar charging station. At the event, Michael, along with the school's princ.i.p.al, a group of proud teachers, and the mayor of Paradise Valley, stood on a platform facing a crowd of more than a hundred people. Behind the platform was the low-slung maintenance building-its rooftop air-conditioning condenser now flanked by rows of solar panels. Sunlight sparkled on their surface. After the ribbon was cut, the speeches began. Not long into the program, a teacher took the podium to say a few words about the project and its young manager. With a smile, he announced to the crowd: "When I grow up, I want to be just like Michael Silverman."

The effort behind this project began a year earlier, when Michael obtained a $5,000 grant from a local energy company. The school ended up approving an additional $40,000 to see the project to completion. This was Michael's second encounter with greening golf carts. During his soph.o.m.ore year he had won a grant from the same energy company to convert a gas-powered golf cart to run on discarded cooking oil. A local entrepreneur later paid to s.h.i.+p the cart, along with Michael, to California to partic.i.p.ate in a green technology exhibition. Everyone who knows Michael would admit that he developed an impressive skill for these sustainability projects. Later in the Arizona Republic article, for example, a teacher from Michael's school effuses: "[He's] got a great future ahead of him." Not surprising, the admissions officers at Michael's top-choice schools agreed.

Michael achieved some impressive feats. There's no doubt about that. Of equal importance, his feats were honored by the media. As he modestly admits: "I think third-party recognition of your efforts goes a really long way in admissions." But what makes him interesting for our study of relaxed superstars is that his work on green projects was his only extracurricular commitment. He didn't join multiple student groups. He wasn't a cla.s.s officer. He didn't become secretary of the French club or compete in science fairs. Instead, his extracurricular schedule reads like a study in disciplined focus. In his soph.o.m.ore year he won the grant to convert a golf cart to run on biodiesel. In his junior year he won the grant to install the solar panels. In his senior year he completed the solar panel installation in the fall, and then in the spring organized his school's Earth Day celebration. That's it. He never had more than one activity at a time, and each new activity was focused on the same topic, environmental sustainability. Over time he got better and better at these projects, until he had teachers saying, only half-jokingly, that they wanted to be more like him.

Due to his streamlined schedule, Michael avoided the standard admissions-related stress that plagued his cla.s.smates. "It was a great lifestyle: I loved what I was doing," he told me. Michael was an aberration at the compet.i.tive private school he attended. The other students gunning for spots at schools like Stanford adopted a much more demanding strategy. "At my school, the thought was that you needed a 4.0 GPA," Michael notes. "In addition, you needed the usual activities: become a leader in student government and president of the senior cla.s.s, join SADD [Students Against Drunk Driving], play varsity sports-that whole deal." Near-perfect SAT scores and a compet.i.tive course load were also expected.

Michael ignored this wisdom. In addition to keeping his activity load light he managed to keep his academic demands reasonable. During the notoriously difficult junior year, for example, when most of his cla.s.smates were taking four or five AP courses simultaneously, Michael took only one. When his cla.s.smates were pulling all-nighters to guarantee an A in every cla.s.s, Michael was happy with the 3.6 GPA he earned by doing a reasonable amount of smart studying. As he explained: "If I knew I would get a B+ instead of an A-because I s.h.i.+fted my time around to work more on one of my sustainability projects, I was happy to do that." The same philosophy held for his SAT. "Standardized testing is not my strong point," he admitted. "I took the tests, did well enough, and kept most of my attention on my independent projects."

Reflecting on his numbers, Michael describes himself as having "a high enough GPA and scores to cross that threshold below which schools like Stanford automatically throw out your application-but not too much higher." He knew that if he could get to the holistic piece of the admissions process, where his essays, press clippings, and recommendations could be read, he would be compet.i.tive.

Another indicator of Michael's relaxed lifestyle was that during his time at Phoenix County Day School, four days out of five he would leave school after the final bell and hike to the summit of nearby Camelback Mountain. The hike would take at least an hour, sometimes twice as long. But as Michael explained: "No matter what work I had, it didn't matter, I went hiking-to help me relax, chill out, and figure out the smartest way to handle what I had to do."

Michael wasn't lazy. He wasn't avoiding work for the sake of avoiding work. He was taking a calculated risk. He decided to focus his attention on a small number of projects all related to the same subject. (On his Web site, he goes so far as to give himself a tagline: "The Sustainability Student.") If he had adopted a harder course schedule, or joined a dozen other clubs, he would have lost the ability to make such amazing progress on his single point of focus. "It just wouldn't have been feasible," he told me. "That's the bottom line." And without that focused progress, he would have been another overcommitted kid, failing to stand out.

Michael's risk paid off. He was able to enjoy his high school career and get accepted to Stanford, his dream school. The rest of Part 2 explores the focus strategy adopted by students like Michael. In the chapters that follow, you'll learn exactly why keeping your attention fixed on one thing can prove so effective-even though it requires less work and stress than the standard approaches to becoming a star. By the time you've moved on to the practical advice of the playbook, I'll hopefully have converted you to this philosophy of focused effort.

7.

The Superstar Effect

THE HIGHLIGHT of the 2008 season of the Metropolitan Opera in New York was its production of Gaetano Donizetti's La Fille du Regiment. Among professional opera singers, Donizetti's work is known as the Mount Everest of opera. This reputation is due, almost entirely, to an especially devilish aria, "Ah! Mes amis, quel jour de fte," written for the tenor role of Tonis. The aria arrives early in the performance, before the singer has time to fully warm his vocal cords, and makes a near-impossible demand: hitting nine high Cs in a row, the final note held in a long, punis.h.i.+ng sustain. The difficulty of this feat cannot be overestimated. "The alluring note has made and ended operatic careers," noted a critic for the New York Times, "and [has] even helped drive one star to suicide." Not surprisingly, most tenors, when faced with this Mount Everest aria, default to the far easier natural C.

It was for all of these reasons that when tenor Juan Diego Flrez nailed the high C nine times in a row during his 2008 performance at the Met, the feat made international news. The acclaim for Flrez's performance was so intense that the Met reversed its informal ban on encores, allowing Flrez to feed the crowd's desire for more. The audience kept clapping until he sang the aria one more time.

Opera singers, among their other eccentricities, are notoriously private about money. We can estimate from indirect sources, however, that a top singer at a top venue, such as the Met, likely makes in the tens of thousands of dollars per performance. This income is supplemented by CD sales. While few cla.s.sical CDs become true blockbusters, winning an industry award can ensure a healthy flow of royalty payments. A talent like Flrez, therefore, likely makes a very comfortable, though probably not lavish, living as a professional singer.

But then there are the superstars. In 1972, thirty-six years before Florez's acclaimed performance, a young tenor by the name of Luciano Pavarotti sang the role of Tonis in La Fille du Regiment. The power of Pavarotti's high Cs in this performance was stunning. Terry Teachout, drama critic for the Wall Street Journal, has called them "sunlit." The audience at the Met demanded a record seventeen curtain calls-making Florez's acclaim seem mild by comparison. Soon after the performance, opera buffs began to call Pavarotti the King of the High Cs. He became a superstar performer, selling out stadiums and earning a worldwide following.

Pavarotti's voice was better than Flrez's. Writing about Flrez's 2008 performance of La Fille, for example, the New York Times critic noted: "If truth be told, it's not as hard as it sounds for a tenor with a light lyric voice like Mr. Flrez to toss off those high Cs.... [In] the early 1970's, when Luciano Pavarotti ... let those high Cs ring out, that was truly astonis.h.i.+ng." But this advantage of Pavarotti over Flrez could be considered slight, since few singers can hit those notes at all. If we had to rank the talent of opera tenors, we might place Pavarotti at the very top, but Juan Diego Flrez not far below.

Minor differences in talent, however, can generate major differences in rewards. We speculated earlier that Flrez receives a good, but not a lavish, income. By contrast, when Pavarotti died in 2007, sources estimated his estate was worth $275-$475 million. His advantage in vocal ability made the difference between a nice career and a fortune.

This story has surprising implications for our quest to understand the college admissions process. As I'll argue below, the same effect that explains the gap between Pavarotti's and Flrez's fortunes can explain why relaxed superstars receive so many more admissions rewards than their hardworking student peers.

The Superstar Effect

It was this Superstar Effect-the idea that the most talented in a field earn disproportionately more rewards than those who are only slightly less talented-that piqued the curiosity of an economist named Sherwin Rosen. He was intrigued by the question of why the best opera singers, movie stars, authors, and actors, among other talents, make so much more money than peers who are only slightly less skilled. In a paper t.i.tled "The Economics of Superstars," published in the American Economic Review in 1981, Rosen worked through the mathematics of why the best so soundly outearn their closest rivals.

The details of Rosen's equations are hard for a nonspecialist to follow, but the basic ideas they capture are intuitive. Let's return to our example of Pavarotti and Flrez. As we established, both are regarded as phenomenal tenors-better than all but perhaps a few singers in the world-but Pavarotti's sunlit voice had a slight edge over Flrez's. Now imagine a million opera fans logging onto iTunes to buy an opera alb.u.m. These fans, being savvy, may have heard that Pavarotti is slightly better than Flrez. Perhaps they read that same New York Times piece, pining for the power of a young Pavarotti. These fans are more likely, therefore, to buy Pavarotti's alb.u.m-if you have just $10 to spend, why not buy the very best? The effect of a million listeners each making this rational decision about which alb.u.m to buy ends up a.s.signing most of the $10 million they collectively spend to Pavarotti. In other words, he earns disproportionately more money than Flrez, even though the difference in talent may be slight. This same argument can apply to a variety of talents, from blockbuster movie stars to bestselling authors. They all share the same underlying narrative of the very best earning a huge share of the rewards in their field.

College admissions, I argue, is one of the settings where the Superstar Effect plays an important role. As I explain below, relaxed superstars take advantage of this reality by focusing their energy on becoming a Pavarotti in a single pursuit, instead of burning out by trying to become a Flrez in many different pursuits.