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Transcript

Welcome back to season two of the Ivy League Prep Academy Podcast. Equipping you to successfully pursue the college of your dreams. We believe everyone deserves to reach their full potential, and the admissions process shouldn't hold you back.

The current college prep environment creates desperation, which is completely understandable. If you're a teenager, put yourself in a teenager's shoes for just a second, or if you are a teenager listening in and you look at the statistics of people who get in and even more scary, the statistics of people who get rejected from the school that you're excited to go to, that's a scary proposition. And it leads to desperation that looks like or sounds like, boy, I wish or I hope that I'm lucky enough to get into that school right.

If you look at the stats, it doesn't matter how impressive I am, doesn't matter how good my grades are, how many difficult classes or advanced classes I take. There are a lot of people who are rejected from this school that I want to go to. There are a lot of people rejected who did everything right but still didn't get in.

And so I just hope that I'm lucky enough to get in. As long as I could just get into that school, then I know I can be successful, I know I can be happy. And there's a lot of desperation around that.

Ironically, the more desperate you feel about any one given situation, the less likely you are to be able to take advantage of opportunities that might guide you to success in that situation. So for college prep, the more desperate you are about one particular school or one group of schools, the less likely you are to get admitted to one of those schools. Even though that desperation might feel like it's fueling you because it's making you more aggressive, it's giving you the energy that you feel like you need to do more to constantly be doing more.

But there's a big difference between healthy ambition and desperation, and I'm going to do my best to kind of differentiate between these two things before we get into the antidote. In fact, there's a clear solution to all of this desperation, and I'm excited to share those tools. It has worked for countless students in my program, and it can work for you as well.

There are clear and easy tools that we'll get to about how to dissolve that desperation and what to replace it with. But before we get there, I want to talk about the difference between healthy ambition and when it crosses over the line into toxic desperation. All right? One of these healthy ambition is fantastic.

It helps you develop skills, helps you become the kind of person that you want to become. And toxic desperation, of course, shuts down your potential to develop new skills, to become the best version of yourself. It shuts down all of that in this desperate attempt to pursue what you think others want you to pursue.

All right? So let's get there. First of all, what does healthy ambition looks like? Healthy ambition is where we hopefully all begin, right? When you have that desire to do something great or to attend a great school, that's healthy, that's wonderful. I support that all day, every day.

If you want to go to a fantastic school, even a school that's really difficult statistically to get into, I encourage you. I think that's a worthy and wonderful goal. And if you have healthy ambition towards that, that means you're going to try hard, you're going to take risks in order to learn new things, and you're going to fail at some of those things, and you're going to be okay with being bad at something first.

So you can develop skills and eventually get good at those things that you know you want to develop those skills, those character traits, or those abilities that you know you want to develop. You're willing to go through the grind, to do the fundamentals, to do the little things every single day so that you can get better. Because you have this healthy ambition, and you're even going to add strategy.

It's not just that you're going to work hard and do things that you think you're supposed to do. You're going to be reflective about this, right as you go, you'll take stock of what you experienced, what you tried and how it worked out. And if you need to pivot, and sometimes those pivots are large and sometimes they're small, but they come from the fact that you've been through experience.

You decided you wanted something, so then you worked hard to get there. And as you worked hard to get there, you discovered some things, right? Sometimes it was harder than you expected, sometimes it was easier than you expected. But you tried hard, you experienced something, and then you reflected.

And in those moments of reflection, you decide to make changes, to make adjustments. And that is where wisdom comes from, all right? So this journey of deciding that you want something because it's really important to you and then working really, really hard so that you can get there, it involves stopping and being reflective so that you can gain wisdom from your experience. Because plenty of people live their whole lives and have lots of experiences, but they just grow older.

They don't grow wiser too. And so healthy ambition is not just working hard and doing what you think you need to do. Healthy ambition includes that reflection element, all right? But eventually you hit stress.

You do get to that point where the friction adds up and the deadlines pile on top of each other. And you've taken hard classes that are advanced, that push you to your limits, that force you to really work hard and focus. And that focus drains your energy a bit.

And you also have demands in athletics or in music or at your job or at home and all of the different stressors can pile up on top of each other and you experience that stress. And the healthy response to this is process oriented. You focus on the hard work, you focus on continuing to move forward and be as effective as possible, which involves reflection and stopping and gaining wisdom and new skills and deciding to be meaningful, right? Deciding to be intentional about how you prioritize and how you get the most out of whatever bag of experiences you are facing right now throughout this process.

A growth mindset is critical. The growth Mindset of course, I imagine most of you are already aware, but famously stemming from Carol Duet's work out of Stanford, this idea that a lot of us have a fixed mindset where we believe that our talents or our abilities or intelligence is fixed. That means either I'm smart or I'm not.

Either I'm good at math or I'm not, right? And if I do poorly in math, that's evidence that I'm not smart enough. I was smart enough for the earlier math, I'm not smart enough for this complex math because now I'm not getting it. The fixed mindset says if I'm good at something, that's because I have talent or skill or ability for that thing.

If I'm not good at something, that's because I don't have the skill or talent or ability. However, science supports a growth mindset. The fact that our brains are plastic and perhaps we struggle at something at first, but actually what makes us good at that thing is repeated practice and focus and reflection, right? This whole process that we've just talked about, the healthy, ambitious process.

And so when you face that stress from a healthy perspective, you continue to prioritize and continue to be strategic and do the best you can to grow and be process oriented and focus on being intentional throughout the day, throughout this moment, right now. And although it's not always easy, you avoid slipping into desperation, which is characterized at first by anxiety. When the feeling of stress, which is totally natural and completely healthy, I would add stress can actually be very healthy depending on your response to that stress.

We've talked about that a couple of times in previous podcast episodes and I talk about it regularly in the Ivy League Challenge. It is very important to realize that stress can actually empower us. But if stress tips over into anxiety, then we become completely outcome oriented.

Whereas before we were process oriented but outcome aware, we're still being strategic and reflective and aware of the outcomes. We're thinking about where the processes that we're engaged in right now are leading to. We're aware of those outcomes.

When it tips over into anxiety, we become outcome oriented and process aware. We're still aware of the things that we're doing, but we're doing them so that we can accomplish a very specific outcome, right? So that we can get to that end result. That anxiety then leads to us feeling like winning is the most important thing.

But if we lose sight of that, if we lose that long term perspective and become myopic about winning today or accomplishing what we think needs to be accomplished, achieving that achievement culture, winning becomes the most important in this anxiety driven, desperate state, reflection looks like what are the winners doing? What is my direct competition doing? Let me make sure that I've got the same to do list as them so that I can beat them. And so that reflection becomes unhealthy and it turns into of course, every single time, eventually it leads to well, I'm not good enough, right? I've given it my best, I've failed, I didn't win every single time and so clearly I'm not good enough. And at some point either we disengage first and then we start believing we're not good enough, or we start believing we're not good enough and then we disengage.

But we have drained our batteries in this toxic anxious state of desperation. We eventually burn out. And during that burnout, or before or after we disengage, we disengage because we're not cool with just living our lives or surviving the day until we can escape into something else.

Now we just fully disengage and stop caring. But what can we do instead? In fact, the current college prep environment does create desperation for a lot of people. And it's not just teenagers.

A lot of adults, parents, teachers alike can buy into that desperate energy to counter it. We must replace the desperation with curiosity. And what I teach my students to do, instead of saying, man, I hope I'm lucky enough to get into my dream college if only I'm lucky enough and just holding on to hope that I'll be lucky enough to get there, we use the three magic words.

Instead of just hoping that we'll be lucky enough to get there, we say man, I'd love to go to Ex University, put in whatever your dream college is right now. I'd love to go to university or something better. The three magic words or something better, and to be curious about what that better might look like.

What is the better outcome that we might have in store for us? Because have you ever wanted something so badly but then you didn't get it? You worked hard, you did everything you could and you really, really wanted this thing, whatever it was, but then you didn't get it? At first you probably felt terrible, but have you ever had an experience where you didn't get it and then later on you realized that you were glad you didn't get what you thought you wanted in the first place? In fact, doesn't it happen over and over and over and over and over again in our lives? Or something better reminds us that we don't always know what we want, we don't always know what is best for us. And so, yes, we should pursue our ambitions with gusto. Pursue them, but add or something better as well to remove that desperation.

Because no matter what, if that desperation or toxicity is removed, the effort required to do great things will not be wasted. Even if you don't get what you think you want most, that effort in the absence of desperation, the fact that you have this healthy ambition moving towards this goal that you have for yourself, it will not be wasted. So long as you are not filled with desperation throughout this process, it will grant you skills and wisdom that would otherwise be impossible to gain.

And so it is with college prep. The beauty of college prep is that teens care about where they're going to go to college, and they should care. It's a wonderful thing to care about, and it can bring out the absolute best in you.

But as you care about which college you're going to go to, add the three magic words replace desperation with curiosity. And that curiosity is just going to be, man, I wonder what that something better might be? Right? I want to go to X University or something better. And keep open the possibility that there is a better option out there.

You'll use the same tool over and over and over again in your lives when you think you want this specific job, or this specific internship, or this specific relationship, or whatever you think you really need in order to be successful or be happy, or to get what you want in life. In fact, as long as your ambitious efforts stay on the side of healthy and don't tip over into the side of toxicity or desperation, then the process of pursuing that thing that you want is more important than getting the thing that you think you want. And the or something better helps us to stay reflective, to stay aware that we don't always know what's best for us.

So add those three magic words to whatever you are most excited about in life right now, as a teenager today, begin adding these three magic words to every goal that is very, very important to you, including the college that you hope to attend someday. Yeah, you hope to attend X University, but the less desperate you are about going to that university, ironically, the more likely you are to be competitive for that college. And in the end, as you probably already know, attending that specific college is far less important than becoming the kind of person that that college would be a fool to let go of you.