The Surprising Psychology of Impressiveness
calnewport.com
calnewport.com
Explaining the "amazing" reason that everyone picks his choice seems much less impressive at that point, particularly as it mostly seems like an ad for a book.
Does anyone actually talk like this (from the comments):
It’s interesting that you mention science fairs. I actually have a chapter in my new book where I take the awe-inspiring resumes of two Intel winners, then break down, step by step, the reality of their achievement
In my personal experience, the majority of people do not think like this. When I was going through grade school, my parents/teachers/etc. often did use words like "awe-inspiring achievements", even for fairly mundane things like getting perfect scores on standardized tests. I got into Amherst through a process very much like the article describes (I had terrible grades but had worked at an all-teenage dot-com startup and aced my standardized tests). In the "brag session" where the director of admissions lists all the awe-inspiring resumes of the incoming freshman class, she said "And one of the students passed 8 AP tests without taking a single AP class", and a murmur of appreciation passed along the crowd. Really, it's not that hard, you read a book and then you pay $75 for a test - but most of them don't know that.
I think it's great that there's more understanding going around of what achievement actually stems from. But that understanding certainly isn't universal, and in the meantime, you can hack people's perceptions of you by playing to the blind spots in their own knowledge. "Everything is impossible until I know how to do it, and then it's trivial."
Passing AP tests is impressive? Whoa.
The ability to cause havocs in UN meetings would more impressed me. Competing with the United States Post Office and then crushing them is also an incredibly impressive to me.
What I would search for, as a college admission office is people who is likely to defy authorities and be massively right. If I can get that guy into college, then that's the greatest achievement I could hope for, because this guy will have massive positive impact in this world.
I don't need Obamas people, but I would like more Talebs people in my school.
Just one guy/gal in his lifetime is what a college admission officer would hope for in his entire career.
That's all he need to cause a revolution in a field.
The problem is of course, how to find the genuine article in a pool full of candidates sprouting impressive grades and other distracting signals which are probably incidental or have nothing to do with massively right insights generators.
My guesses and your guesses is probably as good as the college admission officers. The chance of scoring a direct hit because the officer was able to correctly reasoned that this guy is what he's looking for is probably incredibly low.
Every one of my friends who has volunteered has coincidentally highlighted that experience in some admissions essay two years later.
Steve's accomplishments are surprising. I wouldn't have the slightest idea how he went about them; I'd have to ask to get the full story. (The article names this the "failed simulation effect".) I totally agree with you that it sounds like fluff, but it's unusual fluff.
David's accomplishments are unsurprising. I know exactly how one gets to be the captain of a varsity sports team while keeping up an interesting hobby outside of school. Impressive, concrete, but doesn't provoke any further questioning from me.
I wouldn't pick either of them just from a few sentences. I'd want to see the full essays.
Good point there. After reading your comment I reread the article, and it does seem more reasonable to replace all mentions of "impressive" with "surprising".
That being said, to an academic reviewer, surprising may very well equal impressive, especially when the transcript is read along with a thousand others ...
Meanwhile Steve may have some lofty motivations for his career path, but it says nothing about how well he actually does these things.
FTA: "He’s not brilliant. super passionate, or ultra-hard working — instead, he accomplished something that’s hard to explain. "
And that impresses people?
Track captains are a dime a dozen and there is nothing "impressive" about signing up for calligraphy class. Maybe those were the easy classes at his school - I don't know. But there's nothing inherently impressive about taking calligraphy. I don't even know why you would put that on your resume unless you were going to write an essay about it.
Working with the UN as a high schooler is something that grabs the attention of an admissions officer. I'm sure his essay about the experience sealed the deal.
It sounds like bragging. And worse: it doesn't do anything for your argument.
(And for the record, I agree with you.)
To use your own words, the following is equally as true: there is nothing "impressive" about signing up to lobby the U.N. as an unpaid intern.
Show me a student making real money, and that is actually valued by the free market, and I will be impressed.
And nobody's trying to impress you. These kids are trying to impress college admissions, who are in turn trying to build interesting and diverse student bodies.
I think posts like this actually reinforce the article's meta-point, which is that people are impressed by accomplishments that fit with the person's values where it's not obvious how to accomplish them.
You (and many other readers of this site) value success in business. Even if you're currently making real money, you probably weren't at age 17, and probably didn't have much of a clue how to at age 17, and so a 17-year-old making real money is impressive.
The football player here values the skills he learned from football, and knows how difficult it was to balance them with scholastic achievement, and so he's impressed by the guy who captained the football team and yet still managed to take calligraphy and get good grades.
The college admission's officer is tasked with assembling a unique, diverse, interesting class. She obviously would not have taken the job if she didn't value uniqueness. And so when somebody shows up that doesn't fit the profile that she sees all day, and has accomplished something a little out of the ordinary, she's impressed.
Don't mistake the specific examples for the general principle. You may not share the same value system as a college admission's officer. Hell, you may not even value college. But you can still use this to impress people who have things that you want.
I suspect the parent poster loath people who enjoy rent-seeking, political jockeying, and anything that scream power for power's sake.
He want to make useful products that benefit the world and make a difference. Business success, per se, is not what he's looking for. Business success is only a measure of how much he was able to make a difference in the world and how much he expand the pies for everybody.
As a data point, I got mediocre grades (barely top 10% in my high school class at a pretty run-of-the-mill high school) while playing football (it's a year round commitment) and for some reason Carnegie Mellon chose to let me in [0]. When push came to shove I managed to put myself ahead instead of behind because I was willing to work a little bit harder than I needed to, and I learned how to do that with every miserable, awful football practice I ever went to.
In all likelihood, "Steve" isn't as mentally tough as "David", and I think (assuming a similar grade and test score standing) it'd be foolish to take Steve over David.
[0] In fairness, I had also programmed a lot and I think I was able to convey a passion for it, but I think that's pretty standard for a lot of people who didn't make it in.
How can you possibly make this kind of speculative judgment on the basis of no further information? “All likelihood”? Give me a break.
I know football players who are mentally tough. I also know football players who are lazy dipshit assholes. The kids in the band, or the theater, or the debate team, or the math club, are no less “mentally tough” than the kids on the football team (unless by “mentally tough” you really mean “physically bulky and imposing” in which case you’re absolutely right).
What I meant by "All likelihood" is that, given the information provided, I would wager more on David's mental toughness than on Steve.
What is unfair about me making that judgement based on the evidence provided?
From the information given, no you really don’t.
> What I meant by "All likelihood" is that, given the information provided, I would wager more
Okay, glad you clarified. That’s not what “all likelihood” means to anyone else.
Steve Jobs seems to think it was a big deal: http://www.google.com/search?q=steve+jobs+calligraphy
In other words, I'm impressed with Steve, not because I'm comparing the amount of work and effort they each put forth, but because Steve chooses to spend his time and efforts changing things.
Still, I think there's something to the model. It is difficult to envision how one might become an advisor to a UN NGO! That was definitely a factor in my evaluation.
I agree with your point, but this sentence is not true.
>Admissions officers would agree. They’re not looking to build hardworking and diligent classes. Instead, they want to build classes that are interesting.
The emphasis on this elusive impressive/unusual quality over raw academic prowess also explains the quality of some of the problem sets I've graded...but then, doing well on problem sets and starting successful companies (or becoming an outlier by some other metric of success) are completely different things. Stanford optimizes for the latter.
To be honest though, this article’s premise (I should figure out how to efficiently get into college) seems pretty stupid. It’s just as stupid as college counselor’s premise, and really basically the same.
Instead of “drop the 5th and 6th AP course from your schedule and put your attention toward becoming an insider”, how about trying to learn as much as you can from your classes (emphasis: learning not some irrelevant number), build cool stuff, and try to make it have a real-world impact because they are intrinsically valuable things to do?
Okay, it was at this point where I switched and picked Steve over David.
Captain of the track team sounds impressive, until you consider that there would be 400 other captains sitting in an academic reviewer's inbox. Now I'm not really sure if this is impressiveness, but it sure stands out if I had to sift through a hundred or a thousand applications, and this one guy writes about his experience in the UN.
Sure, the right path may be simple. But so are many successful start-ups ideas. Yet you can't just discredit the skills of the founders just because the ideas were simple. Because simple ideas usually came many iterations of bad ones
If I am an investor I'd invest in Steve because, he is, as PG once said, relentlessly resourceful.
The Magic of Time - The Last One Standing:
http://www.unlikelysalsero.com/2007/08/magic-of-time-last-on...
> When her best friend tried to get Kara to drop a difficult linear algebra class, Kara, to her friend’s horror, simply shrugged and replied, “I like linear algebra.”
http://www.alwaysontechnologies.com/blog/2010/03/16/empathy-...
This article is about the inverse effect, which I didn't even think about at all.
It always sounded easy, but after hiring a few people, it is very hit or miss no matter what you do.
To imagine you can predict what a developing student mind is capable of is simply hubris.
The current system has gigantic problems. But fixing it is not trivial, because such a big network is incredibly complex.
Ideally GPA and SAT scores would make the distinction for us. The top X% of students would range from 3.5-4 in their GPA, or something like that. Unfortunately, grade inflation and test coaching is compacting an increasing percentage of the 'top' students into the tiny tiny bracket around 4.0 and 2400 (SAT). Greater-than-4.0 GPA's attempted to extend the headroom, but much like raising the level cap in WoW this didn't help much.
You think these are good measurements of student ability? For myself, I couldn’t complain about such a system, because (probably like many/most here) I did exceedingly well by such metrics. But to be honest, I think they are absolutely terrible.
When you think about it, the whole idea of rating one human being as "better" or "more deserving" than another is pretty much absurd. But universities have a limited number of spots that they can devote time and attention to, and they have to prune the applicant pool down to something manageable. People are very uncomfortable with randomness, so if a university's admission policy was "We'll pick 1 out of 10 at random", the applicants would go "WTF?" So they make up some arbitrary metrics, add in some guesswork, and try to assemble an incoming class that they feel will be as interesting as possible.
It's sort of unfortunate that their rather arbitrary decision acts as the gatekeeper to something that lots of people want - a good, high-paying, intellectually challenging job. Chalk up another one to "life's not fair".