A wise musician once told me that only mediocre players are picky about their musical instruments. If you are a bad player, then it doesn’t matter how good of an instrument you play on. The music will not sound good anyway. If you’re a good player, then it also doesn’t matter how bad of an instrument you play on, since you will figure out a way to make beautiful music with it anyway (like what Keith Jarrett did in Köln in 1975). However if you’re somewhere in the middle, you could fool yourself in thinking that you’re good by playing on a great instrument. It may occasionally produce decent music despite your lack of practice.
A little over a year ago, I came out of my sabbatical and started working with high school students at an independent school in Silicon Valley (yes I’m back on the west coast!). Getting to know more young people has been a really great transition for me and has given me a renewed sense of hope for the future.
I am concerned, however, at the general culture of the current times, and what some of these kids are told as “advice” by some of their outspoken but misguided peers and adults around them. For example, there is a tremendous number of tasks whose only purpose seems to be to just optimize the college admissions game. These are things like spending an entire summer learning the ins-and-outs of the SAT (just imagine how much wiser these kids would be if they spent an entire summer working a job, reading great books, or working on a passion project instead), or even worse, taking a year-long course whose subject the student is neither interested in nor plan to use, just for the sake of putting something that looks good on their applications.
To spend so much time on this game is horribly inefficient, since most undergraduate programs will teach very similar things anyway, and the time you spend on this game is necessarily taking away from true personal development. The name of the college, it seems to me, is very similar in effect to musical instruments. If you remain bad at what you do, then your work will have little to no value to anyone, so what college you attended won’t matter. On the other hand, if you become incredibly good at something, then your work will speak for itself and you’ll have plenty of opportunities as people covet your work, so the college you attended won’t matter either. So the signaling that comes from the name of the college on your resume, if it makes any difference at all, only matters if you’re mediocre. By telling kids to care so much about the name of the college they attend, we are basically telling them, “We have low expectations of you and think that you won’t amount to much, therefore you will need to go to a famous school in order to signal to people that you’re better than you actually are.” What an uninspiring message that will for sure kill the intrinsic motivation these kids all have.
The tragedy in all this is that by focusing on this admissions game, we are intentionally choosing to stay mediocre. Or at least we are optimizing our life with the assumption that we will stay mediocre. With this mindset, we’re guaranteed to stay mediocre, because our daily actions are not aligned to true growth. I don’t necessarily think that is a bad choice if you’ve intentionally chosen it and are content with it, but a lot of people are funneled into this mediocrity mindset without realizing that there are other options. Developing yourself is a time-consuming process; you must choose to do it, and do it on a daily basis. Because time is finite, you will most likely have to give up some other things for this, but trust me, the tradeoff is well worth it.
