Have you ever been in such a hurry to get something done, that in your need for speed you make mistakes that cost you time, and the task ends up taking longer than if you hadn't sped up?
Often moving quickly slows you down, because if that urgent desire to achieve comes at the expense of critical fundamentals, then you'll develop the wrong habits, which will end up taking more time to undue later on.
College prep is exactly like this. So many people are so busy taking the hardest classes available, preparing for tests, participating in clubs, and racing to be better than everyone else at everything, that they don't have time to stop and be thoughtful or reflective.
They don't have time to figure out their core values, or what success means to them, or any of the fundamental keys to real success.
In an effort to win an imaginary race, they run the in the wrong direction, away from the real finish line.
The busier we feel, the more important it is to stop, breathe, slow down, and focus on the important things.
Racing to get the best grades and test scores, along with an impressive list of accomplishments feels necessary when everyone around you is doing that. But every year on forums where parents of teens assemble, I hear of parents who feel cheated because their teen worked so hard for so long, got the grades and test scores and accolades, and yet was rejected from all of the colleges they applied to.
And even though this keeps happening over and over again. For families in the middle of college prep, this may be their first time. So they follow the crowd. They see the runners racing their hardest, and they join in.
Soon they too are too busy trying to be the best at everything that they don't have time to figure out their core values. They don't have time to think about their own interests or curiosities, and they don't have time to make their community a better place (aside from volunteer hours carefully logged and tracked...)
And yet, when applications come in, admissions officers at selective colleges will be forced, yet again, to sift through piles of applications from students who don't know their own core values, who don't know how they will contribute to the campus community, and who have worked so hard for so long, that they might not even know what they are genuinely interested in any more.
When you are feeling the busiest, that is a sign that you need to move slower, not faster.
If you want to get to the finish line, make sure you are running in the right direction.
Take the time to discover your core values.
Make daily choices that align with those values.
Not only is this more healthy, it is also your best chance at clearly communicating to the most selective schools how you would fit into their campus, and why they would want to admit you.
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