Strengthen your story

I am at the stage of life where I spend a lot of time thinking about college admissions. I have a handful of teenagers, and as everyone knows, getting into a competitive college these days is more challenging than ever before. Lots of kids have good grades and good SAT scores. So what makes you stand out?

Enter the narrative. College counselors advise young people to construct a story about the great things they’ve been doing that makes them unique. And then, if you’re doing this before your senior year, you can add activities or projects to the mix that make this narrative more coherent.

So, for instance, if you’ve spent a lot of time playing on your school’s soccer team, but you’re not getting recruited for this, you could spend your summer volunteering at a youth soccer camp and start a podcast devoted to soccer. Now the admissions committee can start referring to you as the recreational soccer kid — which is a more interesting hook than just your average mid-level player. If you have been doing a lot of art in high school, maybe you choose one format to make yours — let’s say mosaics — and stage some project that makes you stand out. Perhaps you do a mosaic about each zip code that sends kids to your high school and you display this exhibit at the local library.

Now, of course, all this can inspire some eye-rolling. How many 17-year-old kids actually think this way? They generally don’t. It’s their parents or the college counselors they’re paying for advice who come up with this.

But be that as it may, being able to construct a satisfying narrative is a useful life skill. People are going to be seeking stories that make sense for your entire life. Being able to identify a narrative and then strengthen it can make it seem like whatever you’d like to have be your next step is the natural next step.

So, for instance, if you’re changing careers from accounting to teaching, that’s awesome. Your math skills will be in demand. But as you’re applying to teacher certification programs, people are going to want to know why you’re doing this. If you’ve taught a night class in financial literacy at your church, or at a local community center, you can note that you enjoyed that experience and decided that teaching was what you wanted to do from now on. It feels more satisfying to people hearing the story than if you just say “I was bored with accounting.”

People running for office need to do this too. You often hear that someone has a “great story.” You can’t control your family background (though I do find it hilarious when politicians get caught trying to manufacture hard-luck origins). But ambitious would-be politicians think about their early jobs and volunteering gigs with this in mind. It generally doesn’t work to say well, I worked in this congressman’s office, and I figured I could do the job too, and he’s retiring and I already know all the people in the local party and how this works. You need a story about growing up in the town, and seeing your family’s business struggle to do X because of a certain policy, and now you’re running for office to change it. The story makes sense.

Every time I write a book, people ask me why I wrote the book, and again, they want a satisfying origin story. Some of my competitors tell tales of hitting rock bottom and turning to time management or productivity to pull themselves up from the muck. I will freely report that my life is not that interesting. But for every book I do dutifully construct some moment where the book idea came to me — even if that was the culmination of a year of thinking about it.

In any case, think about how you’d like to tell your story. Why are you doing the job you are doing? What would you like to be doing in the future? What could you do to strengthen the story that this next step makes sense? You can think about projects you could do, volunteering gigs you could take on, conferences you could attend, articles you could publish, and so on, that would make this seem like a coherent narrative. On some level this is as silly as the idea that those 17-year-olds would have done all those projects if colleges weren’t looking for them. But the human brain likes stories. Best to deal with this reality.

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