How to be a high school superstar

There is one book that I recommend to all parents of college-bound students, ideally well before senior year, and that is Cal Newport’s How to Be a High School Superstar. While parts of it are dated, its core message still applies: Students can shine in extracurriculars without overloading themselves and burning out.

What Makes This Book Different

I have read dozens of books related to college admissions. So why is my highest recommendation about a book that was written back in 2010, a lifetime ago in terms of college admissions, and where many of its anecdotal examples of student success are dated?

Simply put, it is because Cal Newport recognized that most students had the wrong approach for selective college admissions, and that is as true in 2023 as it was in 2010. These students overload themselves with difficult classes and participate in many activities, but master none, hoping that their dedication to overwork makes them attractive enough to be admitted. Unfortunately, this approach rarely works for the most selective colleges.

The Well-Known Awards Path

Because selective colleges use a holistic admissions process, excellent grades in a rigorous curriculum are required, but not sufficient by themselves to win admission to highly selective colleges. Excellence in extracurriculars is also expected (as are strong recommendations and essays, but that’s a topic for a different day). And there are two ways to really shine enough in extracurriculars to make an impact. One way is by winning certain well-known awards, such as those listed in How to Win a Golden Ticket to MIT. But the competition to win these awards is fierce.

A Personalized Path to Extracurricular Achievement

Cal Newport’s book describes another way to shine in extracurriculars through what I call an personalized path to achievement. His key insight is that the way to create those extraordinary accomplishments is to cut back on the number of hard classes to a minimum, and also cut back on the number of activities, leaving time to explore their areas of interest. This allows the student to focus on activities they love to do, making it more likely that they will do something extraordinary without having to compete against thousands of others trying to win a well-known award. There’s much more to it than that of course, and we will get into that below.

How to Best Use This Book Today

The best time for a parent to read this is when their child is early in high school, ideally at the beginning of 9^th grade. The reason to start this early is that it gives the most time for the advice in the book to work (becoming a superstar takes time). The book can still be useful for students in the beginning of 11^th grade, but its use diminishes after that.

The other important note about using this book is that many of the student success anecdotes are dated. The book starts with a story of a student that was accepted to Stanford with multiple Bs, but that was nearly 20 years ago in 2004 when Stanford’s admit rate was about 3x what it is now. Since then, the increase in the number of applicants and grade inflation has made nearly perfect grades a prerequisite to be considered for admission.

And while the book says to minimize the number of APs, the right advice today is to check with your guidance counselor to make sure you you are marked as having taken the “most rigorous” curriculum at the high school. This often requires taking a certain number of APs, but usually far less than the workaholic students are taking. In short, ignore the anecdotes and instead focus upon the core message.

After a parent has read this book, it should be given to the student to read, with the caveats on the anecdotes being out of date. Then it’s time to discuss how to practice the concepts in this book.

Now, there is no guarantee that the approach described in this book will lead to admission to a highly selective college. On the other hand, there is also no guarantee that the standard approach of overloading with hard classes and numerous activities will lead to admission either. What is certain is that this book describes a less stressful approach that has been successfully used by many, and for that reason alone it is worth reading.

The Key Messages of This Book

The key points in this book are the following:

• Standard Recipe for Burnout: Most students looking to attend elite colleges overload themselves with too many hard courses and participate in too many activities, thinking that doing so much will make them attractive to colleges. But the reality is that a majority of applicants to the most selective colleges have excellent grades from a rigorous curriculum and participate in a number of activities, and most of them get rejected. So that alone does not distinguish an applicant.
• The Relaxed Superstar: Cal introduces an alternative path, which he calls the recipe for a relaxed superstar, and the three laws that enable them. The remainder of the book describes each law in detail.
  • Law of Underscheduling: Keep free time in your schedule, which you use to explore activities.
  • Law of Focus: Master one serious interest. Don’t waste time on unrelated activities.
  • Law of Innovation: Pursue accomplishments that are hard to explain, not hard to do.

The rest of this post will explain each of these three laws in more detail.

Law of Underscheduling

The law of underscheduling promotes the idea that a student’s schedule should contain lots of free time. But that free time is not wasted, but instead used for unstructured exploration in activities the student is interested in.

The key is to not pursue “standard” activities. For example, if a high school student is considering a future career as a doctor, they might think about becoming a hospital volunteer. But because it requires no imagination or effort to get selected as a volunteer, this carries little weight in college admissions beyond the fact that the student spent some time volunteering.

But Cal suggests we can do better. Everyone has real interests. The key is then to find projects that develop those interests. For a history student it might be understanding civil war era weapons and tactics, for a future social scientist it could be learning about how parental poverty affects a child’s school performance, and for the budding doctor, it could be understanding the long-term impacts of COVID on various aspects of a person’s health.

Cal has two tests to determine if something is a real interest that is worthy of pursuit:

• First, is the activity something they would willingly do if they had free time on a Saturday morning? If yes, it’s a deep interest.
• Second, is the activity something that an NPR talk show producer would like an expert in the field to discuss for a show segment. You can see why nobody is interested in discussing a student’s stint as a hospital volunteer. But could NPR want someone to discuss the long-term impacts of COVID? Absolutely.

It’s one thing to show interest, but how does a high school student get to the point where they can do something impactful? The key here is to become part of a community of like-minded people and pay your dues in a junior position. Over time, you get more credibility, allowing opportunities for more interesting projects and advancement, as will be described further below.

To make that possible, you need free time. Cal’s approach to enable underscheduling is to cut back on other activities so that, in a normal week, everything required for homework or other activities is finished by dinnertime, and during the weekend no more than half a day is required. In other words, the student has free time every day after dinner, and most of the weekend to explore. He also explains techniques for students to be more efficient with their time.

The Law of Focus

The Law of Focus suggests you restrict your attention to one serious extracurricular interest at a time and work on this consistently until you become exceptionally good at it. The premise is that being the best at one thing is better than being good at multiple things, because there is a “winner take all” type of reward for being among the very best.

While the book uses different examples, I explain this concept as follows. If you are one of the very best at {pick any activity}, you are likely to be admitted to the most selective colleges. The activity could be anything ranging from dance to debate, chess to cycling, math to martial arts, or science research to Socrates. Note that I am not even including recruited athletes where being the best practically guarantees admission. He summarizes his findings as follows:

• You receive an “impressiveness bonus” if you’re the best at that pursuit out of all the applicants the admissions officers have seen that year.
• This effect holds regardless of the competitiveness of the activity. Pursuits that do not have much competition yield more “impressiveness” relative to the hours worked.
• You must demonstrate some marker of exceptional ability. Your expertise could be demonstrated through means such as publications, press articles, speaking engagements, or athletic victories.

Being the very best at something makes your application stand out in a sea of candidates that otherwise blend together. In the admission committee meetings, you become known by your activity. You are discussed as in admission committee meetings as the “mountain climber”, the “chess kid”, the “published author”, or the “math genius”.

In contrast, a student with a laundry list of activities strikes as someone grinding it out in order to look impressive. Colleges don’t want students grinding it out to look impressive; they ideally want students where the impressive part comes easily.

How to Become Exceptionally Good

I will summarize this section in Cal’s book, but I can’t really do it justice with a short summary. Read the book.

Cal minimizes the concept of “natural talent” that allows or prevents someone from achieving excellence. He instead emphasizes that talent can be developed through focused work, and that upon achieving a certain level of talent, it can be leveraged to get to the next level.

For example, someone who is first chair in violin in their high school can then audition for a regional orchestra filled with adults. The key is to seed opportunities that appear, realizing that most will wither but some will bear fruit.

This increased level of accomplishment can lead to press articles, and also be leveraged in adjacent activities such as offering lessons. Once a certain level of accomplishment is reached, other accomplishments become easier.

The Law of Innovation

In this section, Cal explains the power of the “failed-simulation effect”:

• Failed-simulation effect: If you cannot mentally simulate the steps taken by a student to reach an accomplishment, you will be profoundly impressed.

For example, if you hear that a student presented to the main body of the United Nations, you cannot help but be impressed because most people cannot fathom how a high school student did enough to get invited to speak. In contrast, people can understand the steps required to become a newspaper editor, school president, or member of a rock band, and therefore they are not as impressive.

But how does a high school student create something that can pass the failed-simulation effect? Cal describes it in three steps:

1. Don’t plan the end result: If you could think up an impressive end result and how to get there, then by definition it doesn’t pass the failed-simulation effect.
2. Join a closed community and pay your dues: A closed community is one that people know exists, but don’t know how it operates.
3. Leverage your experience: After you pay your dues, you will get more responsibility.

Here’s a real-life example of how I have seen this work.

• A student in junior high had a real interest in genetics and took advanced online courses to improve her knowledge of the topic.
• In the fall of her freshman year, she sent letters to neuroscience college professors in the area describing her love of genetics, her coursework in that area, her excellent grades, and her willingness to do anything to help out in a lab during the summer. A local medical school professor invited her to join the lab for the summer.
• Her first summer she performed basic experiments under heavy supervision. In later summers she had more responsibility to run experiments herself.
• When it was time for college applications, she showed three summers of doing advanced research at a medical school which helped her win admission to a top-10 college.