How to Be a Good Mentee

In order to attract and retain strong mentors, it is important to learn how to be a good mentee and to understand how to bring value to your working relationships. Building on my post last week outlining 50 Traits of High Quality Mentors, it is important to acknowledge what it is that incentivizes these high quality mentors to invest countless hours of their precious time in your career development. As much as we may like to think that people want to help us out of the kindness of their hearts, your propensity to keep people invested in you as a human being will significantly increase if you bring a clear set of skills to the table and generate value as a mentee.

Here are ten proactive steps that you can take to become a strong mentee and attract high quality mentors:

1.  Always come prepared. When you have a meeting scheduled with your mentor, prepare an agenda in advance and know what you want to discuss in which order. Be clear on your meeting objective and print out hard copies of all work that you were supposed to prepare.

2. Do high quality work independently before committing to working with a specific mentor. This will help you to position yourself as someone who people actually want to work with. Take responsibility for investing in your own career development and show that you really want whatever it is that you are working towards and are willing to put in the time and effort to make it happen.

3. Take care of yourself.  Have pride in your appearance and stay true to who you are as a human being. Don't morph into someone just because you think it's the person that your mentor expects you to become. Be exactly who you are and don't apologize for it. People will respect you for it.

4. Turn work around quickly when collaborating. When jointly working on a project with your mentor and additional collaborators, don't have people waiting on you. When a paper or project gets thrown your way, do high quality work and get it back in your collaborators' hands as quickly as possible. You don't want to be the person that people are always waiting on.

5. Articulate how you can add value. If a mentor is going to invest countless hours in your career development, they are going to make sure they are getting something in return. Take the time to understand what you can bring to the table. Introduce your mentor to people in your network, stimulate their idea development, and learn how you can help them to simultaneously further their own career through investing in yours. Show your mentor that you are equally invested in him or her as a human being and that you want to help them to be the best person that they can be.

6. Be respectful. Your mentor likely has more experience in your respective field, and you need to acknowledge that. Be humble when collaborating and don't be that person who always insists on being right. 

7. Be open to new experiences and ideas. While you will likely aim to find a mentor with similar interests to your own, it is important to be open to learning as much as you can. Be willing to go outside of your comfort zone and explore methods, ideas, and experiences that force you to stretch yourself. Don't run away from challenges that your mentor throws your way. Attack them with vigor. 

8. Under promise, over perform. Winning the mentor/mentee game is largely about properly setting and exceeding expectations. Always do your best to do a better job than your mentor expects of you in a shorter time frame than you agree to. If you know that you have a lot on your plate in a given week, give yourself some extra buffer time when agreeing when you will get something back to your mentor. Then get the given work back to your mentor earlier than promised, and use the additional few days to go above and beyond their expectations.

9. Always be on time. Showing up to meetings and work events late just makes it look as if you think your time is more valuable than your mentor's. Don't have your mentor waiting on you to begin calls, meetings, or presentations. Show up five to ten minutes in advance and get your mind warmed up ahead of time. Be appreciative of the time that your mentor gives you and make the most of it.

10. Be passionate about what it is that you want to bring to this world. Passion and skill is a toxic combination. People want to work with people who are passionate about whatever it is that they are working towards because it helps them to light their own intellectual fire. Be open to exploring new ways to practically implement your ideas, but don't let anyone keep you from dreaming big and following your passions. Passion and drive is contagious and is one of the most important things that you can bring to the table as a mentee.

10 Unconventional Ways to Increase Your Efficiency

Time is our most valuable asset. Every day at midnight, we are given 1440 minutes that are uniquely ours before we rest our heads on our pillows and the clock resets. As we finally allow ourselves to drift off to sleep at night, we are wrestling with half-baked ideas and unfinished tasks that will be waiting for us when we wake up in the morning. No matter how we decide to use those 1440 minutes, it never seems like enough time.

So how can we make the most of it?

Many how-to articles on increasing productivity will tell you to do things like make to-do lists, refrain from frequently checking emails, and minimize your use of social media. Well, duh. These overly prescribed bandage solutions are only suitable to keep you afloat - to keep you in the game, at best. If you really want to maximize your efficiency, you need to gain a deeper understanding of the way in which you navigate the stimuli that engulfs your mind at the subconscious and conscious levels. In order to be exceptional, to experience the timeliness that comes with the ultimate efficiency of achieving flow, you must open your mind to unconventional approaches. You must be willing to change your mindset in order to alter your mind.

These ten approaches to increasing efficiency are far from conventional. Yet, I have found them to be incredibly effective, so experiment with them at your own risk.

Alternate Between Conditioning and Work Tasks.

If you have a stack of papers to grade, briefs to read, or meetings to prepare for, alternate between completing a small task and doing conditioning. Read one ten page paper. Do one hundred calf raises. Read another paper. Do one hundred crunches. Read another paper. Do fifty squats. If you are in a corporate office and are more socially conscious than I am, get up and go to the bathroom or the copy room every hour and do your exercise in there. You can also run up and down the stairs as an exercise in between work tasks in a corporate office setting, or even do subtle core strength exercises while sitting at your desk. As much as you may sometimes want to fall asleep at your desk, this routine will ensure that you don’t.

Mentally Simplify Your Life.

We all have many priorities and many goals - often so many, that it is hard for our minds to keep track of these things. In order to help your mind to better situate new information and to more strategically map out where to spend your time, you need to mentally simplify your life. I suggest mentally creating three buckets: priority 1 (your main priority at the moment), priority 2 (your secondary priority at the moment), and bucket 3 (everything else). It is easier to process new information if we can situate the content into one of our mental buckets in order to assess both the importance of the information and how to relate what we are learning to the rest of our mental real estate. Your main priority should be what you spend the most time working towards. It is what drives you to get up in the morning and keeps your mind churning late into the night. If priority 1 is work related, priority 2 should be representative of your life outside of your primary job. The last bucket should be everything else. It might be helpful to create a pie chart something like the one below, to think through how you might want to create buckets to mentally simplify your own life. I have included the percentage and topic breakdown of my own current mental buckets as an example. You can anticipate that this breakdown would alter at different stages of your life as your priorities are naturally evolving.

Remove the Phrase ‘Most People’ from Your Vocabulary.

Most people function best on at least eight hours of sleep per night. Most people are most effective when they narrow their focus on one task at a time. Newsflash - you are not MOST PEOPLE. No matter what study is being conducted, there are almost always outliers. And more likely than not, you will be an outlier in at least one aspect of your life, which misaligns with the highly publicized logic as to what ‘most people’ should do. Rather than accepting everything you read as a personal truth, go figure out what actually applies to you in your own life and shape your daily actions accordingly. If it turns out that you can function just as well on six hours of sleep per night as you do on eight hours of sleep per night, then by challenging the group norms, you just earned back 14 extra hours of time per week.

Take a Long-Run Approach.

Most people tend to be fairly myopic in nature, consistently focusing on what is directly in front of them, rather than taking a long-run approach to personal and professional development. When you are in the midst of the daily grind, I know how easy it can be to feel like you are drowning in life and barely managing to get through the absolute priorities for tomorrow. There is no possible way that you could do anything more than what needs to be done to meet your short-term deadlines (or so it seems). In order to finally stop feeling like you are constantly trying to catch up with your life, you ironically need to alter your mindset and take a long-run approach. By framing your days with macro-level content and goals, you are both putting yourself in the proper mindset to succeed and better setting up a mental framework in which you will be able to sort the remainder of tasks and stimuli that come your way. By grounding your everyday actions in your long-term goals, you can easily shift your priorities away from the urgently unimportant matters and remind yourself why you are doing certain tasks in the first place. While this approach may make you feel like you are only putting more work on your plate, focusing on obtaining a high-level mastery of the material in your designated topic-area will allow you to work through micro-level tasks at a much more rapid pace.

Ride the Momentum.

When you come out of a meeting with your boss where you discussed a new project you are working on, the information and the content of your discussion is fresh in your mind. The meeting itself has initiated the early stages of a momentum build-up, which can be capitalized upon through spending the next few hours following the meeting taking your ideas to the next level. Rather than riding the momentum in our lives and following-up on tasks after the seeds of momentum are planted, we tend to walk away from the project and we let that momentum build-up go to waste. Instead of riding the momentum that your boss initiated while meeting with you about the project, you decide to continue with the project two days later rather than finishing it the night of the meeting itself. Through pushing against our internal desires to procrastinate and to give ourselves ‘deserved breaks’ following momentum build-ups, we can utilize this initial momentum as a springboard to energize ourselves to complete the work more quickly and effectively than we otherwise would have, given that we are now in the appropriate mental space.

Plant Seeds in Your Mind.

When you fall asleep watching a scary movie, what happens? Well, often watching scary movies before bed leads us to have bad dreams. As we were watching the scary movie while dozing off to sleep, seeds were planted in our mind that grew into the stories that we experienced in our dreams when they were given the opportunity to naturally develop. We don’t always think about what our minds are doing to advance our ideas when we are not consciously focused on them; yet, by simply planting a seed in your mind, your brain will utilize its excess processing power to move the idea forward without expending significant amounts of conscious energy in doing so. If you want to begin writing a fiction story or need to memorize a speech, read the speech right before bed or start crafting the beginnings of the plot development or character development for one of your characters. While your speech will not be fully memorized nor will your storyline be fully developed at the time when you plant the seed, the act of planting the seed in your mind will give your brain just enough material to play with and develop further while you are busy going about your everyday actions.

Let Your Inspiration Lead the Way.

Many people argue that you should just make a to-do list, and start working down the list regardless of whether or not you feel inspired to complete the task in the given moment. I strongly disagree with this approach. The key to moving through tasks not only efficiently but effectively is to get your mind and body excited and in a state of readiness to work on a particular project. If you are not excited about working on something, not only are you going to move through the task at a snail’s pace, but you are also going to get easily distracted and do low-quality work. While there are some tasks and projects that are inherently dull in nature and will never excite us in isolation, the mere opportunity to choose the best option amongst a set of alternatives will get our minds in a more advanced state of readiness to complete the task. In order to give yourself the leeway to operate under a system where you can choose what you want to complete at different times based upon when you feel inspired and ready to do so, you must get yourself far enough ahead in your workflow that you will not be forced to do any one thing in a previously designated hour of the day as a result of procrastination and time constraints. Never back yourself into a corner. Always give yourself the option to choose how and when you execute various tasks amongst your given set of alternatives.

Always Have Two Lists.

Many people find jumping back and forth between tasks to be incredibly distracting. I beg to differ. Trying to jump back and forth between tasks is only distracting if both tasks require the same type of brain power. If the tasks are inherently different in nature, switching back and forth between them will constantly help your mind to hit the reset button and provide a burst of new energy to help you get through your harder tasks. Instead of having one long to-do list for the day, I suggest you create two separate lists: one for content-heavy tasks and one for administrative tasks. For example, if I need to read five papers in a day, work on hypothesis development, and do a problem set, these tasks will all go on to-do list A. Beyond doing my academic work, there are also various other big-picture things that I may need to get done in a day, such as doing my laundry, buying groceries, booking a flight, painting my nails, calling my sister, and making my friend a birthday card. In order to get the most done in the shortest amount of time without ever drifting into the low-productivity zone that results from working on a project for too long at one time, I suggest going back and forth between your two types of lists. If you start with a content-heavy task from list A, when you proceed to feel yourself starting to lose energy and focus, give your mind a break by doing something from task list B. While you will still be giving your mind the break it needs, by pre-planning an administrative task list, you will be filling that time with things that actually need to get done, rather than wasting that time watching a netflix episode (which will inevitably turn into a five hour netflix marathon).

Procrastinate ‘Everything Else’.

Many people view procrastination as problematic. However, this statement is overly generalized. There are actually cases in which procrastination can be incredibly helpful in allowing us to give ourselves built-in time limitations for tasks that fall low on our priority list. In order to check things off our to-do lists, we often will start with tasks which we feel confident in our ability to complete. If we start with those tasks when we do not feel the burden of the time constraints that seem to mentally set in later in the day, we tend to spend inherently too long on these easier and often unimportant tasks, which leaves us in a time crunch when we realize how little time we have left in our days to complete the important tasks. In referring back to the pie chart above, I suggest procrastinating the tasks that fall into the ‘everything else’ category in your mental priority breakdown. Through monitoring which category tasks fall into and weighting their individualized importance accordingly, we can strategically work on the tasks that are most high-priority and relevant to our long-term goals when we feel the most energized and least time constrained. When we start with the high-priority tasks and procrastinate the low-priority tasks, bumping ourselves up against a deadline for these tasks that don’t inherently matter as much in the first place will designate inherent time limitations with regards to how long we can give ourselves to work on the task. Therefore the majority of our time can be spent working on the most high-priority items on our task lists.

Minimize Startup Costs.

In many cases, high levels of inefficiency stem from an overabundance of startup costs. A startup cost is essentially the additional time sink and effort that must be expended when getting your mind back to the place where it left off the last time that you worked on this particular project. When you stop reading a paper halfway through and pick it up a few days later, it often takes your mind quite some time to re-situate itself in the world the author has created. Beyond the additional time that it takes to get our minds back to the level in our understanding of a particular topic that we were at the day before, it is also important to realize that our precise mental states tend to shift from one day to the next. While there is generally a certain consistency about the way that each of us sees the world, we often wake up feeling like various different versions of ourselves depending on a series of different factors and stimuli that shape our view and interpretation of the world on any given day. While it is often impossible to work through projects from start to finish in one day in order to eliminate startup costs altogether, minimizing the degree to which we start and stop when working on in-depth mental tasks will help us to both work through projects more efficiently and to increase the level of consistency in our writing and ideation processes.

Getting What You Want Out of Work

People take jobs for a variety of different reasons. Yet all too often, corporate managers and team leaders fail to acknowledge the differences in motivations amongst their team members. This results in frustrated employees who feel misunderstood and who are constantly working in opposition to a system of incentives that is misaligned with their individualized motivations for taking the job in the first place. In order to maximize productivity in the workplace, it is essential for managers to understand what it is that their employees are personally working towards when they come into the office each morning. On the flip side, it is equally important for employees to position themselves accordingly in order to get what they want out of their employment experiences.

No matter how hard employees and managers try to stay in sync with one another to align their motivations and create an incentive plan that is mutually beneficial, it is essential for employees to understand their own motivations and to position themselves in the workplace accordingly. With all of the distractions that are inherently associated with the modern office environment, it is easy to lose sight of why it is that you are there in the first place. In order to get what you want out of the work that you are doing on a daily basis, you need to be crystal clear on your internal motivations when you walk into the office each morning so that you can shape your daily workflow accordingly.

Here are a few motivations underlying why people decide to accept certain jobs and how they need to position themselves in the corporate atmosphere accordingly:

Some people are looking for a strict 9 to 5 job because they want to focus on developing their family, building their skills in an unrelated hobby, or traveling the world. For these individuals, career development and quickly moving up the employment ladder is often not their primary objective at the moment. If you take a 9-5 job for the purposes of maintaining financial and personal stability while focusing your energy elsewhere, it is essential to stand your ground and ensure that you are not losing sight of your primary motivations for taking this job when 5PM rolls around. If you are not aiming to become the CEO of the company and are content with earning a paycheck, developing a specific set of skills, and satisfying your managers, you need to complete your work for the day to a sufficient and respectable level and then get up and leave. While maintaining a 9-5 job while pursuing outside interests can be physically draining at times, you need to train your mind and body to maintain multiple different modes that you can switch on and off. When you walk out of the office at 5:02, take a half hour or so to get some fresh air and entirely clear your mind of the tasks that you were working on throughout the first half of your day. Then mentally reset and spend the rest of your day and the next morning focusing on your other goals and interests before you channel your energy back into your 9-5 job.

Some people take a specific job in attempt to develop a particular set of skills that will serve as the fundamental building blocks to the pursuit of a career in a particular industry. This is often the case when individuals make a lateral career move from one industry to another, and they need to spend some time redeveloping skills in a different area. If you take a job to master certain industry fundamentals or build a new skill set, you should read as much as you possibly can and ask as many questions as possible. You are there to learn, and you should think of yourself as a sponge, getting paid to absorb knowledge on the job. Be upfront with your manager when you settle into your new position to let him or her know that part of the reason that you decided to take this position over others is that you felt it would be a suitable environment to further develop a particular skill set. When the time comes, ask your manager if you can work on particular projects where you can develop these skills and collaborate with other individuals who are masters in this area. If you want to develop skills that are not directly applicable to the day-to-day work that your manager asks you to complete, come into the office early or stay late to shadow another team member and to utilize the resources at your disposal.

Some people take a job with a clear intent to climb the corporate ladder of that particular company. If your inherent motivation is to get promoted within your current company, it is not enough to simply do your job. Corporations are largely different from more agile early-stage companies in that new hires are given a list of ‘tasks’ that are aligned with their job description. While successfully completing these responsibilities may be enough for your manager to view you as competent, simply doing what you are told is not enough for you to get noticed to the extent that your manager will see you as someone who has the capacity to assume a role beyond your current position. If your intent is to get promoted within an organization, you need to demonstrate leadership skills and pour the majority of your focus into relationship-building. Go beyond your job description, and suggest ways to improve the division or the company at large. Go out of your way to really get to know your managers and colleagues as individuals so that they see all of your attributes, beyond those that are required to sufficiently complete the task list that was attached to your original job description. Meet as many people as possible and express an interest in collaborating with other teams in the company so that you can simultaneously develop new skills and meet people across the organization.

As entrepreneurs, some people take a job to learn more about a specific industry that they hope to enter with the launch of their own venture. If you are starting a company or plan to start a company in the near future, it is not a bad idea to take a job that will allow you to experience the industry from the inside so that you have some fundamental knowledge in the space before trying to learn the rest on the go. If you take a job for this reason, keep a low profile and do not be too overt with your intentions when communicating with your manager. Make sure that you perform well enough on all of your tasks to maintain your current position, but control your internal urge to want to change every aspect of the organization to make it more efficient. Carefully choose the organizational issues that you decide to address, and spend the majority of your time getting paid to learn as much as possible. Don’t give away too much information about yourself, your background, or your motivation for taking the job, and use your extra time to utilize the resources at your fingertips and learn as much as you can. If you position yourself correctly, taking a job while starting a company can often be a great way to get paid for having someone teach you what you need to know to be successful in a given industry.

The next time that you take a job or walk into the office in the morning, think hard about why it is that you are spending so many precious waking hours in a specific office environment. If you come to realize that there is no way to position yourself within your current company so that your motivations are aligned with what you are getting out of the company, get up and leave. Today. There are so many opportunities at your fingertips, that the opportunity cost to staying at a job that is simply not aligned with what you ultimately want to achieve is simply too high. Once you know what it is that you are hoping to get out of a job, you can learn to shape your corporate image accordingly to maximize your personal utility within a given position.

Under Promise, Over Perform

When you were a junior in high school, struggling through American Literature class, did you ever wonder why you would often turn in two papers that you felt were of equal quality, yet you would receive a B on one of them and an A on the other?  When you left class with both papers in hand, trying to decipher the teacher’s rationale for the discrepancy, you got home and read over both papers. Yet, you still couldn’t find any significant difference between the paper that you wrote on The Scarlet Letter and the paper that you wrote on The Crucible a few weeks later.  If anything, you felt that your second paper which you got a B on seemed even a little bit better than the first. 

After you could not find any major discrepancies between your writing styles on the two papers, you tried thinking back to your process as to how you went about drafting and editing the two different papers. Prior to the first paper that you turned in, you scheduled a writing conference with your teacher to review your rough draft.  Before she read your work, you told her that this was the first five-page paper that you had ever written and that you tried your hardest, yet you didn’t feel that you had a strong enough grasp on the material and you were eager to hear the ways in which she could suggest improvements to your paper.  In other words, you unknowingly set the bar low and decreased the level of her expectations.  When she read your first paper, she was pleasantly surprised with your work as it was significantly better than she had expected.  She gave you a grade of an A, as she walked away from her experience grading your paper with confidence in your ability to surpass her expectations as a writer. 

Over the next few weeks, you enrolled in an after school writing program, and you met with your teacher every day during your free period to tell her about all of the new things that you had been learning and about how much you felt that your writing skills were improving.  One day when you were feeling particularly excited, you told her that you thought that writing might be your life calling.  After pouring all of your energy into showcasing your new and improved writing skills in your analysis of The Crucible, you turned in your second paper, eagerly awaiting your teacher’s feedback.  Yet, when you finally got your grade back a few weeks later, you looked down and were surprised to find a subpar B staring back at you. How could this be?

While you were busy fine-tuning your writing skills and sharing those personal insights with your teacher, you were unknowingly building her expectations.  Now that the bar was set much higher, the same writing style that earned you an A on your first paper was no longer good enough (in your teacher’s mind).  Your teacher then knew that you had the potential to perform at a certain level, so beyond being judged more critically in comparison to your own previous capabilities, your work may have even been evaluated differently than your classmates' work.  So while your friend Jimmy turned in a paper much worse than yours and walked away with an A, you stood there dumbfounded, wondering where you went wrong.  The flaw in your logic was not in your product, but rather in your process.

Our teachers’ and managers’ impressions of our work are often not based solely on the final product that we turn in, but more so on how we manage their expectations throughout the process.  No matter how talented we may be, if we set sky high expectations, we are always going to fall short of the person that we claim to be. Through setting high expectations internally and setting external expectations that are slightly lower than what we believe we can achieve, we are setting ourselves up for success.

For example, if you tell your manager or teacher that you are going to get through 100 pages out of a 200-page document by Friday, yet you proceed to fall short of your goal and turn in only 90 pages, you are going to fall short of their expectations. Rather than performing better than they expected you to perform, over promising puts you in a personally stressful position that often doesn’t work in your favor.

Even if you think that with some certainty, you will be able to get through 90 to 100 pages of the document by Friday, you should only agree to have maybe 80 pages done by Friday.  Then if you turn in the same 90 pages that you would have in the case above, you will be exceeding their expectations rather than falling short of them.  Even if your teacher or manager ends up with an equivalent quality of work in their hands, (in the case of under promising and over performing) the fact that they received more than they internally expected will leave them feeling positive and confident in your ability to manage your own performance. If you happen to fall short of your personal goals as a result of unexpected distractions and only turn in 80 pages by the deadline, you will still have kept your promise and met the agreed upon expectations, reinforcing your ability to meet deadlines and keep your promises.

While it is important to set your internal bar very high to keep striving for personal improvement, setting the bar out of reach externally only sets you up to fall short of your promises and to struggle to meet external expectations.  When you set expectations that are realistic and externally agree upon performance metrics that are slightly below your personal capabilities, you are giving yourself the buffer zone that is necessary to succeed time and time again.

The 'It Factor'

With college admissions season right around the corner, the recurrent question of ‘what separates the few from the many’ is more pressing than ever.  In high schools around the world, college seniors are spending their days cramming SAT vocabulary and working through their extensive list of college applications, only to hope that someone behind closed doors on an admissions committee will think that they are one of the best of the best.  Amongst the many thousands of applicants that apply to the top schools each year, with near-perfect SAT scores and GPAs above a 4.0, what makes someone a standout?

There are plenty of students who appear to be qualified for these schools on paper, yet there are only a select number of spots for a mere handful of the very best to turn their dreams of being on top into a reality. While there is no exact formula for getting into the top schools, and no exact phenotypic makeup that deems someone a good fit to be in the next class at Harvard or Yale, there is one thing that recurrently separates the few from the many – and that is the ‘it factor’.  

Whether it be through informally mentoring students who are trying to navigate the complex high school journey, choosing my own friends and colleagues, or conducting alumni interviews for Princeton admissions, I can usually identify whether or not students have the ‘it factor’ after talking to them for only a few minutes.  Not every newly accepted Princeton or Harvard student looks the same – the ‘it factor’ can be packaged in a variety of different capacities, as it is not about product but rather about process.  The distinguishing factor between the ‘good’ and the ‘great’ lies in the journey as opposed to the destination – because the way that a person carves out a path to learn and grow as an individual is something that will continue to make them their own unique person for years to come. 

When you walk into a small discussion-based seminar at Princeton, the twelve students sitting around the table may not be the twelve smartest people you will ever meet; but the majority of those students are more than likely to have the ‘it factor.’  From my experience working with students who may be among the best of the best, I have found the following characteristics to be recurrent in determining whether or not someone has the ‘it factor.’

Grit. You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room, as long as you are the person in the room who wants it the most.  It doesn’t matter if the road is bumpy or the path undefined, as long as you have the drive to carve out your own path to find the pot of gold at the end of the tunnel.

Curiosity.  Inherent curiosity is something that is hard to fake.  If you are inherently curious, the learning takes care of itself.  This is often something that can only be acquired through reading, understanding yourself, and playing an active role in the world around you.  If you let your inherent curiosity lead the way, you just have to follow your interests and passions and will begin to stumble upon more opportunities than you could ever imagine.

Selflessness. Being the smartest person in the room and acting like everyone else is below you will not get you very far – I’ve learned this from first-hand experience.  It took me a while to develop this characteristic, but eventually I came to see that you can really learn something from everyone.  If you approach life with a ‘no task is too small’ type of attitude, then you will gain the respect of those around you and become an inherently stronger leader and more complete individual.

Authenticity.  The ability to be true to yourself is an unmet quality.  Through identifying your strengths and admitting to your weaknesses, you are building a strong degree of self-awareness that will help you to continue to develop as a person both personally and professionally.  Rather than trying to be the person that you think will appeal to an interviewer, a prospective manager, or an admissions committee, just worry about being the best possible version of yourself. If you wake up with that goal in mind every single day, there is nobody who can beat you out at being uniquely you.

While these four characteristics are not all-encompassing, they are some of the recurrent features that I have identified in individuals who possess the ‘it factor’ across various age spans and industry verticals.  While some of these traits may be inherent, there are always ways to improve as a person through understanding where your time and energy is best spent.  And what better time to start than the present.

The Real 'Why' of Going Ivy

I remember the moment that I found out I had gotten into Princeton like it was yesterday. I had just gotten home from gymnastics practice, and I was sitting in our family office in my gymnastics leotard as my family was anxiously hovering over my shoulder awaiting the big news. For the first time in my life, I really didn’t have high expectations, but there was a tiny glimmer of hope that had me on the edge of my seat as I logged-on to the Princeton admissions website. While all I really expected from the Princeton admissions department that evening was for them to wish me luck on my future endeavors, when I opened the admissions decision, I saw a big orange and black tiger on the screen – and under it, an orange headline that said CONGRATULATIONS.  I was frozen. I had absolutely no idea what to think, aside from the fact that there was inevitably a glitch in the system and I had gotten another awaiting student’s admissions decision instead of my own.  Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. And yet every single time I reloaded the page, that tiger just kept popping back up on the screen. 

After finally hitting refresh enough times to convince myself that I wasn’t living in a daydream, I started screaming at the top of my lungs and running around my house in circles. Not too long after, my parents and siblings jumped in with me – and together we probably sounded like a herd of inharmonious band geeks. I’m surprised the neighbors didn’t call the cops because they thought we were throwing another hoopla in the backyard. After my voice was strained and I was all out of juice, I tried checking some of my other Ivy accounts, only to find the sites bogged down by other overachieving Ivy-League wannabees who were doing exactly the same thing. Given I didn’t apply to Harvard and had already been accepted to Princeton, the anxiety in awaiting my Cornell and Penn admissions decisions wasn’t quite as nail-biting. Yet, there was definitely an ounce of curiosity eating away at me, even if only for bragging rights and self-satisfaction.  In an effort to try to prove to myself that this was actually real life and that I wasn't dreaming, I decided to jump in the shower instead of staring at the computer screen as I angrily hit refresh on my Penn and Cornell accounts countless times.  But while I had found it within myself to let the scent of uncertainty linger in the air for another half-hour or so, my parents wanted answers.  So they continued to try to swim their way through the sea of nail-biting students, and after countless efforts, they finally broke through.  This time it was my mom who initiated the screaming and that could only mean one thing – getting into Princeton wasn’t a fluke, as I had been accepted into two lesser, but still noteworthy Ivy League schools as well.  As my mom started banging on the bathroom door to tell me the good news, I started jumping up and down and dancing around like a monkey in the shower.

All in all, it was a good night, a night that I will never forget.  After countless years of pushing myself to new limits and dealing with the many sources of criticism and dumb blonde jokes that had come my way, within seconds, I had all of the validation that I needed. I no longer cared that some of my friends got better grades on their math tests, or that I didn’t have perfect SAT scores, because three schools that I never imagined getting into wanted me to spend the next four years of my life on their campuses. In the public high school that I attended, the day after college admissions decisions come out is college t-shirt day, where all of the seniors wear the shirt of the school that they plan on attending. While I had only told maybe a handful of my close friends and mentors about my multiple Ivy League acceptances the night before, word travels like lightening, and when I walked into my first period honors physics class the next morning, all eyes were on me.  For months, I had been daydreaming about what it might feel like to finally be able to wear a Princeton t-shirt and actually know that my love for the school was not unrequited – not only did I want them, but they wanted me too.  But as I faced a whirlwind of fake smiles masking the glares that many others were not as suave at hiding, I wanted to crawl back under my covers.  The t-shirt that I was so proud to wear would have to stay hidden under my sweatshirt until I built up the nerve to take it off during second period. But just because I was too afraid to flaunt the word Princeton across my chest, it didn’t mean that people didn’t imagine it being there anyway. As I sat slumped down in my chair in the back row of my physics class, I remember a girl turning around to talk to me, as I thought to myself – here we go. After the clichéd small talk and congratulations, this girl took me aback with something that I will never forget.  After talking more about her college options and trying to soften the blow of not getting into the Ivy League schools herself, she told me that I was so lucky to have gotten into Princeton, because now I would be set for life.

While getting into Princeton was undoubtedly a noteworthy achievement, I took the girl’s comment as nothing more than excessive kindness and exaggeration at the time. But now I know that she was right.  As great as it was to see that tiger wagging his tail on my computer screen the night before, I definitely hadn’t considered the ramifications of what a Princeton acceptance meant.  For that day of school and for many to follow, I had to internalize the whispers and glares of all of the people who felt they were smarter and more qualified than I was, and therefore couldn’t fathom why Princeton had possibly wanted me over them.  Were many people in my graduating high school class more naturally intelligent than I was? Absolutely.  In the midst of living in a yuppie town full of star athletes, driven students, and well-rounded people, I was rarely the smartest person in the room, and I was okay with that.  I was never afraid to ask question after question in class, or to call my friends at two in the morning admitting that I had no idea how to do any of the physics problems on our homework assignment. Not everything came as naturally to me as it did for other people, but there is one thing that I am certain of – and that is that I wanted it more than anything.  And passion and grit can take you further than anything else in the world.

While there is no exact science to college admissions decisions, I would definitely say that getting into the top schools is a lot more like a creative writing piece than a math test.  So all of the people who didn’t think I deserved to be wearing that Princeton t-shirt would just have to live with the uncertainty of the situation, just the same as I would. As the days passed and the date on the calendar crept closer and closer to the time when I would have to commit to a particular school, I explored all of my noteworthy options and tried to consider what going to each school would mean for the next four years of my life.  But while it was the next four years of my life that were primarily weighing on my decision, it was really the next seventy that I should have been mulling over in my head.  As I went from one school to the next in attempt to make my decision, I tried to talk to as many students and alumni as possible in attempt to get a sense for what my experience at the school would be like, and ultimately why I should attend. Getting into all of these great schools definitely gave me a temporary chip on my shoulder, because I felt like for a fleeting moment, I was on top of the world.  I was a senior in high school, the captain of the gymnastics team, and according to the girl in my physics class, I was set for the rest of my life.  So over time the glares of those who resented me only started to fuel my fire, and avoidance slowly began to morph into a feeling of power as I embraced my present and tried to start writing my future.

When I had the opportunity to spend a few days on the Princeton campus for Princeton Preview, I was immersed in a blur of orange and black, with students presenting me with all sorts of reasons why Princeton was the best school in the world.  And while they were struggling through writing their thesis or pulling an all-nighter in the library, they put on a good face and tried to convince me that Princeton was the best choice.  Though I appreciated all of the friendly students who were eagerly congratulating me and sharing their Princeton experiences, I have always been a pretty blunt person – and to this day, there is one rationale that has stuck with me - the ultimate reason that made me check the box that would sign me up for what I thought was four years of perpetual Halloween.  And that reason was this: for the rest of my life, I would be able to write the word PRINCETON in sharpie marker in big bold letters on a white piece of paper, and that is the extent of a resume that I would need to open any door I wanted in my future.  So while my high school crush may have been going to Penn and I would have been able to do division one gymnastics at Cornell, I realized that there was a flaw in my logic.  While the student’s notions may have been exaggerated, sitting where I am today with a Princeton diploma in my hand, I can say that there is all too much truth to the premise of his argument.

After internalizing the student’s words and trying to look at the situation in its entirety, I realized that the college that I would choose was not only going to impact the next four years of my life, but it would impact the seventy to follow.  And after coming to see the strength of Princeton’s community and alumni network at a dinner that I attended, my decision was a no-brainer. Saying yes to Princeton would not only mean four years of pushing myself academically and being exposed to some of the best professors that this country has to offer.  It would also mean setting myself up for a lifetime of opportunity, with countless proud tigers bending over backwards to help me every step of the way.  While there are a vast amount of direct benefits that come with attending an Ivy League school, such as incredible professors, wonderful academic and career opportunities, and all of the amazing peers whom you will have the opportunity to share your knowledge with along the way – the real ‘why’ of attending a school like Princeton is most clearly depicted in the stream of orange and black tigers who parade past Nassau Hall during reunions every single year.  From the proud tigers in the old guard to the seniors who are about to graduate, the group of alumni that you become a part of when you walk out of Fitzrandolph Gate at commencement is simply indescribable. I have this one Princeton t-shirt that says ‘once a tiger, always a tiger’ and as cheesy as that slogan sounds, there is no better way to articulate my Princeton experience. And now instead of having one Princeton t-shirt that I would wear under my sweatshirt in high school, secretly wondering what the word Princeton would really mean in the context of my own life, I have more Princeton t-shirts than I know what to do with, and I wear them proudly. While I may still not be the smartest person in the room, I am and forever will be one of many in a pack of tigers who are always there to help me find my way.  And though I may not have all the answers, I know that for the rest of my life, the answer will be just a phone call away.