The Niche Strategy Behind A Harvard & Stanford Admit

[MUSIC] Welcome back, my name is Sam Hassel. And in today's episode, we're going to be doing something a little bit different. So in the past, we had done some deep dives into some of the various online forums, various students and parent questions, and answering some of them today. In this episode, we're actually going to be breaking down a post in one of the online parent forums. And we're going to basically just be dissecting this and analyzing it. It relates to awesome of the strategy for getting into elite colleges, in particular Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT. So let's get into it. OK, so this post is from March 1, 2026. And the author, of course, anonymous writes, we are fortunate to have a daughter who has accepted all of the Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT schools back in 2025. So this sounds like this was last year's application cycle. We are unhooked in every aspect of the word. I'm not here to engage with people who call me a troll or try to discredit the premise of this post. I'm laying the facts of our experience down and you may choose whether or not you want to believe me. Quite frankly, I don't care if you don't believe me. If you choose to believe the post, I hope that it will be useful. I'm also not here to discuss ethics. OK, so we're off to a great and pretty intriguing start. It seems to me that the best way to get into these schools nowadays is to use what I call now a barb instead of a spike. So what they mean by a spike is basically what we refer to as a hook, a very defined sort of additions through line, passion, a theme to your application. What this means is to go all in, extracurriculars, essays, classes on one incredibly, incredibly niche field. This departs from the typical sense of a spike in that a spike is far too broad. These are often synonymous with a field of study, computer science, environmental science, politics, healthcare, etc. But a barb is far spiked year than a spike. It means that you must specialize within that spike. Spikes have now become well-rounded and well-rounded applicants have become rejects. So you could choose to go all in on ways that Native Americans interact with the environments or go all in on compilers and computer science or spend your time lobbying for laws that challenge deceptive interrogation tactics or architecture and hospitals or a specific gene in the ostrich genome. This one's probably too specific. In a way, we found success by targeting all of our donors extracurriculars at that one particular topic. This leaves no question for the AO as to what place the student will take on campus, what labs they will engage in, what classes they will take, what clubs they will join and what their future looks like. It. This is a typo here. It makes your regional AO's job advocating for you in committee incredibly easy because they can just refer to you as that student who is interested in making exonries or that student who has a deep passion for colonial Japan's rise or that student who has worked on protest theory for years. Barbs also lend themselves to great awards to put on an application. Such deep intellectual regard research and involvement is often rewarded. And this might be a little unethical. What swings the deal at these schools is that you can change your major before you even arrive on campus. There's no commitment to any of these barbs. No self-respecting person is going to major in any way cosmologies, but a self-respecting high schooler may very well choose their barb in that field. This is also a very high variance strategy. If rejected by all top tens or whatever, you may be stuck studying political science at the University of Maryland or Yukon. This strategy has been very successful in recent years, but that's of course anecdotal. Curious to hear thoughts, questions, etc. Okay. So, talking a little bit here about some sort of taxonomy and some nomenclature. So what the person is referring to here as a spike, as I said, is basically what we often refer to on the podcast as a hook. Some sort of very clear passion that is evidence in the student's application, a clear throughline that runs through their activities, their strengths in terms of their coursework, their course rigor, potentially their SAT ACT scores if you want to be an engineer or doing something more STEM oriented, are your STEM scores better on standardized testing, do you get harder STEM classes, external college courses in those fields related to that hook. And most specifically, the hook really comes out and is evidenced through your extra cragglers and your awards. So they're using the term spike. We often use the term HUP. Now, what they're referring to as a barb, this is sort of the mean premise of this post. And we obviously can't verify. This is an anonymous poster in a forum filled of anonymous posters who is saying that their daughter got into all of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, and Stanford a year ago. Obviously, we don't on diverse. I know that. It'd be a little bit odd if somebody goes into a parent forum and boasts about this and sort of puts forth this well elaborated hypothesis for no reason. But take that as you may. What they're basically calling a barb is what we talk a lot about on this podcast, which is the notion of having an niche. I don't know that you need to actually change the nomenclature here. I think you could just say a very focused hook, or a very specific hook. But this is often what we talk about and what they're sort of alluding to here is that a spike, or as we would call it a hook, they're saying is synonymous with a field of study, by which they often mean, you know, a college major, computer science, environmental science, politics, healthcare, field of study, major discipline. Now, I have said that a hook is not really the same thing as a major or a discipline or a field of study. It's not quite the same thing. It really is just a focus, right? And how that eventually gets translated or converted to any particular college, or what you'll sort of bring to that college, what you'll study, what research, you'll conduct, what clubs you'll join. That will vary on a school-by-school basis, because different schools have different academic offerings, different majors, different minors, different certificates, concentration, traditions, whatever it's called at the school. They're for clubs, not every single college obviously has the same set of extracurriculars, the same set of professors, you know, doing research or labs. And so that will really depend how you ultimately convert that hook or that passion into majors and academic areas, specific courses, research, clubs, etc. So a hook isn't really, you know, or spike isn't really even the same exact thing as a major or field of study, but they are very closely related. So the main concept here basically is it's if we're sort of doing a chronological progression of admission here, what they're basically saying is there was one epic in admissions where you know, the student who was very well-rounded, they play sports and instruments, etc., etc. Maybe they weren't very academically deep into one discipline and maybe a bunch of their pursuits didn't even have any academic relevance whatsoever. That sort of student, you know, had their heyday, right? Mostly in sort of the 80s and the 90s. They're then sort of the way that this is sort of presented is we then sort of move on to okay, will we move past the well-rounded regime into the regime of the more spiky students, you know, as a hook, but what they're saying is now we're sort of post that period and now because there are sufficient number of students who do have a hook or spike in these broader areas or fields of study, computer science, environmental science, you know, politics, political science, medicine, that now in order to even further differentiate yourself from sort of that second period, that second chronological group of students, now you need to be even much more niche or much more drilled down into one of these fields and must be much more specific in terms of, you know, a very particular topic or cause that you're, you know, that you're devoted yourself to and your extracurriculars and all of your application basically come together to support. So this is nothing particularly novel. If you've listened to the podcast for quite some time, I've very often talked about the importance of having a niche and particularly if you're in a very competitive field or competitive area such as computer science, engineering and then even of his engineering, but it's just, you know, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, it's just too competitive. You want to be a doctor, you want to do biology. Any of the really common fields and umbrellas, I've said basically that the more competitive the top line positioning is, which is just the overall umbrella of that field. If it's very competitive, then you have to be able to differentiate yourself from all the students in that area by drilling down into a much more specific topic in that field. And that's how you basically create distance from yourself and others. You, of course, can also just be exceptional by way of talent in that field. Right? If you're in math, you could be, you know, national international level. And that may just be another way that you can differentiate yourself. I don't know. So the two means by which you can differentiate yourself is you can be scarce or rare by way of just sheer uniqueness. You just start drilled into a very specific niche that not a lot of other people occupy. It's sort of a blue ocean, so to speak. Or you can be exceptional, be extremely scarce and rare by virtue of ability. And this isn't an either or as I often say in animations. If you are both, that is obviously the most ideal. Right. So we very often have mentioned sort of what they're referring to as a barb as basically a niche or just a hyper-hyper-specific and where Hulk and it's going to be the most important for applicants who are in the most competitive fields. We're just being specialized and having a hook in computer science or mechanical engineering or medicine or bio pre-med. It's just not going to be differentiating enough. Unfortunately, it's going to be very cliche. And then you run it into further complexities. If you are, for example, an Asian Indian American boy who wants to do computer science or engineering, you end up with further complexities. If you're in Silicon Valley, if you're in certain areas, that's very common or it's certain technical high schools, magnet schools. In those cases where you basically have compounding degrees of difficulty, you even more so have to be able to stand out. And one way to potentially do that is by pursuing what this person or building what this person or refers to as a barb, what we often refer to as "undish". Now I want to sort of talk about some of the practicalities of this post and sort of, you know, how people should sort of think about this. It is written like a rather almost insidious or mocky-evalian way. First off, and this is something that I've seen with a lot of people when I'm doing parent calls, is people are sort of very good at spitting back to me. What I refer to as strategic idealism. This is a bit of my fault, I think, on the podcast because when I'm doing episodes, there's no student here. There's not an actual human being. We're not having in this particular case when I'm doing an episode, it's, you know, pretty theoretical. Even if it's a case study, it's still fairly abstract, right? But particularly if it's not a case study. This isn't a student or a specific 14-year-old where you have to assign them to do items basically to make progress on their candidacy, right? And that makes it a lot more concrete and you have to factor in a lot more practical considerations when you're actually working with a teenager and doing this process, you know, in a fairly rigorous and tense high accountability way. When I'm just sort of, you know, arm-sharing it on the podcast, I can sometimes go a lot into sort of the theoretical aside and not always as much the hyper-pragmatic tactical side. And a lot of this just because I have no, I have no kid particularly in front of me. Again, even if it's a case study, that's going to be a lot better and a lot more hyper-specific and practical and pragmatic and tactical because I, I don't have the student literally right in front of me. We're not doing actual work per se, but I do have the various histories of a case and context and deed that's to work with, right? But when I'm sort of just, you know, just going off, a lot of what ends up happening is I sort of say it's like describing the ideal gas loss, but for a league college emissions, right? And this is a lot of what, where this post is sort of leaning, which is leading a lot into strategic idealism because there's no actual kid right here in front of you that you're going to have to make interested in in-u-it cosmologies for the next three years, right? And I think even as I say that, we can understand the difference, right? This is great as theory, and I think it's extremely important for people to understand because there is a lot of truth in this post and there is a lot of validity and legitimacy to this post. First of all, if you're in sort of that, you're still in that first era of call of elite, U.S. call emissions, where you're still, and this is still the vast majority of people. Because even if we think about this, even for all the people who become very educated as to the strategy of elite college emissions, well, they only have so many kids and they only stay in the game so to speak for so long, right? Even if you have three kids, eventually you just age out and you don't care anymore, and then there's somebody else who still has no idea how elite college emissions works, who now has, you know, who now has kids who now basically enter the college emissions life cycle, right? And so there's always basically just people who have still absolutely no idea about anything in terms of what these colleges are looking for or the sort of game, so to speak, of elite college emissions, what it really actually takes to stand out, whether you want to play that game, whether you don't, whether you want to be strategic, whether you don't want to be strategic or intentional, there is still just insane information gap. If you're coming from that camp of sort of 1980s, 1990s, well-rounded student, they play the sport, they do the instruments, they're part of a bunch of clubs that nothing to do with each other, they're the class presidents, and there's no clear academically relevant through line in particular, unless you're going to be a recruited athlete at the college, with setting that aside, generally you're going to be a student, so you have to have something that is academically or intellectually relevant, there has to be supported throughout your application. So if you're still in that well-rounded mindset, then just moving from well-rounded to just the notion of a hook or spike of just having some focus is making a good amount of progress. Where this post is sort of coming in saying, okay, well now even if you're in that second camp, now you have to move basically to a third camp if you want to differentiate yourself now in this new era of college missions. And so this is still very useful, and again, particularly going to be useful for students who are maybe very focused. As I've said, a lot of STEM students are not necessarily that well-rounded. A lot of them are hyper focused. We don't have a lot of lawyer prodigies or doctor prodigies, but you do have kids who've been coding since they were seven. You do have kids who've been doing math since they were three. And so very particularly in STEM, as I mentioned on the podcast before, STEM is a field or general umbrella that does lean in some stronger characteristics among those applicants. They do tend to be higher intellectual vitality or higher curiosity or higher intrinsic motivation than maybe students in other disciplines. However, it tends to be a set of areas that lean to a bunch of students who tend to have parents in those fields who have potentially influenced their path in that field, have taught them from a very young age, or the students just became very interested in motivated and became very skilled in those fields from a very young age. And then you end up with a lot of their race ethnicity or the males, the Indian Asian Americans, the boys in the STEM fields, etc. Where you get these sort of compounding, as I've said, levels of difficulty or sort of lack of scarcity, basically. And so I think particularly again, if you're in very competitive over saturated fields, a lot of the wisdom of this post, so to speak, is good. Like you should understand this and at a conceptual, theoretical level, you should just understand scarcity. And you should, I often say admissions is just a Lee College of admissions, just a stock exchange of scarcity. You need to understand that if you are just selling the college, if you're just the same archetype as other students, you just have the same interests, you're just yet another kid who takes 11 AP classes, right? It's just, it's not actually rare or unique or as much as you might think it is, you know, just sort of in your own header evaluating at a local basis, right? And so I think all of that's good. So a lot of what we've spoken about on the podcast, that being said, right, if you sort of need that wake up call, so to speak, or that basic understanding of how a Lee College of admissions actually works and the sort of pressure to be very unique and very scarce and differentiate yourself just from the sea of students who are straight A's, top of their class, near perfect task scores, have good extracrificulars, founder of this, present of that, et cetera, et cetera. If you already moved on past that and hopefully many people of us in the podcast have, you now really need to understand, so okay, you understand basically 101 strategy, right? Of elite college admissions, right? Or maybe 201. But when you actually have a kid in front of you, as I told many parents before, if the kid were robot, then all we would do is we would just write and I love, I love theory, right? I love college admissions theory and sort of what is strategically ideal in a perfect world. We would just program these interests into the kid like a computer, right? Because the computer wouldn't object. And we would just say, you know, go do any of these, you know, these things that this first of mentions in the post, right? You can go all in on ways that need Americans interact with the environment. By the way, I know students who've had some of these narratives and they still not are attractive, but yeah, sure, you can do the, the Inuit cosmologies and you can program it into the computer. The unfortunate part is it's not how it actually works. As I mentioned before, because. Because I'm both in the field and I'm also in some ways when I do these podcasts who are in the armchair. I become much more cognizant over time of do I say something like what do people spit back to me when I actually speak to them and I have a real suing case and what actually predicts real behavior, right? And a lot of times, your idealistic strategy does not actually predict behavior, right? And what I mean by that is if you have, particularly, this is going to be most applicable to students who are much younger because it's much longer process, right? And so it's much less sustainable for soon over a very long period of time to pursue something in which they have very little to no interest just because it's quote unquote strategically ideal. And even meeting students, I've told parents this before, even meeting students, the students themselves many times, we even, they'll even convince themselves that they can do it, right? If you say, hey, if you could become, you know, a computational linguistics, you know, a kid who's, you know, applies it to the Navajo language, right? You go to Harvard, right? A lot of kids will convince themselves that they'll be able to do that. But it's just abstract, right? It's just an abstraction where what they're seeing is just what they believe to be the goal or the outcome that they'll get and a lot of kids will just sort of maybe dilute themselves or convince themselves that they can do it. And I generally have not like one of the things they put pressure on with a lot of students is like, I want to see how legitimate or how genuine this interest is. One thing I often say is there's sort of, you know, three different mean variables is we do a lot of, you know, giving the students a lot of questions as per their discovery assignment when they start. And so some really good sort of proxies or metrics for, you know, should this be the area that the student is building in? One would be the frequency with which they talk about the topics. You give them a sufficiently large sample of questions. How often do they talk about this topic, right? Or maybe a few topics and a few disciplines that we can sort of intersect with each other into a hook. Second one is at what length do they talk about it? It's not a perfect, it's not perfect, but it's a reasonable proxy, right? It stands a reason that if you can only talk about something for two sentences versus you talk about it for eight paragraphs, you could probably understand which one's probably a better operationalization as to what might be a student's hook. The third one is I would say the degree of competence or skill or proficiency that is exhibited in the way they talk about it, right? That topic. So a lot of students is still the case down the line with the call just says they're like, why do you want to do business? So I want to do business because I'm good at math, right? Terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible. Versus you had a student who's going to end up going to Penn and they can talk about some super niche specific concept in economics. And so a lot of students I simply don't believe their interests because they have very little proficiency or knowledge. They don't talk about it very often. They have no behavioral evidence, which is what I consider the most on this signal. They had no, I'm so interested in business. They don't do anything, right? They never even run a lemonade stand. They've never tried to sell anything. They don't look up any videos on YouTube. They have no behavioral evidence whatsoever, right? And so there's people who will say, oh, they've never taken a business course before. That was a great excuse in the 1970s before you basically had access to all the world's information at your fingers at any time that you wanted. It's a really bad excuse when you live in 2026 that you can't even listen to a podcast or watch a YouTube video or you don't even want to tick tocks related to business, but somehow, some way you're so interested in business doesn't seem very credible. One thing that I'm trying to do is put a lot of pressure on how genuine is this and a lot of students will be able to convince themselves, those of themselves, oh, yeah, I could do this, right? You need to start making it extremely concrete. If you want to build an exceptional candidacy, you have to be an exceptional executor. In order to be an exceptional executor, you need to basically do this thing on a weekly basis, if not almost a daily basis, right? This is why I often say, okay, in our program, you're going to get twice weekly assignments Monday and Friday at every single week, right? This is a hyper executor, hyper accountability program because that's what it actually takes. And by making small increments of progress and then compounding those small increments of progress over a very protracted time span, that is how excellence is actually built, right? No Olympic gold medalist just woke up one day or trained for six months and they just compounded six months worth of progress. If you want to really start pressure testing, okay, as this legitimate, as this January or not, start making it extremely concrete, not okay. If you pursue this niche field, you know, you have a higher probability success of going in Stanford, but instead of that, okay, great. Today is Friday. On Monday, you're going to have 10 items in your to-do related to Inuit cosmology. Are you excited? Right. And so now we've taken something that's much more, you know, nebulus with just sort of the upside is mainly what's seen, but the cost isn't really seen as much. And now it feels a lot more palpable, right? And I think we understand that most kids are not going to be super excited. And this is what I would say is the difference between strategic risk and executional risk. You might have a angle, a narrative, right? You may see this all the time, right? We have an Indian boy, Chinese boy who's interested in engineering or math or computer science. And of course, are we going to try to do our best to still make the student not a total cliche in emissions and sort of be mindful of the positioning? Of course, we're going to look for other fields they might be interested in as well. Maybe there's a cool intersection, right? And this is one of the ways a lot of people are very, very worried about like being too focused on one discipline. A hook is not necessarily a single discipline. As I've said many times, a hook can be interdisciplinary. I don't consider a well-rounded student, which is they play a sport and an instrument and things that have nothing to do with whatever the main hook is going to be what they're bringing to the college. That is not the same as a student who has two or three, you know, academically relevant interests that can be combined into a clear theme, right? And so one of the first things you do with a student who is in maybe a saturated field or to make them more niche is in to send them off and make them thrilled with any one that calls homologies. But it is saying, okay, you maybe you maybe like these two or three fields, there happens to be a discipline, you know, or research problem that spans these two or three fields, right? And you're sort of doing a couple of things simultaneously and you're sort of kind of, you know, you're sort of getting your cake and eating it too, as they say, which is you're making the student more niche because you're bringing in a couple of disciplines and the intersection of them is what is going to create the niche, right? They have to say it's like a Venn diagram where if the overlap between the two circles of the two disciplines is where not a lot of a lot of students are, right? There's going to be a lot more students in one circle or the other circle, but not as many at the intersection. And then if you had three circles, there's going to be even fewer at the intersection where there's an overlap between all three of the circles. And we've seen this on the podcast before with the extra vacancy that I did. I've mentioned what I referred to as juxtapositional depth, which is two fields that on their surface seem like they're not necessarily related. We saw a girl who did math in classics. We saw a boy who did business in classics. We saw a student who did architecture and political science, right? And so you don't necessarily have to be niche just with some hyper, hyper, hyper-hyber-specific topic. You can also be niche by bringing in some different disciplines in some potentially very interesting ways, creating what I refer to as nexus activities, sort of points of tendancy between the disciplines. You get that upside of creating a niche by way of bringing in a few of the students, you know, interest, their academic interest. Then what you also do is you sort of don't make them feel like they're cutting off one of their arms because they have two or three academic interests. And you're telling them make it only pursue one of them, right? And so you're preserving some optionality, some breath of interest, while still doing what is strategically ideal. And so you do end up reducing the strategic risk of the students not going to be unique because you have a unique bundle of interest, potentially that are put together in an interesting way. And then you reduce the executional risk because the student actually likes this bundle, these two or three different things or this intersection, basically of these interests, right? And so that concept of strategic risk versus executional risk is very important because in a lot of cases the execution risk is the greatest risk. If you have, if you come up with a, let's say, a 10 out of 10 strategically, I, you know, ideal narrative for the students, right? First of all, it's not very hard at all, right? You could just not very difficult to find something that's hyperhyper specific. I think we understand what's difficult about it is to get the student actually do it over multiple years and create the type of execution and progress that it would take to actually build out that type of candidacy. Setting aside the issue of you potentially wasted three years doing something you potentially don't like. But let's say we have a 10 out of 10 strategy, but the execution is basically 40 per cent. Well, then you have a four out of 10 on net, right, between the two factors. Let's say you have an eight out of 10, you know, strategic, you know, from a strategic perspective in terms of upside, but you have 80 per cent execution, right? Well, you have a 6.4, basically, right? We sort of net that out. You have to understand that the execution basically, it's very important to be mindful of the strategy and the considerations. I always say, this is just an information processing model that we use and I believe in very firmly. I want to see all of the data and all the variables before we make any decisions, right? But a variable or a consideration, right, saying, okay, this student is more overrepresented in this field or this is a more competitive field, right? That consideration or variable or a factor, it does, it does not mean it's the final verdict, right? It means it's an input into the model of the final decision, right? And again, a lot of times we can have our KKD2 because there will be something else, some other interest the student has that is more unique. And so then we can use that to hedge against the interest that's a lot less unique or overrepresented or over saturated. And so it may, you know, it's potentially not an issue really in the first place. But these are a lot of times what I'm mentioning are maxims, they're strategic maxims, but eventually they may break when you actually get to the real world and you're working with a real student and you have to factor in things like execution numbers. And fundamentally, I mean, even if your student listening to this or your parent listening to you don't obviously have to be, you know, doing this professionally, you know, as college advisor, but just think of how hard it is if you're a parent to get a teenager to do something that they really don't want to do, right? If you are the teenager yourself, right? Or you're a kid, maybe you're a little bit younger than a teenager, but how hard is it to even get yourself to do something? That's really, really that you really don't want to do. And then you can think about, okay, well, could I get myself to do it once? Could I get myself to do it for an hour? Could I get myself to do it for five hours once every month? But the thing is you are already negotiating, right? You're ready. It's like, this is always one of the biggest traits or the biggest red flags that I look for in students is the negotiator. The negotiator is the students where they want to negotiate everything down, right? How little of my time can I spend on this process? You know, how much of my summer do I have to give up? You tell me I can't go on my three-week vacation with my friends in Japan. I say they're like, you know, there's the phrase like, we don't negotiate with terrorists, right? I said, I don't negotiate with those kids, right? It's like because the whole frame of the process is how little can I do, right? Total opposite of what it would be ideal for this type of process, for a highly competitive process, the mindset that you want to have would be the polar opposite. It would be how much can I do, right? And so I often say the ideal student is willing to revise the essay until however many times it needs to be revised, right? The student who is not a grade fifth of this process is always going to be annoyed every single time the essay or something needs to be redone or it needs to be better, right? You got to pull them through the mud and it's excruciating, right? For all parties involved, right? And so I want to remove that as much as possible. You want to remove friction as much as possible. It's why I've said you try to piggyback, you piggyback on current existing uses of discretionary time, right? That's why I say hobbies are potentially a really good signal for what your emissions work might be because it's already something the student seems to enjoy and it's an existing use of discretionary time, which is basically I can't find much of a better operationalization of passion, right? So we want to reduce friction, right? And so the mindset should be what could I do, what can I sustain, what can I increase the probability of execution of success to the greatest possible extent? Because to be truly excellent or great at this thing, I would have to do it as much as I possibly can. I would have to be motivated to get as good at this thing or as excellent at this thing as I possibly could. That's the execution on side and very often, to nearly almost all the time, the the strategy is often going to give way to the execution. I was I've said, there's a lot of ways where you can have your cake and you need it to and you can make the kill up more unique in terms of strategy and also increase the execution capacity or you know, probability of success or decrease the executional risk. So to speak, and that sort of just comes through by, you know, that comes by doing the process a lot, talking to a lot of students understanding the trajectories, you know, and just getting good at that part of the process. But you do have to understand the strategy versus the execution, right? And sort of what's the probability of success? How much is a student going to be really intrinsically motivated? And a lot of the kids who scare me the most were not really willing to bet on them necessarily as a horse in this race are the students who are purely intrinsically motivated because I just know it is a source of fuel, but it is not generally the most sustainable source of fuel. So often I say like I want the plane to have two engines. I don't if one of the engines goes out, I want to have a backup engine. Sometimes you just need to do things purely because of the game of admissions and the strategy and, you know, what you write the essays about, you might want to write about this and that's why you're quote unquote more intrinsically motivated to write it about, but that's a cliche topic. And so you do have to understand just the fact that you are not, you know, just in a vacuum, you're competing against other people. There are certain constraints that are imposed upon the process just by virtue of it being, you know, a much broader scale competition. And there's a lot of variables that come with that, right? Just in the missions officer, they had aimings to review your application. There's just certain constraints that are imposed as there are constraints that are imposed with basically anything where you're going out into the actual world and you're just not by yourself in a vacuum. Sometimes you do need to pull from the extrinsic motivation side. As I often say, if things get really hard, yeah, you can pull from intrinsic motivation and perseverance and self-actualization, all that stuff. Sometimes it was really great to just remember that you have a really big long term goal in mind. And that's another source of motivation. I want as many sources of motivation as possible, right? So it's not even necessarily optimal to just be intrinsic a motor. I think you do need some sources of extrinsic motivation in certain parts of the process. And there is going to be sort of a reason for certain parts of this. You might really enjoy something, but there wouldn't necessarily be a pressure for you to be as excellent at it or you would never really maybe done that of your own accord. Unless there was some goal in the next three years that you that pressure on you to become that degree of excellent or focused on it. On the other hand, I don't want just purely and extrinsically motivated kid. And this is a very extrinsically motivated post, right? It's almost entirely extrinsic and it's almost entirely strategic, but not necessarily executional. It doesn't speak at all about the actual practicalities of working with a kid, right? And it doesn't talk at all about time course, right? This is a six month process. You can maybe, right? You're still going to deal with a lot of the executional rest because even in six months, it could also make the argument that even if you have a six month long progress, you have no time to waste not hyper executing. Like I need as many of those late nights and weekends and that act as possible because you have so little time, right? And so I do say and you know, parents will sort of talk about this, okay, like a three or four year process versus six month process. It sounds like you could probably maybe do six months of the Inuit Cosmology, right? But even so, if you don't like it, you only have six months, right? And so it kind of really doesn't matter that much, right? It kind of sounds good and I've sort of said this sometimes, okay, it's a six month sprint versus a four year marathon. Okay, like, you know, maybe the six months sprint doesn't require as much intrinsic and it's true to some extent. You could sort of maybe grate your teeth for a shorter period of time, but I still really, really have the highest probability of success from an executional perspective because strategy is nothing. Strategy is just if it's not executed, it's meaningless. In order of that highest probability of executional success, like I need as much from you, I need as much as you can possibly give and muster, right? And for that to be the case, even on a six-month timeline, if I tell you, you know, okay, if you do this, this will get you into pen or whatever it is. I just know it's a, it's a source of motivation, but it's the combination of multiple sources of motivation is much more powerful, right? And particularly just the short term, near-term rewards that doing something that you enjoy, that you like, that you have a shung-derive interest, and just the short-term rewards that pays you on a daily or weekly basis tends to often be the greater reinforcer of behavior versus a much, much more deferred reward. I think that's, that's one aspect that this is meaning a lot into what I refer to as the fuchsia-geg idealism, which I also lean into a lot. And I think it's against very important that particularly for people are not as knowledgeable of this process, they at least understand that, right? But again, do not confuse considerations and variables, and strategic factors with what necessarily predicts execution, or what necessarily predicts behavior, right? Because fundamentally, if you want to get outcomes in the external physical world, you need to first and foremost be a behaviorist, right? You need to first and foremost be concerned with actual behavior, and what the soon is actually going to do, not just some, again, just totally, you know, nebulous, okay, this, this sounds great. There's a lot of good conceptual validity here and understanding, again, the scarcity of uniqueness, the rarity, and this is true in many ways, in many different departments that you can't see if you were under represents and minority, if you're from an underrepresented state, it's all the same thing, it's just they're talking about it from one very specific angle, and this is why this is, isn't necessarily going to get you in. Why I've said like, I've seen students with these areas, who still haven't gotten into this tier of college, right? And it's because this is only one source of scarcity. But as students, Canada's Cedar application basically is a, what I have heard is a scarcity composite. It's a stack of different variables that all have to add up to being a certain degree of scarcity, right? And so in this one department of your hook or your interest, or what you're applying for being very unique or scarce or rare, of course, and it's always going to be optimal in any given department to be more unique or more rare, but there's also many, many different departments. Are you a legacy? Are you not? Are you from this date? Are you from that state? Are you underrepresented? Are you all represented? You know, the essay execution, obviously your task force, obviously there is a lot of the other conventional departments as well that will make you more exceptional or less exceptional. And that's why this in a vacuum isn't necessarily, you know, as I said, just, you know, I've seen students in these areas who still have failed to get in, just because there's other parts of their cannabis, see they didn't create ultimately the scarcity composite or the cumulative degree of scarcity that was still required for the college. And this poster didn't necessarily talk about any other variables of the students background or their Canada. As you all we know is, you know, this is a daughter, they did actually put there was no other hooks in terms of I think gastemographic. So I guess they did actually mention that, but there's still a lot of other contacts that we had just no idea about, right? And that if you were to take maybe what this student's hook is, first of all, if you were just to give it to another student, there would be in very high probability of just a significant amount of executional risk because this student might have their interest. The thing that people take for granted is there are just some students who are really interested in super niche, super weird fields, right? And do they have an admissions advantage in this very particular game? Yeah, they do, right? It's like if somebody had really weird hobbies, are they going to make for maybe some better conversation at, you know, the cocktail party or something versus somebody who's just, I don't know, you're at a party with a bunch of law firm partners, may have very similar interests. And, you know, of course, right? It's just uniqueness. You're just scarcity. It's just what stands out more. But if you were just to take that and, you know, sort of put it on other students playing say, okay, go execute this. Well, they're a very different student. They're a very different person. But then also again, they would have a totally different set of demographic variables and entirely different candidacy. And what happens is when you change other variables, a lot of things start to break, right? And so a lot of times when I talk about something in the context of one student's case, or just talking about a devoid of context, and somebody tries to apply it to a different student, or they try to do, you know, they try to do the same type of research, but in a different field, it just things start to break because the context changes. The last sort of point that I want to make here as well is that there is potentially an inverse relationship between sort of the strategic side and the execution side, which means you could have a topic that is so niche, which would make it from a strategic side to very ideal or have a very high rating. But it is essentially so niche and so hyper specific that the execution risk actually rises a lot because there may be or not very many opportunities in that field, right? Or maybe certain opportunities that are higher value, there just may not be any in that field, right? And so there actually can be this sort of interesting relationship between what is strategically ideal, because it makes you very rare or very unique, but at the same time because it is so rare or so unique or so hyper niche, that the total addressable market, so to speak, for opportunities or high value opportunities or professors doing research in that field, it just goes down substantially just by almost definition because it's extremely niche, right? And so a lot of the examples that they gave could potentially be in this, you know, could could be susceptible to that issue, right? If sort of high degree of execution ownership because the total addressable market in this niche is very small in terms of opportunities. And it really depends. There are some topics that would be hyper niche, but there's still a lot of things that you can do to pursue them or decent awards or people who are doing research. This is why also too you might be very niche, but that doesn't mean that you can just hold your breath for a year, try and get an opportunity that exactly 100% hits that niche on the head, right? Again, if you if you use something that's any degree of or some really extreme degree of specificity, you will basically naturally and almost by definition reduce down potentially again, if you're just talking about research or something like that, you're just going to reduce down the number of people who are potentially studying doing that very, very hyperspecific topic. And so this is why it's important. You can if you do have a niche or something, you know, that is more specific, not everything in your candidacy needs to be to some extreme degree of specificity. You can have a lot of different things that are just generally in those areas, right? You do not need to, you know, okay, because you're working on, you know, environmental justice with the specific Native American tribe, right? If it's an essay, you could be super specific because it doesn't require any action or any opportunities in the real world, right? So when you're doing essays, you could be super, super specific on some crazy niche topic of economics, right? To build six activities from multiple years around one hyper, like, what are you going to do? Launch a, like, a school club on one concept of economics? It doesn't make any sense, right? And so you don't need to have the same as this post is sort of making it sound, which again, it may be possible for a certain topic, but it just depends on what is the topic, what's the student, right? You need to know specific details, right? It's hard for me to go through and analyze every possible hook and every possible discipline. And when we're looking at possible hooks or possible disciplines or possible fields, possible directions for hope building, we have a lot of executional knowledge as to, okay, see, we've had students, they've built this type of candidacy in that past. The student may be struggling a little bit more here. It's hard to get opportunities in this niche or that field, right? You have a lot of the executional knowledge that goes along with the potential strategic considerations. You do have to understand that that there is also rich just because there can be, there's executional responsibility because there could be an inverse relationship relating to the specificity, the more specific the strategy, potentially the fewer people who are doing things in that field, the fewer opportunities, the few, you know, fewer awards, less ability to launch a, you know, a club at Tattra Tattra, but it does not need to, when you're talking executionally, you also do not need to make everything a hyper, hyper, hyper, hyper-specific and certainly not on the top line, right? So you can have, you can have a club, you know, just because you're really interested in one versus a topic of economics, you again could go work with a professor in, you know, behaviorally con or some specific field or maybe you can't even 100%, maybe you just can't get as specific an opportunity as you want. And you work with a professor who's in, you know, something somewhat adjacent, like organizational psych, right? It's not exactly the same thing, but much better for you to potentially take the bird in the hand there in that case, especially if you have a longer time course because you, you still preserve optionality, you could still You can still send reach outs, you can still go for their opportunities. And if you got a better opportunity, you know, who knows, you could always, you could always just do that one as well. But in the meantime, you've taken an opportunity that at least is in the overall umbrellas, right? Do a role umbrella of what you're interested in, right? And so you can also execute with this concept of adjacency as well. It's not to be hyper-hyper-specific into just this, you know, extremely, extremely specific topic. Because like I said, you are increasing the executional risk, potentially in doing that. Those are some just sort of comments. I think a lot of people, they lean a little bit and this may be in some cases, my fault as I sort of hear where people then repeat back to me on actual calls, the right. I'm like, yeah, this sounds great. But like this one actually probably predict any behavior and then you meet the kid and you're like, yeah, this doesn't predict any behavior whatsoever in their specific case. And as I said, these are, you know, these are strategic considerations, strategic variables. These are good concepts for people to understand and just to understand how the overall game of missions actually works and start thinking from a scarcity or a rarity perspective also to understand if you are a hyper competitive field, if you're represented, you're very high hill to climb, high mountain to climb. But that does not mean that what you do is you sacrifice your interest. And one of the things that I never want to do, I don't care if you're, you know, you know, thrice overrepresented geographically, racially ethnically, sex, gender, et cetera. If you have a nine out of 10 level skill set in something, you don't neglect that. Right. There's all sorts of risks that come into play. If you start going into other people's lands where you do not have a good skill set in those fields, just because of one of these strategic variables. Right. And so again, when you're, when you're analyzing what to do with a hook, you have to look at skill. What is your propensity? What's your ability in this field? And then what obviously on top of that also, what is your degree of passion, or interest or motivation? It would be very, very unwise for a student who has a nine out of 10 level skill set in a field to potentially concede that major, major advantage just because of some, you know, potential scarcity variables, strategic group. Again, we're always going to try to get it both ways. So if we can maximize that nine out of 10 skill set and then also find ways to make it more unique, I would say that that's 100 or some of the time what we are trying to do. We're not trying to take tradeoffs. We're trying to compound what I say is alpha. Right. We're trying to compound advantage. A lot of times it's not either or at both end. Right. I want your nine out of 10 level skill set. And then I would also prefer, but you're not, we're not going to just trade off a nine out of 10 level ability or skill set or interest in a field just because there's something that's a little bit strategically sub optimal. You have to be able to audit things like that. The other thing you have to really be able to audit too is if you've built a ton of evidence in this field, like you have a huge resume, which would go alongside if you actually legitimately have a nine out of 10 level ability in a field, you don't just, you don't just throw that by the wayside insert from zero because starting from zero is the greatest amount of risk that you potentially inject into your candidacy. Right. And the later that you get in the process, the higher and higher the risk if you go back to zero again, these are considerations. Are we going to look at what's strategically better? What's more unique? What's, you know, overrepresentation underrepresentation, house adraisers feel of course, but we're also going to look at all those other variables. Right. First and foremost, what can the student actually execute on and compound progress on at the highest possible rate and to the greatest degree? What's their current evidence? What's their skill set and then a whole bunch of other variables, right? And so it's important to understand these are, these are critical strategic of variables, but they are variables and considerations. They are not final verdicts in and of themselves. These factors, such as how unique or how niche students feel does. I obviously went into a lot more Dublin. I was actually expecting to on this post, but I think it's, it's good. And it's another side of a lot of what I talk a lot about, which is they say a lot of the sort of strategically optimal factors. And I think it makes it a lot more clear to a lot of people as well that you have done or sin fundamentally, you're working with a kid who has to really get to a pretty high level and anything you have to enjoy. You have to have some skill in it. Ideally, it extends off of, you know, current pursuits that are already in place. So you're not starting from scratch. And there's always other, these other practical or executional factors as well. Then I'll say just sort of the last point here, I don't really philosophically believe even as much as I do talk about the strategic idealism and as much as this process is oriented around getting excellent outcomes. From a philosophical perspective, I don't believe in having a student, a current artificial canonist, seem purely for called emissions. We have had some parents or, you know, it's rare, right? Because think a lot of people just understand that you're not going to get the buy-in from the student. But you have had a family here or there where, you know, it's just okay, the student clearly, they have some cool interest, they want to do it. This is what they want to do for the rest of their life. They're pretty convinced of that. But we're going to spend three years making them into a classics major. There's just a make any sense. And just it's not philosophically well aligned. I think from that sort of like philosophical, this person mentioned a lot of the like, you know, philosophical or ethical, you know, implications. I think ethical is a little bit of a stretch. People can sort of make of that what they want. But I think anytime you're pursuing particularly over a longer time course, it's a little bit different. If it's six months, yeah, it's a little bit different. You might be in a really bad, bad situation in terms of a candidacy where like a lot of outcomes that you want to all of them are clearly going to be off the table unless you do this thing and just it's either you give up six months or, you know, and so there can be those types of situations, but in a more normal case, particularly over a longer time horizons, because even if you are going, and even if there is some strategic risk introduced by the fact that this is not as unique of an area, if you have a lot more time, again, that's another one of the variables that can compensate for, you know, for maybe you being in a little bit more of an oversaturated field. And so again, all these variables intersect with each other. How much time do you have and all these other variables they all intersect, which is why it's very hard to take one variable in isolation and then make decisions based off that's just not how it actually works. But if you do have a pretty normal type of process where you have two, three, four plus years, for example, it's just not, it's just not even necessary in a lot of cases. Like if you have three or four years, it's one of the biggest adventures of starting earlier is that passions can dictate a lot more of what you do, because you have a lot more time and your back's not up against the wall. Basically, you're going to maybe lose the colleges that you want to go to and you have this major, major trade off. But over this much longer time course, I would say, you know, in particular, I think a lot of people jump really far ahead into the students like future career next 30, 40, 50, 60 years and what do you want to do the rest of your life? And I don't think that's a lot of times a very useful frame. It's extremely daunting. I think the frame very often should be, okay, what are you interested in? What do you passionate? What do you have evidence for? Where do your skills lie? And can we just go probabilistically more in those directions, right? And get a lot more focused. It doesn't need to be going from zero to 100% focus, but it could be 70% more focused. Right? And a lot of times that 30% is just, the student has a few different things or two different interests. Then we're sort of intersecting them, right? They might have an interest in media or communication or writing and they have an interest in space policy and we can build a space policy writing and they get students to do the writing stuff where we had a girl case study the last episode that we did where she has the music side and the creative side. But then she also has this computer science and math side. And so we found a way to intersect them. And I said, you know, some of your activities may be next as activities that intersect these two. Some of them will just be more of the STEM activities. Some of these will just be more of the music of a creative activity is, right? And so, you don't even necessarily need 100% focus. You might need 100% focus in terms of, you know, I mean, not 100% percent, on every not 168 hours a week. You do need a lot more focus than is maybe typical or maybe that you're currently moving up. But it doesn't again necessarily mean that you're precluding multiple of these areas where the student has three interests and you're saying, okay, you got to chop out two of these basically. I just focus on this one. That's just it's not even necessarily strategically optimal in a lot of cases. And it's certainly not executionally optimal if the student is is giving up certain pursuits that they may be again, are very interested in or have a degree of proficiency or resume. And if you have a particularly a longer time course, I will ask students hypothetically because I want to sort of put them in certain situations where I wonder how they'll respond to trade-offs. And so I will do this as hypothetical exercise. I will say, you know, okay, I've clearly identified what you like the most, what you most want to maybe build the candidacy around. But what if we told you for four weeks this was the better thing to do and for your candidacy or for your call to missions odds? Because that's not giving up four years. That may be four weeks. And you don't necessarily want the student who can't make any trades or can't understand anything that may need to be done just by way of discipline and will power because it's not the real world that you get to do things that you enjoy 100% of the time. It's just that's not the real world. Right? And so as much as this process could be driven by passion and energy, and what the student's enthusiasm has, enthusiasm, there's always going to be overhead. So to speak, right? There's always going to be parts associated with your passions or your interest, even if you're a professional athlete or Hollywood celebrity, you know, you might like to be famous and you might like the paycheck that comes with it, but you might not like the fact that the paparazzi are out with you at dinner, basically, and it's really hard to go out in public. Right? There's always going to be things that are associated. And whenever you turn something from a hobby into a profession, it's just not going to have, it's just not necessarily going to have the same alert to it because it's framed differently. And it's why I say don't want a hundred percent pure engine's like motivation. I think you need a culmination of different motivational factors because you need to bar from different sources in different contexts. And so I will put pressure on certain kids and I will say, great, okay, very clear that you have the engine's like motivation for this, but what happens again, if we find ourselves in a situation where we need you to write the essay about that topic instead of this topic is this topic is the one that you're more interested in, but that topics the one that's more strategic, you do need to be somewhat flexible along the way, but I don't agree with the notion that we need to engineer for your process of a kid, you know, that we need to that you should artificially make a bacanternacy. I think you're going in probably a sector actions based on the current best evidence that you have and you also think that you're wanting to engineer entire career trajectories. You are just auditing what is a student go to at this point in time, what are they lean to, what are they have evidence for, and can we build those up a lot more and be a lot more intentional in those areas, right? That really, then the day that's really fundamentally what it comes down to is just probableistic directions and compounding progress and depth in areas that have shown promise, right? Versus just being all over the place and having no degree of intentionality. I think philosophically, even if you could do this and we could make the kickers of it, I mean, it wouldn't be hard from a strategic perspective to just go find what the most interesting most strategic perspectives. And this is why a lot of people, I mean, who understand this game, they still don't do it. Even if they understand it and they couldn't make up some topic, they still don't do it. And the reason is because executionally, even aside from sort of the more specific, you know, execution of factors, there may not be as many people in this field or my burger, your opportunities or awards or etc. So they're even setting that aside, there's the extreme execution risk of, as I've said, of a teenager and just having to do this on sort of the day by day, week by week process. And the extreme opportunity cost of you're getting 20% execution 15% versus getting 80 or 90% execution, right? It's just you're basically just end up shooting yourself in the foot and you may actually end up in a worse position than if you did what was strategicly optimal, but not practicalness, this student's given a case. So it would be very easy to identify these in a vacuum and do the strategic idealism, but it's not the way that unfortunately the real world tends to work. I don't even think it's optimal in terms of creating the best outcomes and even if it were, I still would probably have a lot of philosophical objections to it, the executional part of it aside. Okay, that is it. This one way, way, way longer, probably not surprising to a lot of you say that I'm long-winded and exceptionally redundant. Both of those claims I agree with and I guess I have evidenced it yet again. So yeah, this was super deep dive. These are a lot of my just sort of off the cuff thoughts and response of this post, but I thought it would make for an interesting episode. That's it for this one. Next episode, we will be getting a lot more tactical and hyper-specific as I alluded to before because it is very useful to the audience and we'll be doing another case study deep dive for a junior. So you have that to look forward to next week as well. Okay, that's it for this one and we'll talk soon and next episode. Bye.