Study Hacks

The Manifesto Arrives

If you read last Friday’s interview with Chris Guillebeau, you may remember that he planned to release a free eBook titled: A Brief Guide to World Domination. Early yesterday, the manifesto became available. And I highly recommend it.

At a high level, I must admit, the guide hits the standard, commencement-style post-grad high notes:

1. Don’t restrict yourself to conventional paths.
2. Follow your passions.
3. Give back to the world.

These glossy ideals will be familar to anyone who has ever attended a graduation ceremony. You’ll hear the standard quotes…

e.g., “You don’t have to live your life the way other people expect you to.”

…coupled with some brief, insight-free anecdotes of the type required by law to be included in any piece of self-help literature. (”Bob hated being a lawyer, but then he quit to become a professional woodcarver and loves it!”)

Where Chris really begins to pick up speed, however, is when he shifts from the general to the specific. Unlike many aspirants to the Tim Ferriss throne, Chris actually lives the life he preaches, and his approach introduces some new and exciting practices into the broader conversation. Ultimately, it is the practical tips that separate the work from standard “be the change you want to see in the world” fluff, and make it an essential read.

For example, early on, Chris introduces an intelligent deconstruction of the prevailing paradigm that you either serve yourself or serve the world. Drawing from personal experience, Chris walks the reader through the possibility of compromise — a position forged, no doubt, from extensive practice in the art of leading a non-conformist lifestyle in a reality of bills and student loans payments.

I was most excited, however, by the the final part of eBook, which describes a “Toolkit for World Domination.” Chris’s advice on the power of a catchy story and the need to build a small army, among other examples, struck me as both shockingly original and intuitively sound. (If anything, the discussions here are too short.) This is exactly the brand of tactics I hoped to glean from A Brief Guide — battle-hardened strategies extracted from years of struggling to keep his unusual lifestyle alive.

In the end, I think Chris is on to something interesting here. His philosophy begins with The Four-Hour Workweek, then injects a social conscious, removes the shady Internet businesses, and gives the whole thing a cleansing bath in new media, social networking-powered goodness.

I recommend starting with the free guide — skimming the generic and dwelling on the novel — then continuing to Chris’s blog, where there’s much insight to be gained from his growing collection of war stories born of his daily skirmishes against the conventional.

[Update: I recommend that you check out Swaroop’s excellent reflections on Chris’s approach and how it applies to his own unconventional life.]

The Power of Innovation

At the core of the Zen Valedictorian philosophy is the idea that if you really understand the psychology of impressiveness, you can, in effect, hack your image — making yourself outrageously impressive without having to become outrageously hard working.

I introduced two techniques for achieving this goal. The first, focus, stated that becoming very good at one thing was more impressive (and less time consuming) than becoming kind of good at many. The second technique, innovate, was more difficult to parse. It stated that any activity that made someone think “how did he do that!?” would yield rewards that were disproportionately large compared to the effort put in.

In this post, I dive into the details of this idea and describe both why the innovate factor is so strong and how you can achieve it.

Some Innovative Examples

Let’s begin with some examples. Below are three activities that generate the “how did he do that!?” response. Each is based, loosely, off of real students:

1. A high school student who designed a technology-based curriculum recently adopted by several states.
2. A college student who setup the U.N.’s first youth advisory council and led the effort to write a youth rights constitution adopted by the Arab League.
3. A high school student who ran a web design company that involved the managing of a dozen contract employees and servicing 5-figure corporate contracts.

Each of these examples, most will agree, are impressive. These students, no doubt, will have many interesting opportunities afforded to them: they’ll get accepted to good colleges (relative to their grades) and have their pick of cool jobs. Lurking behind this reality, however, is an insistent question: why, exactly, do these activities command so much respect?

Some Non-Innovative Examples

To help answer this question, consider, as a point of comparison, the following list of more standard activities:

1. A high school student who was the president of two student clubs and was a member of the varsity tennis team.
2. A college student who did well in a double-major and also sat on two different student activity councils.
3. A high school student who played trumpet in her state’s regional orchestra.

Compared to the previous list, these three activities probably did not elicit the same level of admiration. Certainly, these students are more impressive than the average schlub, but, on the other hand, we don’t imagine them necessarily breezing into top colleges or having their pick of post graduation jobs. Whereas the students in the first list might be called superstars, these latter students might be stuck with the moniker of “grind,” “hardworking,” or, pronounced, no doubt, with a note of disdain: “ambitious.”

Why do we judge these two student groups so differently?

If pressed, you would likely guess that impressiveness is a function of talent and hard work. The above examples, however, falsify this hypothesis. The activities of the second list require just as much hard work, and, in many cases, such as varsity tennis and regional orchestra, more natural talent than the activities of the first list. Yet, the first list strikes us as much, much more impressive.

Indeed, the real reason the first list is so much more impressive can be attributed to a little understood phenomenon…

The Failed Simulation Effect

When presented with a student biography we tend to oblige our instinct to mentally simulate the path that led to that student’s achievements. For example, when we hear about a student holding down two different club presidencies and a spot on the tennis team, we imagine the hectic, running from meeting to meeting lifestyle that supports that volume of tasks. We have no problem with this simulation. We know students like this. We feel that, with a high enough tolerance for pain, we too could be that busy. It’s hard work. But it’s not mysterious.

What happens, however, when presented with the story of a student who works with the U.N. and drafted a constitution for the Arab League? Our simulation apparatus fails. We don’t know how, exactly, one becomes a player in major international organizations.

The effect of this failed simulation: a sense of novelty and wonder.

And it is exactly this feeling that we end up interpreting as the sensation of being “really damn impressed.” In other words: The first three sample students elicit great admiration not because they are harder working or more talented than the second list, but because we cannot simulate the path they took to their achievements. This failure intrigues us. We don’t feel like we could have done the same. We don’t feel threatened. A sense of novelty and wonder sluices through our synapses.

Leveraging the Failed Simulation Effect

Understanding this subtle mental effect allows you to maximize the impressiveness you reap from the effort you expend in activities. The key, we now understand, is to push activities into a realm where most people cannot easily imagine the steps that got you to your destination. Here’s the good news: such pushes are a function more of planning and creativity than of hard work.

From my experience in deconstructing the paths taken by these types of students, I can identify three steps that will help you get to this impressiveness sweet spot:

1. Enter a Closed World and Exceed Expectations. The first step is to get involved as an insider in a world that interests you. This might mean landing an internship, or shadowing someone, or joining a relevant club. Once there — and this is key — tackle the opportunities given to you with vigor. Complete them fast. Go slightly above and beyond. In such entry-level, non-full time situations, the people above you will be pleasantly surprised that you are getting things done. You will soon be rewarded for this.
2. Package Insider Connections. After you’ve proved yourself in this world, you’ll begin to notice interesting opportunities that only an insider, like yourself, would know about. Look for an opportunity to lead a project that would be available only to someone on the inside. Leverage your insider knowledge to its fullest extent.
3. Escalate. The solo project from (2) will defeat most people’s simulation apparatus as it was built upon connections available only to insiders. In this final step, leverage this effect, and the good job you did your past project, to shake loose an even more un-simulatable project. Repeat this process a few times, with each iteration ramping up to an even more insider-supported, harder to simulate project.

Case Studies: How The Three Example Students Applied These Steps

Let’s examine how these three steps were applied by the sample impressive students at the beginning of the article.

Case Study #1: The high school student who wrote the curriculum.
She satisfied step (1) by taking a student internship at a well-known technology company. She then satisfied (2) by getting involved — and following through — on an internal project involving the application of the company’s technology to educational settings. Finally, (3) was satisfied when she volunteered, as her main intern project, to package up these findings into a full curriculum. By doing a good job and following through, she got the company to pitch the curriculum to their school partners; several picked it up.

None of this required any more effort than the standard high school summer job. But because it leveraged opportunities only available to someone working inside the education department of a technology company, it appears, to an outsider, to be un-simulatable — “how do you get states to adopt a curriculum you wrote!?” — and thus really damn impressive.

Case Study #2: The college student who worked with the U.N. and Arab League.
Attending school in the middle east, this student met up, by coincidence, with an old friend who had started an international youth activism network. To satisfy (1), he agreed to start a chapter of the organization in his own neck of the woods. He pushed the chapter to meet regularly and grow. By doing so, he met some important contacts and identified some important youth issues in the middle east. To satisfy (2), he made a lateral move to start his own organization focused solely on middle east youth issues. By attending conferences, and making phone calls, people got to know him. Finally, to get at (3), he leveraged this status and his connections to get invitations to help lead relevant initiatives at the U.N. and the Arab League. No mystery. He ran a youth organization in an under-represented region. These international bodies wanted to work on these issues. It was a natural fit.

This was hard work. But no more so than the running of any large club. Because, however, it dealt with an insider world — a vibrant sub-culture of international youth activism — it yielded rewards — involvement with the U.N. and Arab League — that, to an outsider, seem absolutely inexplicable.

Case Study #3: The high school CEO.
I’ll come clean: this story is based on the company I started in high school with my friend Michael Simmons. Mike and I knew how to design basic web sites because we were, well, nerds. Hoping to make some money, we stumbled across a local guy who ran a business directory web site for the Princeton area where we lived. To satisfy (1), we setup a little deal to help small business he listed build simple web sites. To satisfy (2), we leveraged the portfolio and experience this provided us to strike out on our own. One of our key insights working with the business directory was that it was easy to find sub-contractors that would, for a cut of the fee, tackle most of the time-consuming tasks of designing web sites. We landed a few clients and made some money. Finally, to satisfy (3), we leveraged the fact that our company looked like a big deal to hire a CEO, print some fancy marketing materials, buy suits, build up our team of sub-contractors, and, most importantly, raise our fees.

The company was fun. We never had more than one or two clients at a time. And our responsibility was mainly keeping them posted while our sub-contractors did the work. Looking back, Mike and I estimate the time we spent was roughly equivalent to being the president of a student club. The rewards, however, were so much higher. Because we leveraged the insider knowledge gained by working with a local web portal, we were quickly able to get to a point that foiled most people’s simulation apparatus.

In Conclusion

I apologize for the length of this article, but the subject of activity innovation is tricky. It is also, I must admit, one of my favorite issues to explore. If you’re looking to make an impact in this world — and you want to do so without suffering a steady stream of stress-induced panic attacks — you need to look beyond the standard exaltations to simply “get started!” and “work hard!” and “follow your passion and it will all work out!” Instead, think carefully about how impressive achievements really come about. When you know what you’re doing, you will be surprised by how soon you can get somewhere that earns serious admiration.

Greetings from Annapolis

You may have noticed there was no Friday blog post. I’m still on the road and have limited computer access. I still wanted, however, to leave you a brief note. Yesterday I was roaming a Barnes & Noble, and, naturally, I gravitated to the graduation table to check out the latest crop of student advice guides. I discovered that no fewer than four new books were centered on the following idea: the key to being happy after college is to identify your passion then go do something that fulfills it.

Here’s my problem with this concept:

• Passion is generated by extended exposure to something that becomes an important part of your life. It’s not some magic score assigned to each job that describes, with great accuracy, how happy you’ll immediately become if you follow that path. (In reality, it’s really just a fancy word for general occupational fulfillment.)
• As a recent graduate, you have not yet been exposed to any job long enough for you to know what might fit well with you and lead, down the road, to the type of general fulfillment people dub passion.
• How, then, are you, as a newly minted graduate, supposed to identify a passion?
• Conclusion: Passion-centric career planning reduces to well-intentioned guess-work — typically based on some rough — and highly limited — idea about what types of jobs seem like they should be passion-inducing.

Herein lies the advantage of lifestyle-centric planning: It gets you started down the right path without requiring you to have an expert-level knowledge of a large number of potential careers. It also relieves you of the stress of trying to identify some magical perfect job that will maximize this fuzzy metric. And finally, guess what? If you’re living a lifestyle you really like, pretty soon you might just start to describe yourself as “passionate.”

Some Advice for the Road

I’m leaving this afternoon to attend a college graduation: my second in three weeks. As you might imagine, graduating is on my mind, and, I would guess, on many of your minds as well. To celebrate the season I thought I would turn my attention to some advice for finding your way after college.

I want to share with you the unique law I use to guide my life. It’s a twist on the standard graduation inducements, but it seems, from my limited experience, to work the best of the various strategies I’ve watched my peers try on for size in their first years out of college.

The advice goes like this:

Fix the lifestyle you want. Then work backwards from there.

That’s it. Notice, I’m not talking about “avoiding taking yourself to seriously” or “always finding ways to give back.” I didn’t mention “the importance of a sense or humor” or why you need to “follow your passion, not money.” These are all reasonable words of wisdom, but they don’t necessarily direct you to a life that you’re happy to live.

My advice does.

Defining Lifestyle

What do I mean by lifestyle? Roughly speaking: a detailed feel for what your day to day existence would be like. Some questions to consider when imagining an ideal lifestyle:

• How much control do I have over my schedule?
• What’s the intensity level of my job?
• What’s the importance of what I do?
• What’s the prestige level?
• What type of work?
• Where do I live?
• What’s my social life like?
• What’s my work life balance?
• What’s my family like?
• How do other people think of me?
• What am I known for?

Using these types of questions to guide you, construct an image in your mind about the ideal future you. Notice, specific jobs don’t need to enter the equation. They can if they help you visualize, but they aren’t necessary. Add little details. Really get a sense for what this lifestyle would feel like. If the image makes you happy and gets you excited about the possibilities for your future, then you’ve hit on a good match.

Example Lifestyles

There exists an infinite variety of possible lifestyles. Here are just a few examples:

• The Power Broker: You live in a big city in a nice apartment. You climbed the ladder fast in a difficult business. You wield power. You’re good at what you do. You’re well respected. Your job is intense but you are super-organized so it doesn’t drive you crazy. You’re surrounded by good, loyal friends, and when you have fun, you have fun hard.
• The Serial Entrepreneur: You live in a nice San Francisco townhouse. You’ve started several businesses. Some more successful than others. You tend to alternate between an intense year or two growing a business followed by some extended time off for intense relaxation. You’ve got a network of good friends across the country and a bar down the street that you visit every Friday night to catch-up with your closest buddies. You use your off time to develop extreme hobbies and indulge in grand, hopelessly ambitious and wildly fun projects.
• The Virtual Voyager: You live in your dream house in a cozy community-oriented town, surrounded by natural beauty. You work virtually for several technology companies; setting your own hours. Three or four light days a week is enough to take care of your expenses. You and your family spend a lot of time outdoors, barbecuing with the neighbors, and, in general, enjoying small town life. You travel a lot for the sheer adventure of it.

Working Backwards

Once you’ve developed a detailed, visceral sense for your ideal lifestyle, use this image to guide your early career decisions. It’s a rough guide, to be sure, but it can still prove surprisingly useful.

Imagine, for example, that you’re faced with two options as graduation approaches. One is an elite project manager position at Microsoft and the other is acceptance to some good computer science graduate schools. Both are interesting and challenging. What do you choose? The power broker would go for the Microsoft position. The serial entrepreneur, on the other hand, would go for grad school — a perfect place to develop her first marketable technology.

The Power of Lifestyle-Centric Career Planning

Starting with a dream lifestyle — as oppose to a dream job — opens up more creativity. When thinking only about jobs, you’ll find yourself considering the same artificially-narrow menu of options troubled over by most talented college grads (banking, consulting, law, non-profit…) A lifestyle, on the other hand, provides much more flexibility — letting you discover potential paths previously hidden from your planning process.

The main advantage, however, is that, in the end, the whole point of worrying about your career is because you want to feel good about your life. By cutting to the bottom-line — what would make me feel best? — and then working backward from this answer, you are maximizing your odds that you’ll actually get somewhere worth going.

As with any graduation season advice, take this with a grain of salt. This is what I have seen work, but it doesn’t mean it’s the only thing that will. It can’t hurt, however, to take a moment to ask yourself: what lifestyle would suit me best?

You might be surprised where the answer leads you.

The Book(s) of Daniel

If you don’t know Daniel Pink, you should. His bestselling books, Free Agent Nation (2001) and A Whole New Mind (2005), heralded the arrival of the conceptual age. Dan has also written on issues of business and technology for The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Wired.

His full biography reads like a Zen Valedictorian, post-grad adventure tale. He attends Yale Law School then never practices a day of law, deciding, instead, to bum a ride out to Washington. Soon he’s a vice-presidential speech writer. He leaves that job to write two of the most important business books of the last decade. He then wins a fellowship to move to Japan and study the Manga industry.

Enter Johnny Bunko

Perhaps most exciting for Study Hacks readers, however, is his latest project, the new book: The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need (illustrated by Manga hotshot Rob Ten Pas). In Bunko, which tells the story of a young graduate receiving workplace lessons, Dan lays out six core pieces of advice for making it happen in the real world. As someone who works and writes a lot about these issues, I can say with conviction: this is some of the most dead-on, effective young career advice that I have ever read. (Don’t take my word for it, you can preview the rules here and read the first chapter here.) The Miami Herald, perhaps, puts it best: “[Johnny Bunko] blows away all the rest with its clarity, simplicity, and intelligence.”

As you can imagine, I was quick to get in touch with Dan. I asked him what advice he had for a current college student looking to jumpstart a Pink-esque career after graduation. He was kind enough to respond.

The interview follows…

Your own post-college path seems serendipitous. How did you stumble onto this path. And once on it, how did you keep moving in such an interesting direction?

You’ve got it right. There was a lot of stumbling and serendipity. Since I knew I wasn’t going to practice law, I decided to go into what I then found most interesting: politics. I worked on a number of political campaigns as a policy and communications person — and then, yes, stumbled into speechwriting. What happened is that I wrote a few speeches. They weren’t awful. Then they asked me to write a few more and before I knew it, I was a speechwriter. I got reasonably good at it, did it for awhile, but then got sick of the b.s. of politics. At that point in my life, I was becoming deeply interested in business and technology — so I decided to go out on my own and write about those topics.

All of the books and most of the articles I’ve written since then have really emerged from pursuing the things I was curious about. That’s a key. Curiosity. I tried to follow my curiosity and see where it took me. Also — and this is important — I decided that since so many people could outsmart me, nobody would outwork me. As you know, I’m a big believer that persistence trumps talent.

What’s the biggest myth about the post-graduation search for a job that you would like to dispel?

That you need to have a carefully articulated plan. Too many people make career decisions for instrumental reasons — because they think what they’re doing will lead to something else. Not enough people make decisions for fundamental reasons — because of the value of the activity itself.

The dirty little secret is that instrumental reasons don’t work. It’s way too tumultuous out there. The people who really flourish are those who make decisions for fundamental reasons. They have to live with a certain amount of ambiguity about not knowing what’s going to happen next. But that keeps them alert to unexpected opportunities and the serendipity you talked about earlier.

What lessons would you give to Johnny Bunko’s little brother who is, let’s say, a rising college sophomore?

1. Begin the process of discovering what you love to do and what you’re great at — what, in some sense, you are on this planet to do. You won’t necessarily find the answer in college. But asking that question will put you on a promising trajectory.

2. Pick the professor, not the course. In the hands of a good teacher, every topic can fascinating.

3. If you’re in the arts, take a laboratory science course. If you’re in science, take a studio art course.

4. Exercise. Seriously. Exercise is one of the few things in life that is uniformly, unequivocally good for you.

Thank you so much for your time!

Grad School Without Ulcers

I recently received an insightful collection of questions from a Study Hacks reader. In short, he was trying to reconcile my philosophy of radical simplicity with the ambitious goal of getting accepted to a good graduate program. I address his main points below…

You recommend that students not kill themselves doing obscenely hard work loads and working their butts off for straight-A’s. On the other hand you say that grades are important for graduate school admissions. Would you please write about how someone who wants to go to grad school can best apply your radical simplicity ideas?

This is an excellent question. I like it because it highlights a common misconception.

I’ll start by clarifying my position. Grades are important. You should get good grades. (This should come as no surprise considering that I wrote a book titled How to Become a Straight-A Student.)

If you review my recent radical simplicity manifesto or my open letter to new college students you’ll notice that getting good grades is a core motivation. The logic proceeds as follows: If you focus on one major, and a reasonable course load, and not too many activities, you will be able to really engage your courses and avoid the typical student assignment shuffle; i.e., spasmodically flailing from one deadline to the next.

The results of this engagement:

1. You get good grades. It’s crazy how easy it is to get an ‘A’ when you like and understand the material.
2. You do so without a lot of stress. This is especially true if you couple this reduced schedule with the type of efficient study habits preached here every week.
3. You get really good at the material. Your professors will notice that you really understand and care about what they’re teaching. They end up writing great recommendations and offer interesting opportunities to you. (It’s these “department stars” that have the easiest time getting into graduate school. It’s somewhat ironic that the way to become a star is to do less. Ironic but awesome. )

This brings up, I think, a more important point. Why did this reader interpret the radical simplicity manifesto to say “don’t sweat grades?” The answer: students are deeply committed to the false belief that grades must be the result of a sacrifice requiring hard, stressful work.

This belief is so strong, that when this reader saw the idea that you shouldn’t work your butt off, he made the immediate, intuitive leap that this also means you shouldn’t worry about grades.

One of the key messages of this blog and my books is to dispel this myth. To get good grades with a reasonable schedule and reasonable study habits is not a hard task. To get good grades with a crazy schedule and a triple major and two thousand activities is near impossible.

Let’s move on to his next interesting question…

Other than research, what else does someone interested in grad school need to be doing — and not doing — and how do we free ourselves up to live a great life while not jeopardizing our chances of getting accepted?

I’ll share my understanding of graduate school admissions, which applies mainly to the sciences. (I invite feedback from those who know more than me on these topics). From my experience, to get into a good graduate school, you need:

1. To get good grades in the relevant subjects.
2. Be known as one of the best students in your major.
3. Demonstrate, unequivocally, that you can handle the demands of research.

Notice that becoming president of 10 clubs and volunteering on the weekends does not make this list. In the few casual conversations I’ve had with professors who served on graduate admission committees, I’ve never once heard a mention of something outside of a student’s grades or research experience.

Practically speaking, this means the following advice applies to the aspiring grad student:

• You should slash and burn your schedule to the point that you have more than enough time to really focus and engage with the courses in your major. Don’t double major. Don’t pile multiple hard courses into the same semester. You need to live and breath the core material. No one cares if your schedule was hardcore. Get over it.
  
• Get started in research. Don’t be lazy. A common tale here at MIT: a hardcore (read: over-scheduled) student signs up to do undergraduate research because he heard it was important for graduate school. Because the student is so hardcore, this involvement soon becomes seen as an annoyance — one more thing among dozens eating away at his limited, stress-saturated time. The student does the bare minimum. Makes excuses. And, eventually, the professor forgets about him. Don’t do this! Instead, go beyond the bare minimum. Do good work fast. After a year or so of proving yourself you’ll be rewarded with the type of responsibilities that will, down the line, impress the professors reviewing your file.
• Time permitting you can add back at most one serious extracurricular activity. This provides some non-academic balance to your life. But this all about you. So don’t do it unless it’s something you find meaningful. Also, don’t add more than one thing. It’s key that you leave a sufficient buffer of free time to relax, and decompress, and pursue random opportunities.

Take this all with a grain of thought. But I think these basic concepts are sound. To summarize, the key to getting into graduate school: focus on your major; be a good researcher; don’t do too much else.

The good news is that this lifestyle is quite reasonable. You like your classes, become an expert in your subject, don’t feel overwhelmed, and have plenty of time left over to relax. Not a bad way to spend your four years on campus.

So to answer the question that titles this post: Yes. And you’d be a fool to try it any other way.

Dear Student,

It’s April. If you’re a high school senior, this means college admission decision season. Fat envelopes will soon be arriving. Though, as I understand it, stalking the mailman has long since been replaced with the ritual of obsessively refreshing the admission department’s web site. Same idea. Your fate will soon be known.

Yes, within weeks you’ll know who got in where. The rumor mill will begin its frenetic churn. You’ll begin trying to pattern match the results, attempting, vainly, to figure out the logic behind the decisions. But no matter how hard you cogitate, no model you devise will really explain why that asshole Peter got into Dartmouth while you were rejected from Northwestern.

Eventually, you’ll come to the conclusion that the decisions are more or less random. They’re not. But you don’t have nearly enough information to understand them, so don’t sweat it.

The next thing that will come to mind is a simple question: what’s next?

This is where I come in…

Your temptation will be to treat college like another admissions process. You probably imagine that four years down the line the task of getting a job, or getting accepted to graduate school, will be, more or less, like getting into college. Roughly speaking, you believe that some collection of admission-style officers will one day review your college resume, check your activities, your grades, make sure you’re well-balanced in all the right ways, and then promptly reject you so they can hire that asshole Peter.

But here’s the thing, and I really can’t stress this enough: it’s not like this at all.

No one cares about your college resume. If you’re applying for a job, your grades and, maybe, your major, will be used as a rough screen to see whether or not you’re granted an interview. That’s it. The rest is about you.

No one cares about your laundry-list of activities. No one cares that you tripled majored or took really hard course loads and were often up late and unhappy and grinding it out because you — dammit — are hardcore! [Sound of no one caring]

If you end up applying to graduate school, here’s another secret: there are no admissions officers for grad school. It’s professors who will review your application. And they care about exactly one thing: do you have the ability to do research? Again, laundry-list, triple-major: irrelevant.

Even the vaunted professional schools — law school, med school — are much more formulaic in their decisions than you might imagine. Do you want to go to Harvard Law so you can use your lawyerly skills to save the indigent and help the downtrodden? Get a high LSAT score. Your 19 different volunteering gigs and that expensive week spent building houses in South America won’t matter here.

How then should you fill your time? The answer is simple: living the best possible life. College is not just another stage to help set you up for your position in the real world; it’s not a process you have to suffer through to achieve the real benefits down the line. College is the real world. If you don’t start living the life you want now, then when are you going to start?

Here a few ideas to keep in mind:

Take courses that interest you. Don’t pile on too many hard subjects during the same semester. Allow yourself to really get into the material. Think about your readings. Question what you encounter.

Allow yourself the time needed to do your schoolwork without becoming overloaded. This means: don’t sign up for too many activities. Find one thing you really enjoy and focus on it. That’s enough.

Explore with your free time. Go to talks. Make friends. Chase down wild, random opportunities.

Here’s where it gets interesting. If you follow this approach, and live the life you want to live starting from your first day on campus, two things happen.

One, you’ll be happy. (A non-trivial feat in today’s age of overburdened undergraduates).

Two, you’ll be surprisingly successful when it comes time to hunt down post-graduation opportunities. Your grades will good, because you didn’t overload your schedule and you engaged what you were learning. That focus you afforded to a single activity will probably have taken your involvement to really cool places. And that free time spent chasing down random opportunities led you to actually catch a few, making you one of the more interesting people in your graduating class.

And here’s the relevant rule for post-graduation: Interesting things happen to interesting people. Boring things happen to over-scheduled boring assholes like Peter.

But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. When your college acceptances arrive, take a moment for congratulations. Then put the whole admissions experience behind you. It’s time to stop thinking about the future and start thinking about your now. In the real world — the world beyond the high school pressure cooker — the rest has a way of taking care of itself.

Sincerely,
Cal

A Charmed Life

I signed with my literary agent at the age of twenty. At twenty-one I signed my first book deal with Random House. The next year, I signed my second deal. Neither titles became New York Times Bestsellers, and I’m yet to appear on Oprah, but beyond these two exceptions I have, more or less, lived out all of the standard writer daydreams that first led me down this path. Among other things:

• I’ve appeared as an expert on NBC, ABC, and CBS.
• I’ve been interviewed on well over 50 radio programs and have been featured in big newspapers.
• My books have been translated into exotic languages (my favorite is the Korean edition of How to Win at College, which features, bafflingly, images of robots watering flowers.)
• I have had publicists and editors and agents and assistants all working on my behalf.
• I’ve been flown around the country.
• I’ve been projected on the Jumbotron in Times Square and put up in a $500 a night hotel overlooking Central Park.

All in all, not a bad way to spend the first half of my twenties.

The Inevitable Question

Because of these experiences, I often get asked the inevitable question: how did you get your book deal? I love talking about the process because I find it fascinating. But I thought it might prove useful to dump everything I know into one post — a definitive answer that captures all the little insights and tricks that might elude me in casual conversation.

In this post I describe everything I’ve learned about how a first-time writer can maximize his chances of landing a non-fiction book deal. This is based only on my specific experiences. But if you have writer ambitions, it’s a good place to start.

My “Secret” Process

Here are the steps in my process:

1. Don’t write the book first.
   
2. Become a non-bad writer.
3. Identify a first-timer compatible idea.
4. Pitch the right agent.
5. Practice proposal yoga.

Below I explain each step in detail, and, when useful, provide examples from my experience selling my first book.

STEP 1: Don’t write the book first

For non-fiction, you don’t write the book until after you’ve signed a book deal. If you’ve already written the book, pretend like you haven’t. Definitely do not self-publish if you plan on later trying to sell to a publisher. Unless you can sell an extraordinary number of copies (think: Chicken Soup for the Soul), having an existing version will hurt your chances of getting a deal.

STEP 2: Become a non-bad writer

You don’t have to be a good writer to land a book deal. I’ve been writing seriously for 7 years and am still trying to figure out how to become good. You can’t, however, be a bad writer. Your writing has to be tolerable for 200 pages. In other words, you have to shake off the stench of amateurism before you start talking to people in the publishing world. Trust me, one of the first things a potential agent or editor will want from you is writing samples, writing samples, and more writing samples.

How do you know if you’re bad? If your only writing experience is e-mails and school papers then assume you’re bad.

How do you become non-bad? My rough rule: spend at least one year writing for edited publications.

My Experience: I started writing seriously at the beginning of my sophomore year. I eventually worked myself up to become a columnist for the daily paper and the editor of the campus humor magazine. About six months before I began shopping my book idea I started writing freelance advice articles for student-centric magazines. I ended up sending samples of all of this writing to my agent-to-be when she was deciding whether or not to take me on as a client.

STEP 3: Identify a first-timer compatible idea

There are all sorts of interesting non-fiction book ideas. Most of them, however, are off limits to a first-time writer. If you’re not famous or an established journalist, then your idea most satisfy the following:

1. It is something that a large audience will feel like they have to buy.
   
2. You are uniquely suited to write about it.

Most first-timer writers have ideas that satisfy at least one of these rules. Few, however, hit both.

If your idea is simply interesting (e.g., a book about some new youth phenomenon) then you’re violating rule #1. Interesting ideas need to be really well-written to succeed, therefore publishers will allow only established writers to tackle them. Your idea needs to be more than interesting, it needs to be something that people need to have — regardless of whether or not the writing sparkles.

Similarly, if your idea is a must-buy, but has little to do with your unique skills, then you’re violating rule #2. The publisher will look past you to someone who is a better fit. If I had pitched Random House a book on finding balance in your life, they would have tossed it right out — as a 20-year-old I wouldn’t have had the relevant experience to talk convincingly about such issues.

My Experience: For How to Win at College, I satisfied rule #1 by arguing that this book would be the only advice guide that focused on doing well as oppose to just “surviving.” Therefore, for any student who wants or needs to do well in school, my book would be a must-buy. I satisfied rule #2 because I was a student who was doing well at a good college and had been writing about these issues for national publications.

STEP 4: Pitch the right agent

Books are sold by agents. If your idea is not good enough to get an agent then it’s not good enough to be bought by a publisher. As a first-time writer, an agent is the only reasonable path to get your idea considered by a publisher. The implication: get an agent.

Roughly speaking, the process works as follows: you send a one-page query letter to targeted agents. The agents who are interested will follow-up and ask for more information on you, your writing ability, and your idea. Those who are still interested will offer representation.

If you have a personal connection to an agent, you can probably skip the query-letter stage by contacting them directly. However, if your idea does not satisfy the Step #3 conditions, they’re not going to work with you, regardless of who you know.

How do you identify the right agents to pitch? Here’s the trick that worked for me. Go to the bookstore and find books that are similar to your idea. Flip to the acknowledgments. The author will thank his agent. Google the name to see if the agent accepts unsolicited queries. If so, pitch.

How do you figure out how to write a query letter? Buy a book on writing query letters and follow the instructions. There’s no dark magic here. I used this guide.

STEP 5: Practice proposal yoga

Once you have an agent, she will guide you through the process of writing the proposal that she’ll take to the publishers. Listen to her! She’s the one who talks to editors every week. She knows what they want, what they don’t want, and the thousands of ways authors can sabotage their chances of landing a deal. So be flexible.

My Experience: I stayed true to the core concept of my first book, but it otherwise was subjected to a lot of tweaks to make it more palatable. My tone was toned down, my chapter length expanded, new topics inserted, more students interviewed. This is not how I would have written the proposal if left to my own devices. Then again, the proposal I would have written would probably have never been bought.

Conclusion

The process of selling a book idea is not as difficult as many people think. It is, however, sensitive. That is, if at any point you veer from the accepted path, you run the risk of immediate rejection — regardless of the quality of the idea. Therefore, if you’re serious about writing a book, be serious about figuring out how this world works. If you do, you might be surprised by how smoothly the experience can proceed.