How to Be a High School Superstar: A Revolutionary Plan to Get into College by Standing Out (Without Burning Out)

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Do Less, Live More, Get Accepted

What if getting into your reach schools didn’t require four years of excessive A.P. classes, overwhelming activity schedules, and constant stress?

In How to Be a High School Superstar, Cal Newport explores the world of relaxed superstars—students who scored spots at the nation’s top colleges by leading uncluttered, low stress, and authentic lives. Drawing from extensive interviews and cutting-edge science, Newport explains the surprising truths behind these superstars’ mixture of happiness and admissions success, including:

·        Why doing less is the foundation for becoming more impressive.
·        Why demonstrating passion is meaningless, but being interesting is crucial.
·        Why accomplishments that are hard to explain are better than accomplishments that are hard to do.

These insights are accompanied by step-by-step instructions to help any student adopt the relaxed superstar lifestyle—proving that getting into college doesn’t have to be a chore to survive, but instead can be the reward for living a genuinely interesting life.

Review

“As a former Ivy League admissions officer, I was overjoyed to see a book that hit the nail on the head regarding selective college admissions and how to take the process in stride. Students will find his book extremely useful and admissions officers will be relieved to see applicants who escape the cookie-cutter syndrome.” —Dr. Michele Hernández, author of A Is for Admission and co-founder of Top Tier Admissions

“Disguised as a peppy college-admission guide, Newport’s book is actually a profound, life-affirming manifesto for ambitious high school students. Forgo the sleepless and cynical path to college acceptance. Instead, blaze your trail to the Ivy League by living a full life and immersing yourself in things that matter. Relax. Find meaning. Be you.” —David Shenk, author of The Genius in All of Us

“How to Be a High School Superstar should be on the shelf of every student who wonders how to stand out in the increasingly competitive race to get into a top college. Cal Newport has a keen sense of what types of students and activities appeal to college admissions officers and his advice is exceptionally easy to execute. His approach will not only help you win the admissions race, it will keep you sane while you run the marathon.” —Joie Jager-Hyman, author of Fat Envelope Frenzy and B+ Grades, A+ College Application

“This book changes everything. Put away your traditional college plan and get ready to learn something that really works.” —Chris Guillebeau, author of The $100 Startup and The Art of Non-Conformity

About the Author

Cal Newport graduated from Dartmouth College, earned a Ph.D. from MIT, and is now an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University. He’s the author of five books, including most recently the Wall Street Journal business bestseller Deep Work. He also runs the popular blog Study Hacks, which explores the impact of technology on our ability to perform productive work and lead satisfying lives. His contrarian ideas have been featured on many major media platforms, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Economist and NPR. Visit him online at calnewport.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Horseshoe Crabs and Blogs

THE IDEA of drastically reducing your schedule probably sounds great in theory—who wouldn't want to enjoy an abundance of free time? But if you're like many students I've advised, you probably have reservations about the impact of such a lifestyle on your chances of getting into college. Running through the back of your mind is a simple logic: doing more is more impressive; therefore, by cutting back you're reducing your impressiveness, and this will hurt your admissions chances.

You will soon come to understand that this is a flawed belief. The number and difficulty of your accomplishments play only a minor role in college applications. Other factors are much more important.

Below, I introduce two students. The first, Olivia, dedicated only a handful of hours each week during the school year to extracurricular activities, yet still won a full-ride scholarship to the University of Virginia. The second, Jessica, was often able to finish her week's homework by Tuesday night—leaving the rest of the week free. She got accepted into the University of California, Berkeley, her dream school.

Their stories will help acclimate you to the concept that light schedules can correspond with admissions success. In the chapters that follow, we'll dive into the details of exactly why this is true and how you can replicate these results.

The Horseshoe Crab Effect

In late March of 2008, Olivia, a high school senior from a small town near Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was ushered into a room. She took a seat across from a semicircle of five distinguished-looking men and women. The group greeted her with wide smiles, but their eyes were serious and appraising. The cramped dimensions of the room surprised Olivia. A desk, littered with the standard collection of photo frames and computer accessories, encroached on the floor space, leaving Olivia and her inquisitors almost uncomfortably close. "It was so small," she recalls. "It was just someone's office."

The mundane setting contrasted with the importance of the event taking place there. This was the final-round interview for the prestigious Jefferson Scholarship—an award that covered the full costs of attending the University of Virginia. Three months earlier, Olivia had been nominated by her high school for the prize. She had survived a round of regional interviews before being flown down to Charlottesville, Virginia—home to the university—for a battery of tests leading up to this interview. Over the past two days, Olivia had taken exams to assess her math and writing skills. She had also been given a packet of academic papers to read, and then placed in a conference room to debate their merits with other finalists while members of the Jefferson Scholars Foundation selection committee took notes. This final interview, however, held the most weight for the senior members of the foundation who would decide whether or not Olivia was Jefferson material.

To better understand what constitutes Jefferson material, consider a student whom I'll call Laura Gant, who won the scholarship the previous year. Laura liked to write. As a high school student she interned at Business Week and had several pieces published on the magazine's Web site. She also won the Victor L. Ridder Scholarship, the National Council of Teachers of English Achievement Award in Writing, and the Harvard-Radcliff Book Award. Not surprising, she boasted exceptional grades that had earned her an almost embarrassingly long list of academic awards and scholarships. In addition, she's an artist and a talented musician—both voice and piano—who studied her craft seriously at a special music school in New York State. She rounded out her activity list by being the co-president of a school club, a member of the National Honor Society, and the co-founder of a community service group, and she was heavily involved in both the theater and choir groups at her high school.

Laura is a sterling example of the standard thinking about college admissions. She distinguished herself in high school by demonstrating commitment to lots of activities. Her life, I imagine, must have been brutal—a constant stream of work driven by the persistent fear of falling short of perfection. In the end, however, the suffering paid off when she won the Jefferson. This is the type of student against whom Olivia had to compete.

Olivia had never heard of Laura Gant, and this was probably for the best. Olivia's extracurricular involvements looked nothing like Laura's. Olivia didn't win armfuls of awards. She was not a star musician or an artist. She didn't start any organizations,or, for that matter, even participate in that many. Here's what she did do: to satisfy her school's athletic requirement, she joined the dance team, a commitment that required only four to five hours a week.

"That was much better than the ten-plus hours you'd spend if you joined a real sports team," she told me.

During her senior year she joined the tech crew for the school musical, but this counted as an elective class. She also co-chaired her senior class's community service organization.

"In past years, the group marched in parades and held bake sales," she recalls. "My co-leader and I decided to not do that kind of thing. It really takes a lot of energy to organize high schoolers for things like that!"

Instead, she and her co-leader shunted their classmates toward an existing community service program that organized a service trip that would take place soon after graduation.

"Leading that group required, on average, about two hours a week," Olivia says. "It was not a huge commitment at all."

During her sophomore summer, she was also a part-time unpaid volunteer at the University of New Hampshire's marine biology laboratory. (The professor who ran the lab was her family's next-door neighbor.) You'll learn more about what sparked her interest in marine biology later in Part 1; for now it's enough to know that she returned to the lab her junior summer as a paid research assistant and planned on doing the same her final summer before college.

And that's about it.

If you're keeping score, the above entailed six to seven hours of activities per week during the school year—leaving Olivia's afternoons, evenings, and weekends wonderfully free. She had more than enough time to keep up with her courses without resorting to late nights or experiencing stress. And this still left abundant time to relax. Olivia enjoyed her underscheduled lifestyle, and she looks back on high school fondly.

She was not Laura Gant.

On the surface, it seemed as if Olivia's prospects for winning the Jefferson Scholarship were dim. She had avoided the stress that comes from an overpacked schedule, but as she sat before the five men and women who would decide whether to grant her one of their alma mater's most prestigious honors, she worried that she was about to pay the price for her happiness.

"At the time I felt really insecure about it. Maybe I should have played varsity soccer and lacrosse and, you know, become student council president," she recalls.

Some pleasantries were exchanged, and then the interview began in earnest. "Tell me," one of the men said, "about those horseshoe crabs."

With this question, the fear vanished from Olivia's mind. She knew how to talk about horseshoe crabs. The past two summers, she had spent every morning and every afternoon commuting to and from the UNH campus with her neighbor, the director of the lab where she worked, holding lively debates about the nuances of marine biology.

"One morning—to give you an example—the professor began going on about a paper on particular neurotransmitters in the brain of lobsters," Olivia told me. "It wasn't his area of research, but he was fascinated anyway. It helped me understand that being a scientist isn't just about focusing on one small area; it can also be about being interested in huge, broad topics." This interest had seeped into Olivia's personal life, affecting what she read and what she thought about.

The interview conversation soon turned to a book Olivia had recently read for fun: Emergence, by Steven Johnson—a look at how large-scale complex traits can arise from small-scale simple actions; for example, how thousands of ants following simple rules aggregate into an intelligently run colony. Olivia began to riff about the book. She discussed how studying the emergent traits of horseshoe crab populations, as Johnson had described researchers doing with ants, might yield new clues about the behavior of the crustaceans. She wanted to study both marine biology and environmental science at college so she could tackle interdisciplinary problems of this kind.

Olivia's idea about emergence was original, but to her it was not particularly special. She loved the field of marine biology and was used to coming up with and debating ideas about it. This was simply what you did at the lab where she worked. It was a natural by-product of being genuinely interested in the subject.

The five scholarship committee members, however, were entranced. They were used to students, like Laura Gant, who would enter that cramped office and give careful, official-sounding answers to their questions—never failing to miss an opportunity to highlight accomplishments from their lengthy resumes. They would say things like "My time spent volunteering at the local hospital taught me the importance of service." Or, "Being student council president is another example of my ability to lead."

Olivia, on the other hand, ignored this strategy. She exuded confidence and curiosity. Above all, there was real substance behind her words. Put another way, she was actually interesting, and this would take her further than she ever imagined.

The next night, after returning home to New Hampshire, Olivia got the call. This student from a small high school—a student with copious free time, who had never won major academic awards or competitions, or started any important club or organization,and who lived a happy, low-stress life—was informed that she had won the scholarship.

As it turns out, Olivia's story of interestingness trumping busyness is not unique. In the next section you'll hear about another laid-back student who transformed a love of life into admissions success.

The Forty-Minute Essay

Jessica, a student attending a private school in Upstate New York, decided as a sophomore to adopt an underscheduled lifestyle. This decision was prompted by a short-lived, ill-fated brush with entrepreneurship the year before. She had been paying fora deluxe Web hosting account, when she had an idea. She could rent an entire Celeron server from the hosting company for $59 a month. She could then resell a hosting account for around $90 to $100. The difference would be profit, which she could use to help pay her own server bills.

Jessica rented and resold her first server, and then soon thought: "Why not do this with more computers and make even more profit?" She discovered that a P4 rack server bought for $400 could be rented for $180, generating an even bigger profit after the initial cost was paid back. So she bought one—and then some more.

Things soon got out of hand. First there was the logistics of handling money and client accounts. Even today, years later, Jessica hesitates to talk about what she did wrong during that crazy year. She never incorporated the business and didn't handle the money well. With thousands of dollars sloshing in and out of personal bank accounts, more servers being bought, and bills mounting, the finances became complicated, and that bred stress.

The human problems made things even worse. On paper, renting a server for one price and re-renting for a higher price seems like automatic money. What this equation omits, however, is the late-night phone calls, from the companies paying those higher prices,when something went wrong.

Things often went wrong.

Jessica started bringing her cell phone to school to answer tech support calls in between classes. Her anxiety rose. The situation came to a head on New Year's Eve in her freshman year. Jessica was away for the holiday break with her family when her phone rang. "It was literally one minute before the ball was about to drop," she recalls. The call was from her business partner.

"Hey, big problems," he started. Jessica's stomach churned. "All of our customers just got their data wiped out by a hacker."

On the TV, the ball began its descent.

"I'm on vacation, can this—? Shit, this sounds really bad," Jessica replied.

It was possible that eight hundred companies had just lost their data. She knew the feeling well; earlier in the year the same thing had happened to the three hundred customers they had at the time. As the New Year officially began, Jessica punched in the number of the technician on call at the data center. It would be a long night.

A few months later Jessica found her way out of this self-created prison. A client offered to take over the servers and their accounts. Jessica wouldn't make any money from the deal, but the client would take on the outstanding bills. The agreement was made at five o'clock on a Tuesday morning over an MSN Web chat.

"It was sort of scary; it left a big gap in my life," Jessica recalls. "But it was also a relief. There is no way to describe what it's like."

The stress of this experience drove Jessica to vow that she would never lose control of her schedule again. She became wary, for example, about taking on too many commitments. She joined her school's model UN club and played in the jazz band. She also did some volunteering and was involved with student government. But these were her only formal activities. In fact, she even left most of these minor clubs off her college applications, explaining, "I thought they would clutter things." At the beginning of her junior year, she also started a blog to help work through some of her thoughts about the experience with entrepreneurship that had shaken up her freshman-year life. It was a way to stay connected to that world without actually running a company.

Jessica kept her academic demands equally light. "On a weekday, I might work until eight and then I was done," she told me. "I rarely worked on weekends. I would just hang out, work on my blog, or build random Web site stuff."

She was good at starting assignments early and taking advantage of slow periods to get ahead on her work. She was so good, in fact, that by her junior year she would often finish her homework for the week as early as Tuesday evening, leaving the rest of the week completely free for her to do whatever she wanted.

"It was such a relaxed time," she recalls.

Jessica was about as far from a grind as it is possible to be without failing out of school. So when it came to writing her college application essay for Berkeley, one of her dream schools, it didn't cross her mind to obsess over the task. Fortunately, Jessica had some experience with writing. Her blog had led her to devote much of her free time to informally reading and thinking about entrepreneurship and talking to interesting people involved with it. As I'll explain, it was this thinking and writing that made her genuinely interesting, and it was her interestingness that would make her application so unique and powerful—helping her get into this notoriously competitive school.

Review:

4.5 out of 5

90.00% of customers are satisfied

5.0 out of 5 stars Great for High School Students or Anyone Who Wants an Interesting Life

A.C. · April 5, 2013

***THE BOTTOM LINE***I definitely recommend this book. It has good, unconventional advice on how to succeed as a high school student without being a social reject. This advice will probably NOT be common sense to the type-A students out there who have been raised thinking the successful students do homework from 6p-12a every night. If you know a student who wants to get into an elite university, this book provides evidenced techniques for succeeding toward that end.***A FULLER REVIEW***I picked this book up for my brother, who's in high school. Secretly, I--being a university Freshman--wanted to read it too. The book's lessons can be life-changing if you listen and have faith in Newport's advice.I was the opposite of relaxed in high-school. I was stressed, involved in service clubs I didn't care about, and taking 6 AP courses each semester my senior year. I got a 30 on my ACT, which was certainly nothing spectacular in the eyes of most elite schools. Not surprisingly, my laundry list of unremarkable endeavors, A average in AP courses, and mediocre standardized test scores did NOT get me into Harvard, MIT, Yale, Dartmouth, Columbia...(seriously, the list of elite schools to which I applied and was rejected is embarrassingly long). This book explains, in explicit detail, why my attempt at getting into the elite universities was flawed, and it also explains the optimal way to try to get into elite universities.For high-school students, the book gives excellent advice for lowering stress (e.g. stop working at a certain time each day, do some thinking/reading in solitude, don't give up your entire life for school, etc.). The book also gives excellent advice for improving grades (i.e. note-taking methods, studying strategies, etc.) and advice for doing interesting things outside the classroom. It is a very balanced approach to high-school life that, when executed correctly, will make a student more impressive AND leave her with more free time than the alternative (i.e. my approach described above).For the general public, this book contains valuable lessons about creating a more interesting life. The rules still apply, if you're creative enough to seek the applications. Not working past a certain point in the day, pursuing endeavors that are innovative, and cultivating a reading habit are among the many broadly applicable tips Newport gives throughout the book.My main critique of the book is that it doesn't explicitly spell out how much of your free time should be used for interesting pursuits versus totally social activity (e.g. hanging out with friends). I suppose the author leaves it to you to discern that Friday and Saturday nights are good times to interact with other humans.This book was definitely worth the few days it took me to read through it. If you're interested in becoming interesting (and perhaps getting into an elite university), this book will spell the process out for you.

5.0 out of 5 stars eye-opening look at what colleges really want AND guide for a less stressful high school experience

C.C. · February 6, 2019

I purchased this for my daughter, who is only a freshman in high school but, like many of her friends, already stressed about getting into a good college. They seem to believe that unless they load up their schedules with AP and Honors courses, earn straight As, and spend every hour outside of the classroom engaged in the "right" extracurricular activities (student council, robotics = good, art club, choir = bad),, the dream of attending a good college will never come true. Cal Newport, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, provides very different advice in this book -- encouraging students to actually create more free time in their schedules to be open to new experiences, and follow their passions and interests in exploring opportunities that come their way, rather than cramming their schedules full of activities that may spark little joy and not be aligned with interests. Professor Newport's advice will certainly result in a more fun, less stressful high school experience -- it will also make you a more interesting person, the kind of person many colleges would want to have on campus.As a middle-aged woman with no intention of applying to colleges any time soon, I read this book through and found it quite interesting and full of useful guidance on keeping yourself open to opportunities and new experiences and being willing to pay your dues and establish your own credibility within a closed organization -- lots of useful tips here, whether you are 16 or 56. Newport is a good, clear, writer, and the book is full of examples of student successes. Many of the success stories seem daunting at first glance -- not everyone is going to write a best-seller or start a million-dollar company -- but every student can find a unique path to pursue.I highly recommend this for any high school student who has a very rigid and daunting notion of what it will take to get into college. And I recommend it for parents of such students.

4.0 out of 5 stars Quick read. Well worth it.

P. · July 27, 2010

I initially stumbled upon Cal's blog six months ago, searching for techniques that might help my kids. In fact, what I found was a veritable treasure chest of techniques, that could be applied by individuals of any age. I have since adopted many of his approaches and have found them useful in my work.I suspected that this book would not have much substance beyond what could be found on the Study Hacks website. After all, even a person like Cal, can only have so many great ideas. Regardless, I ordered the book if for no other reason to support and reward Cal's hard work in writing useful and original content.I read the entire book in one sitting of a few hours. As I expected, much of the substance is already on the website.However, it is still worth buying this book. Cal pulls the whole message together into an overall framework, and elaborates on many of his points with relevant examples. Even loyal Study Hacks readers will be better able to execute on the approach after reading the book.

Five Stars

K.K. · January 10, 2018

A perfect give for a young student.

Makes you game changer

S.Y. · July 19, 2019

It's amazing

Well written guide to get into Top Universities.

T. · August 11, 2024

It was a good read with useful information on " the relaxed superstar method". It doesn't apply to the local context here, but the methods can be extrapolated for most high school students who want to do interesting things and find more free time with their hectic schedules. Overall, I think it's a great resource for parents and secondary school kids who are already doing well in their studies and want to make time to aim for top colleges worldwide.

inspiring stories

M.M. · December 19, 2018

good and engaging book

good book

R.G. · April 15, 2024

its a book to read once .

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How to Be a High School Superstar: A Revolutionary Plan to Get into College by Standing Out (Without Burning Out)

Name: How to Be a High School Superstar: A Revolutionary Plan to Get into College by Standing Out (Without Burning Out)
Brand: Cal Newport (Author)
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