COLLEGE ADMISSIONS MASTERCLASS Week 1 Video 2- Two Key Mindsets of High-Achieving Students

All right, welcome back. We're back on video number two of week number one, and we're talking about the success secrets of high achieving students. In the earlier video, we talked about how high achieving students have a plan and they approach it with urgency and consistency, energy, enthusiasm, and they have an expectation that it's going to work. But I left out two very important secrets. These are the strategies and habits of the mind. These are the mindsets that high achieving students embrace and live in their life. The story that I tell on this one, for my own personal story, and I talk about this in some of my videos that you've seen before, is that when I was 15 years old, we were constantly moving. We moved a number of times throughout my childhood. We were on move number 19 and I was standing in the school line and I saw a U haul truck pull up through the line. And it was actually my father. My father was picking us up from school and as we got in the truck, he told us that we had to move that night and we had to be out the next morning. And one of the things I thought to myself is not again, that this was going to be the third school, third high school, my sophomore year, third high school in two months. And the next morning as we started moving out and my father wasn't there, I thought to myself, what am I going to do now? I can't go for this world record of numero high schools. I needed a level of stability and certainty because I had dreams, right? I had dreams of going to schools that were very selective, that my grades, I thought were high enough that I could maybe achieve a level of entrance into some of these schools. And what I decided to do was to pull together a package of my materials of my grades, a letter explaining that I had good grades, good test scores, but no money, and I could play a little football. Will someone please take me? And I sent it out to the top 20 boarding schools in the country. And ultimately I heard from the McCauley School, which is an all boys boarding school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and they were very generous in their financial aid offer. And that's ultimately where I went. But through that process, what I realized is there was at no point where I was kind of like, this is a dead end, right? That this is it for me, that I'm just going to continually bounce through life from house to house, school to school, job to job, that for me, that wasn't going to be my life. And that that is the message I try to give people, right? That no matter your Circumstances that you have the ability to live with intention and drive your ship where you want to go. Which leads me to the two mindsets that I've seen in countless high achievers in every area of life. And both of these have been backed up by research recently. The first one is the grit mindset. And if you have not read Carol Dweck's book or, I'm sorry, Angela Duckworth's book Grit, please do. She's a professor at Penn. She actually studied under one of my old professors. And her basic storyline and research to back this up is that of all the factors you think about that comes leads somebody to success. The number one factor that's actually determinative, according to Professor Duckworth, is grit. And grit is this concept defined differently by different people of persistence or stick to itness. Or as my G. Mama, my grandmother would say, I would have said it's that fire in the belly, right? This idea that obstacles aren't going to stop me, that obstacles may be there, but I'm getting over them. And that's the grit mindset that we encourage people to adopt. And it's the one mindset that seems to push people forward in every area of their life. And in the book Mindset, Angela Duckworth shows the studies that she did on, for example, West Point graduates. West Point graduates in their early years, their plebe year, the freshman year is a very hard time. And the military are not very good at identifying which student is ultimately going to succeed. So Professor Duckworth said, well, let me try. And she posed this grit test. It's a very short test and I'll have a link to it down below in the notes. Very short questions that students were asked. And at the end of the day, at the end of the year, no other test was more predictive of whether or not a student or ultimately succeeded in the first year program than grit. And that was the factor that she identified. And she's identified it in a number of different areas in life. And whether or not you can build grit, I do not know. And the studies haven't shown exactly if that's possible. But what I do know is that mindset, if you stick to it, ultimately may bear fruit for you. That if you live this life outside of your comfort zone thinking that obstacles will not stop me. Right. I will find a way that that mindset will get you further in life than not. So grit mindset is the first mindset strategy that I've seen and Professor Duckworth has seen and other researchers have seen and we Encourage our students and our parents to adopt this mindset in every area of their life, especially in your studies and in your academic pursuits. And this includes applying to college. The second mindset that we have identified, and it was identified by Carol Dweck in the book Mindset, was the growth mindset. And what Professor Dweck says is that there's two kinds of mindsets identified in people. You have a fixed mindset and other people have a growth mindset. And a fixed mindset says, basically, I am who I am and I cannot change that. I am a set person and I am test define me, and there is no changing in me. Ultimately, at a big picture level, the growth mindset says, that's interesting, but I can evolve, that I can grow as an individual and that I am not a victim, right? I'm a victor. I can make my life what I want it to be and that I can make a way and that a lot of people who approach this and try to think, what are the differences between the two? I try to define them as the difference between the makers and the takers. Okay? So this is my spin on it, that there's people who are makers, people with a growth mindset who make things happen. They make money, they make jobs, they make opportunities, right? And then the takers are those that I view as having a fixed mindset. They take things, Things should be given to them, the that they are entitled to stuff because they are who they are. And what we encourage@collegeadmissions.com and certainly in our legacy class, or you would not be here, is that the growth mindset allows you to push yourself forward. And no one, no one can define you, that you define yourself, and that your experiences and how you define those experiences will ultimately drive your life, right? So here in the legacy class, no whining, no complaining, Those people are not allowed here. We only allow makers, people with growth mindsets to flourish here because those are the people who are going to make things happen, and those are the people who are going to think. Jeb's putting out a strategy. He's putting out a plan that's worked for others. It can work for me too. And that they don't think of why things are not going to work. Okay? This is something we all battle all the time, is that things are not going to work. If you look at something to through the lens of I can make this work, if others have done it, I can do it too. If this guy can do it, I can do it too, then you're going to get far in life, and you're going to get far in this process. Just believe in it. So the story that I always tell on this one came from the twin study, very famous study, where they looked at twins and tried to identify the differences between two twins. And these are twins who were raised in different families. And there was one set of twins that was very telling to this story. In early life, these twins were raised by an abusive father who drank too much, was abusive, did not support his children. And then ultimately they were split apart and taken apart and lived their high school years and the rest of their lives apart. And what they did was the researchers went to the both of them and to the first person, they said, why have you been so successful? This first twin had made quite a name for himself. He'd been very successful in life, was a CEO of a company, had a very happy family, and was living, by all measurements, the life that people would like to live. And what he said was interesting. He said, well, my father was abusive. He was an alcoholic. He was not there to help me. I had no other option. I had to succeed, right? They then went to the other, to the brother, the twin brother, who was raised apart from him and said, so why have you struggled through life? He was at this point unemployed and had not had a job for a long time and was at this point in his life where he was trying to figure out where to go, right? And they said, why have you struggled? Why have you come through life at such a point where you feel like you have not contributed? And he goes, well, I had no other option. My father was abusive, he was an alcoholic, and he didn't support me. Same stories, different innings. What we attach to those things is through our mind, and that's the important thing. Growth, mindset, grit, mindset. Approaching your plan with urgency, consistency, energy and expectancy, and doing with the right mindset is ultimately going to live you, push you forward to a life that you want to live. So my question for you today as we finish out this video, what are you thinking? See you next time in the next video. It'll be our third video of week number one. See you next time.