COLLEGE ADMISSIONS MASTERCLASS Week 1 Video 1- Success Secrets of High-Achieving Students

Well, hello and welcome to week one of our college admissions masterclass. This session is the first session of this course. And what we're going to talk about today are the success secrets, habits and strategies of high achieving students. And then in the second series in this first module, we're going to talk about the mindsets that these students have. And then we're going to finish up with the mountain exercise. And as we've discussed in a number of our legacy class sessions, that is the first thing that you want to start with. But let's go ahead and get started with those secrets that students, high achieving students have. I always like to start these off with a personal story. It's kind of my way of letting you know that I'm not perfect. I have had my own trials and tribulations that I've gone through that hopefully you can identify with and make you realize that if that guy can do it, then surely I can. Right? It's kind of like the story about Roger Bannister. When he broke the four minute mile, everyone thought it was impossible. And then all of a sudden he broke it, ran a mile in under four minutes. And all of a sudden all these other people did. So my hope is by sharing some of my personal stories, I can do that for you. So that you can say that I too can do this and offers you a level of inspiration. Okay. So the first story I want to tell you is a story I don't tell a whole lot. I touched on it briefly in my book Breaking into College. It's the story of me getting expelled from college break. Yes, it's true. I was expelled from the University of Pennsylvania after my freshman year of college. I had a 1.7 GPA. Yes. Quite, quite low. And I was thinking, what am I going to do now? And what I did was I went to the dean and I explained my situation and offered up my reasons why they should not expel me and why they should make that a temporary three day expulsion. Allow me back in. And one of the things the dean told me was, we will allow you back in. Ultimately, after a lot of begging, she said this. If you find a model, if you find a role model that will allow you to follow their footsteps, that you need to find somebody who's been there and is doing it successfully here on campus and then model your study habits and your approach to life after them. And that's what I did. I sought after people on campus, on and off campus and through different mediums to find people who are successful. And I started Stalking them. I started following them, trying to understand what they did that was so different from me. And I learned a number of things. First off, they study. Second off, they go to class. But most importantly, what they do is that they have a plan. And that's the first secret that I recognize from successful high achieving students. That they start before they do anything else with a plan. They map out where they are, where they want to go and how they're going to get there. And then for a lot of them, it's by finding those role models, it's by finding a map, someone who's been there and seeing how they do it and following it. And it's by letting somebody be their mentor, Letting somebody see where they are and then try to follow their ways. One of the things that we recognize throughout life is that there's people who have been on our road and are further up the road than we are. And what successful students do is they don't try to reinvent the proverbial will. They try to follow the plan and the path of those who've been successful before them. The second secret of successful high achieving students is that they approach life with urgency. That they don't procrastinate. They seize their life. Carpe diem. They seize their life and seize that plan to move their life forward. That they don't sit around saying that I should have done this or I will do that. It is a matter of I am doing this. That this matter of urgency really does embed everything they do in life. So first off, they seek out a plan and then when they have that plan, they put it into action. The third thing that I identified very quickly is that they do it with consistency. That for a lot of people it's a life of inconsistency. That for, for example, me, I have oftentimes go through these stages of where I'm going to get super fit and I'll hit the gym sometimes for three hours in one day, and then I won't go to the gym for a week because I'm sore. But for those who are very, very fit and stay that way for their entire lives, what they do, of course, is they go to the gym for shorter periods of time every single day. They don't miss, right? They show up in their life every day and live with intention instead of this sporadic back and forth that so many of us go through. So they live that life of consistency. The fourth thing that we recognize is that they have a level of energy, right? That they have this level of enthusiasm. For life, that they embed this enthusiasm in everything they do. And when they approach that plan with urgency and consistency, they do it with a level of enthusiasm that carries them forward. Right. The fifth thing that we see is that they have, they expect to succeed, a level of expectancy that at the end of the day, their plan will lead them to where they want to go. And they come at their life knowing that that will happen, that they don't live a life of worry and anxiety, but they live a life of expectation that their plan will work out. So those five success secrets that we've identified over the last 20 years and has been backed up by research, again, is having a plan, approaching it with urgency, and then doing it every single day, a level of consistency that succeeds out and then doing it with energy and enthusiasm. And lastly, expectancy. You know, the expectancy reminds me of my daughter. My daughter is now six, but when she was learning to walk, it seemed like maybe she never would learn to walk. It was a long process for us. And at no point did we think, she's never going to learn how to walk. We knew it was just a matter of time, right? And that's true for so many things that we do in life. If you have that level of expectancy, if you follow a plan, teaching her how to walk, for example, do it with consistency, urgency and energy that ultimately your child would walk and that she's not going to crawl across the stage at high school graduation, Right? So what we know is people who do these things, ultimately they're nothing special, right? That these are people just like you and me, that they're people who had a plan and lived that plan out, and that they ultimately realized their dreams and where they wanted to go because they stayed true to that plan. So as we start off this new course, I want you to keep those in mind that I'm trying right now to give you a plan. And if you put it into place consistently and with urgency, don't procrastinating on me now. If you put this together with an energy and expectation, that this plan has worked for countless others and that it's worked for me, that ultimately it's going to work for you. In the next video, what we're going to talk about is the mindset, what mindset you need to have in place to make sure that actually happens for you. So go ahead, do the exercises down below, and we'll see you on the next video.