Jeb White uses Charlie Munger's inversion method to fix college essays. Instead of guessing what works, identify the ten ways students sabotage their applications, then do the opposite. Each pitfall has a concrete fix that makes your essay memorable.
Today I want to talk to you about how to sabotage your college essay and what to do instead. Hey everyone, I'm Jeb White, founder of CollegeAdmissions.com and the author of the best-selling book Breaking into College: The Underground Playbook for College Admissions. And I want to start with something that has absolutely nothing to do with college admissions on the surface, but I promise you it has everything to do with it underneath. So, Charlie Munger, he was Warren Buffett's longtime business partner, one of the greatest investors who ever lived, had a mental model he used constantly. He called it inversion. Instead of asking, how do I build a great business? He'd ask, how do I destroy this business? He'd make a list of every single way to sabotage it. And then he'd Flip that list. Whatever showed up as the fastest way to ruin something almost always pointed straight at the thing you needed to do to make it thrive. Charlie Munger's reasoning was simple. We are wired to spot problems more easily than we're wired to spot opportunities. Ask someone, how do I write a brilliant essay? And they freeze. Ask that same person, how would you write the worst most forgettable essay a college could receive, and the list practically writes itself. So that's what we're going to do today. I'm going to give you 10 guaranteed ways to sabotage your Common Application personal statement. There's 10 things I see over and over that quietly kills a student's chances, and for every single one, I'm going to hand you the inverse— what to do instead.
