How To Be A High School Superstar Part 11

I have a confession. I changed one key fact about Maneesh's high school experience. He didn't play in a rock band. Instead, at the age of sixteen he published a book t.i.tled Computer Game Programming for Teens. The t.i.tle sold well in America, at one point hitting number sixteen on the amazon.com bestseller list. It also sold well abroad. (For reasons unknown, it was a hit in Poland.) The success landed Maneesh a brief recurring segment on a show airing on the teen-oriented TechTV cable channel, where he answered viewer questions about game programming.

When I make this subst.i.tution, Maneesh's Stanford acceptance suddenly slides into focus. "Of course he got in," you think, "he wrote a bestselling book and was a TV personality!" Take a moment, however, to question this shift in your feelings. Why is writing a book substantially more impressive than playing in a popular local rock band? As I mentioned in the opening in Part 3, when I ask students what makes an activity impressive, they tend to circle back to responses such as hard work and talent. But does this apply here? Maneesh's example challenges these a.s.sumptions.

I'll start with hard work. Maneesh wrote his book over a period of two years. In fact, he was more than a year late handing in the ma.n.u.script due to his inability to do large amounts of writing all at once. Maneesh wrote when he had the time and energy-he estimates that he averaged only two hours of writing per week. The earlier quote about the rock band never being "a real time sink" was something Maneesh actually said about writing the book. In other words, playing in a rock band probably requires more hard work than Maneesh invested in his book. (As the former guitar player for a high school rock band, and the author of multiple books, I can base this claim on my own experience. Bands are demanding!) Moving on to talent, I claim that playing in a successful rock band requires at least as much natural talent as writing a computer game programming book. A band requires you to master a musical instrument. The book required Maneesh to learn how to program computer games. A band requires that you write original songs and develop your own style. The book required Maneesh to come up with a structure for presenting information about basic programming. A band requires that you're good enough at your instrument to play standard songs. The book required that Maneesh be a good enough writer that people wouldn't throw down the volume in disgust, but it certainly didn't require expert writing skill-it's a computer manual, not a literary novel. In short, the amount of talent required doesn't differ much between the two examples. No wellspring of hidden brilliance was tapped to make Computer Game Programming for Teens a reality.

To summarize, I tackled the standard arguments for what makes something impressive-hard work and talent-and established that playing in a rock band and writing a book are comparable. Yet writing a book blows away Stanford admissions officers in a way that playing in a rock band never would. If it's not hard work or talent, we can then ask, what is it that makes the book writing so impressive? Part 3 is an extended answer to this crucial question. In the chapters that follow, you'll learn about a powerful but little-understood phenomenon I call the Failed-Simulation Effect. This effect explains the paradox of the book versus the rock band and helps decode the success of almost every relaxed superstar I've encountered. In these chapters, you'll meet other students who, like Maneesh, leveraged this effect to get into their reach schools, even though their high school lives where uncluttered and relaxed. I'll highlight the general strategies they followed to integrate this effect into their student lives, and teach you how to do the same.

11.

The Failed-Simulation Effect.

MANEESH THE author blows us away. Maneesh the musician does not. This observation hints at an interesting phenomenon hidden outside the range of common understanding. In this chapter, I resolve the mystery by describing an overlooked but crucial admissions concept-a deceptively simple hypothesis that goes a long way toward explaining how relaxed superstars do what they do.

The Failed-Simulation-Effect Hypothesis.

If you cannot mentally simulate the steps taken by a student to reach an accomplishment, you will experience a feeling of profound impressiveness.

Put another way, you are impressed by things that are hard to explain, regardless of whether or not they were hard to do. Consider the two different versions of Maneesh's story. Playing in a rock band doesn't generate the Failed-Simulation Effect. You can easily simulate the steps required for that accomplishment: buy an instrument, take lessons, practice, brood, and so on. There's no mystery. By contrast, publishing a bestselling book at the age of sixteen defies simulation. "How does a teenager get a book deal?" you ask in wonderment. This failure to simulate generates a sense of awed respect: "He must be something special."

Once you understand this effect, many of the seemingly random twists and turns of the admissions process suddenly make sense. It helps explain why students who you thought should get accepted had a hard time-even though they exhibited the traits you a.s.sumed were important-while other students surprised you by breezing into the Ivy League.

Consider the following two examples of real relaxed superstars who used this effect to succeed in admissions. (Later in Part 3, I'll detail exactly how they made these accomplishments happen.) The first student is named Kate. During her senior year of high school, Kate started an organization called the Varsity Study Team. It brought seniors from her private high school to work with seventh-graders in a well-known charter school servicing a rough neighborhood in Southeast Washington DC. As Kate describes it, she wanted to do more than "just help students with their homework." Instead, the organization focused on study and organization skills-"teaching the students how to outline their essay on Tuesday so they could do a better job writing on Wednesday." This program was deemed a success by the teachers at the charter school. Later that same year, Kate completed a research study of the reading techniques used by six of the best charter schools on the East Coast. The report was so well received that this same DC charter school adopted some of the findings in its cla.s.srooms. In short, Kate had a major impact on the lives of struggling students.

Kate's accomplishments clearly generate the Failed-Simulation Effect. You probably have no idea how a teenager can pull together an important study-skills program or wield original research to change the way a charter school teaches its pupils. The power of this effect was enough to get Kate into Princeton, even though, during her senior year, she took only four courses and partic.i.p.ated in almost no extracurricular activities outside of her involvement with the charter school. With a hint of embarra.s.sment, she admitted to me that she rarely had more than an hour or two of homework to finish during the average weekday-a small enough load that she often finished the work before she got home. The Failed-Simulation Effect, however, overwhelmed these factors.

For my next example, I want to return to Kara-the student described in the book's introduction. As you may recall, Kara developed a technology-based health curriculum that was adopted by school districts in ten different states. Once again, you probably have no idea how a high school student can have such a powerful effect on the country's educational system. Accordingly, you feel powerfully impressed-providing another clear example of the Failed-Simulation Effect in action.

Like Kate, Kara deserves the "relaxed" piece of the "relaxed superstar" t.i.tle. Kara involved herself in few activities outside of her work on the curriculum, took a reasonable course load, and shockingly enough was happy to accept the occasional B to avoid late-night study marathons. The Failed-Simulation Effect was powerful enough, however, to swamp these concessions and help Kara get into twenty out of the whopping twenty-one schools to which she applied, including Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, and MIT, where she now studies.

Maneesh, Kate, and Kara all wielded this effect to blow the socks off the admissions officers at their dream schools, even though they lived laid-back lives. They were impressive in a way that students who rely on basic traits like hard work and talent can't always replicate. Before moving on to detail exactly how these students got involved with their pursuits, I want to take a small detour to answer an important question: Why does this effect exist?

12.

La.s.siters Insight.

THE FAILED-SIMULATION EFFECT Hypothesis seems plausible. It dispels much of the mystery surrounding the admissions process-why, for example, we're so impressed by Maneesh, Kate, and Kara, but not by the equally hardworking students who devote their time to familiar pursuits like playing in a rock band or becoming cla.s.s president. We are still left, however, with the question of why the Failed-Simulation Effect exists. That is, why is the inexplicable so impressive and the explicable so boring? To answer these questions, I turn your attention to the story of two competing research teams at Ohio University who, in the late 1990s, had the insight to turn a cla.s.sic question of modern psychology on its head.

The Genius Effect.

Over a period of several days in 1997, a group of seventy-eight undergraduates at Ohio University visited the lab of psychology professor Mark Alicke. They arrived, as scheduled, in pairs, having been told that they would partic.i.p.ate in a study of intellectual skills. Each pair of students was led to a small cla.s.sroom, where they sat side by side at desks. The walls were bare, except for a mirror. The students were given a test consisting of ten questions. The questions were visual puzzles, of the type found on IQ tests, and they required the test-takers to rotate and twist complicated shapes in their minds.

The puzzles were designed to be tricky; the average undergraduate at Ohio University could complete only three out of the ten. But in every session of this experiment, one of the two test-takers always did much better than this average, answering an outstanding seven out of ten questions correctly. He accomplished this feat because, as it turned out, the student was a confederate, hired by the researchers. He knew the answers in advance and was instructed to always score higher than the unwitting test-taker sitting beside him. To add insult to injury, this humiliation did not go unnoticed. Behind the mirror was a third student, who had arrived earlier and been instructed to quietly observe the entire process.

To understand the importance of this experiment, you have to step back to 1954, the year when a Stanford psychologist by the name of Leon Festinger proposed a simple idea, which was that our feelings about ourselves come from comparisons with other people. To the modern ear, this sounds obvious. But at the time, the impact was profound. Festinger's work kicked off half a century of inventive research that probed how different types of comparisons make us feel.

More than forty years later, Alicke's Ohio University experiment took Festinger's theory and flipped it. Alicke was not interested in how the unwitting test-taker felt about himself after the confederate scorched him on the test. He wanted to know instead how it made the test-taker feel about the confederate. It's a simple tweak, but given our interest in how people evaluate the impressiveness of others, it proves crucial to understanding the Failed-Simulation Effect.

After the tests were completed and scored, the fooled test-taker, whom I'll call the subject, was asked to rate both his and the confederate's intelligence on a ten-point scale. The subject, of course, didn't know that his partner was a plant, so he wasn't feeling too hot about himself, having just been trounced. Not surprisingly, the subjects rated themselves, on average, 4.28, while rating the confederate a much higher 7.51.

The real insight, however, came from the third student, who watched from behind the mirror. When this student, whom I'll call the observer, was also asked to rate the intelligence of the two test-takers, he rated the subjects, on average, 4.33, which basically matched the score of 4.28 that the subjects gave themselves. But when the observer rated the confederates, he gave them an average score 6.44-a full point lower than the average score of 7.51 given to them by the defeated subjects. In other words, the subject, who'd just been beaten badly on the test, thought the confederate was a really smart guy. The observer, watching the same test disinterestedly through the mirror, was less impressed.

Alicke and his collaborators dubbed this result the Genius Effect, as in, "The only way I'm comfortable with someone beating me is if he's a genius." They hypothesized that we inflate the ability of people who outperform us so that we can heal our fragile egos. To use the a.n.a.logy given by Alicke in the original paper, the tennis pro at your local club won't be upset if he's trounced in a match against Andy Rodd.i.c.k. In the context of Alicke's experiment, if the subject a.s.sumes that the confederate is the Andy Rodd.i.c.k of intelligence tests, then he won't sweat being beaten. It's in the subject's best interest to a.s.sume that the confederate's a really talented guy.

But was Alicke right?

Several years later, a different team at Ohio University, led by professor Daniel La.s.siter, challenged Alicke's hypothesis. La.s.siter began by re-creating the 1997 experiment and found the same results: the subject consistently inflated the confederate's smarts. But La.s.siter then introduced a twist. He hypothesized that the Genius Effect was not about ego. He claimed that it instead revealed a much simpler truth, which is that when judging people we use ourselves as a convenient point of comparison. When it comes to things like intelligence tests, people think they are much smarter than they actually are, so when they do poorly they a.s.sume the other guy must be really smart. It's not about repairing one's ego, it's instead a snap judgment based on imperfect a.s.sumptions.

To test this idea, La.s.siter conducted a survey of Ohio University undergrads. He found, as expected, that most of these students a.s.sumed that they would be good at intelligence tests. In fact, the majority predicted that they would score better than another student in a head-to-head compet.i.tion. Like Lake Wobegon, Ohio University is a place where everyone thinks he or she is above average.

Now reconsider Alicke's experiment in light of this new hypothesis. A subject and a confederate sit down in an isolated room to take a test. According to La.s.siter's survey, the subject probably thinks he's pretty good at these tests. Then the subject does poorly. If La.s.siter is right, and the subject uses himself as a convenient benchmark for evaluating the confederate, he will conclude: "If I'm good at these tests and this guy did better than I did, he must be really good." He then a.s.signs the confederate a high intelligence score. This is not ego, just a quick decision based on a self-comparison.

And now consider the observer. Though he too may feel strongly about his own test-taking skills, he has no reason to think that the subject is anything special. When the subject gets beaten, therefore, the observer is not as impressed by the confederate and therefore doesn't score him as high. In other words, the subject thinks of the confederate as someone who defeated an above-average test-taker, while the observer thinks of the confederate as defeating only an average test-taker.

Both Alicke's ego theory and La.s.siter's comparison idea are plausible explanations for the Genius Effect observed in these experiments. But who was right?

This is where La.s.siter's twist comes in. The professor cleverly altered the experiment as follows. In 50 percent of the trials, chosen at random, the research a.s.sistant running the experiment casually mentions to the observer that he's heard that the subject is really good at these tests. In other words, the researcher tries to get the observer to think as highly of the subject as the subject does of himself. If La.s.siter is right, then this priming should make the subject's and the observer's impressions of the confederate converge. If La.s.siter is wrong, and repairing ego is the key factor, then the subject should continue to rate the confederate higher, because he feels bad about losing and in his quest to repair his ego he will push the confederate's intelligence score as high as possible. The observer, with no ego damage to repair, will not go as far with his scores.

After the experiment was conducted, and the numbers crunched, it turned out that in the cases where the extra information was given, the scores of the subject and the observer became statistically identical. La.s.siter was right: forget ego, to judge other people we use ourselves as a convenient benchmark. The Genius Effect observed in the test-taking environment was the combination of this simple truth with the fact that students tend to think they're good at tests of this kind. As I'll argue next, the reach of the Genius Effect extends beyond the psychology lab of Ohio University and into the world of college admissions decisions.

From the Genius Effect to Extracurricular Activities.

Imagine two hypothetical students whom I'll call Mia and Jon. Mia is the first-chair violinist in her school orchestra and Jon drives into the city once a week to take j.a.panese calligraphy lessons. Mia and Jon are following standard admissions orthodoxy by focusing on activities that demonstrate traits such as hard work, some talent, and, in the case of Jon, unusualness. According to the Failed-Simulation Effect, however, neither of their activities will generate a feeling of impressiveness because they're not inexplicable. (You can probably simulate exactly what is required for both of their accomplishments: practicing in the case of Mia and attending a weekly lesson in the case of Jon.) La.s.siter's research helps us understand this reaction. When evaluating the impressiveness of Mia, for example, we learned from the Ohio University studies that you're using yourself as a convenient point of comparison. You probably learned how to play an instrument at some point in your life, or at least know someone who did. Because of this, you know what it takes to become really good at the violin: practicing hard. You agree, therefore, that Mia is a hard worker. If you were rating her diligence, then your self-comparison would lead to a high score because you likely imagine yourself to be a hard worker and she did a lot more hard work than you. But you're not rating her diligence, you're instead considering her impressiveness, which most people tend to think of as a measure of intrinsic ability. (In American culture, as I argued in the Part 2 playbook, we're much more impressed with people who have some magical ability than with those who simply work hard. That is, we love Michael Jordan and Matt Damon's character from Good Will Hunting, but we are indifferent to the valedictorian who studies ten hours a day.) When you compare Mia to yourself, therefore, you don't see a special intrinsic ability that you lack. She coupled hard practice with perhaps a dollop of musical talent, but you too could become pretty good at the violin if you practiced as hard. So when it comes to rating her natural abilities, your self-comparison generates a mediocre review. On the other hand, if she had gotten so far with the violin that it defied your ability to simulate-say she played at Carnegie Hall-the Failed-Simulation Effect would return, as the path to this level of accomplishment is beyond what you could imagine yourself traveling.

The argument against Jon's seeming impressive is equally clear. You probably have no doubt that you too could learn j.a.panese calligraphy if you wanted to. Go to Google. Search for nearby instructors. Sign up for a cla.s.s. Done. When you compare Jon to yourself, you once again find no intrinsic ability that you lack.

Now let's return to Maneesh, from the opening chapter of Part 3. Here things get interesting. Think for a moment about how your self-comparison unfolds in relation to this student. You probably ran into trouble because, unlike what Mia and Jon did, what Maneesh did defies explanation. You cannot compare Maneesh's ability to publish books to your own ability, because you have no idea what this goal requires. Whereas for Jon and Mia you could quickly simulate yourself repeating their efforts (with enough extra effort), and therefore not grant them much credit for special skills. Maneesh forces you to confront an unsettling scenario: he accomplished something that you couldn't-no matter how much effort you imagine yourself investing. Like the subject who's outscored by a confederate taking the same intelligence test, you cannot escape the asymmetry of the scenario. Maneesh has done something you couldn't do, so he must possess something special. As a result, you're impressed.

I can reduce these ideas into three simple insights: Research shows that you evaluate other people by first comparing them to yourself.

If during this comparison you can't imagine yourself doing what someone else did, then you're left to a.s.sume that he or she possesses some ability that you lack.

In American culture, impressiveness is tied more to special abilities than it is to persistence or inventiveness.

These insights combine to an inescapable conclusion: the Failed-Simulation Effect makes perfect sense-we are most impressed by activities that are hard to explain.

I hope I've convinced you that the Failed-Simulation Effect is fundamental to the way your mind works. This is a powerful observation; the effect allows you to separate impressiveness from backbreaking work and the stress such efforts bring. In other words, it's a key ingredient in the relaxed superstar stew.

With this crucial concept in hand, you're left with the task of figuring out how to introduce this effect into your own extracurricular life. I address this challenge in the chapters that follow.

13.

The Three Rules of Innovation.

FOR CONVENIENCE, I'll use the word "innovative" to describe activities that generate the Failed-Simulation Effect. I like this word because it's not commonly used in the context of college admissions and I'm trying to emphasize the difference between the type of pursuits that produce this effect and the type that most students think are important. The former tend to be engaging and manageable while the latter are time-consuming and stressful.

I first introduced the idea of innovative activities in a blog post during the summer of 2008. The idea was an immediate hit-many of my readers said that the concept helped them make sense of the admissions process.

But there was a problem.

An understanding of the Failed-Simulation Effect doesn't necessarily help students deploy this force in their own lives. Consider the following comments I received on my 2008 post: "The Failed-Simulation Effect really helped explain things. But I'm still trying to find my own mind-blowing activity."

"Awesome post ... but how can I apply it as a research-oriented student? I guess I should volunteer to be an RA, do independent research, etc., but how do I push this to the 'wow' level?"

"I'm trying to figure out what activity to take part in next year, and though this article helped I'm still relatively clueless."

"[I'm having] a hard time coming up with that original idea. How do I find an innovative experience in my field of interest?"

These comments, which are just a few from among many similar ones, demonstrate a common reaction to the idea of activity innovation. At first the student is elated to discover that there's a rational explanation for why some accomplishments are more impressive than others. But then the student sits back and asks himself or herself: "Okay, what innovative activity can I do?" As ideas fail to form, the elation fades.

In this chapter, I want to help you avoid such a fate. Below, I define what I call the three rules of innovation-three pieces of advice you should heed if you want innovation to become a feature of your extracurricular life. In the next chapter, I'll help cement your understanding of these concepts by returning to the stories of Maneesh, Kate, and Kara and identifying exactly where the three rules aided their transformation from average to innovative.

Rule 1: Innovators Don't Try to Think Up Innovations from Scratch.

The students who commented on my blog post got stuck because they disobeyed this rule. It's nearly impossible to think up an innovative activity from scratch-so don't try. Maneesh and Kate and Kara didn't have brilliant brainstorms that led them directly to their innovative activities. The paths they followed were long and circuitous.

Obeying this rule is difficult because it requires patience. Your instinct is to want to find something right now that can help you stand out. The idea that you might have to wait until some unforeseeable future moment is scary. "What if it never comes?" you ask yourself with understandable trepidation. I hope the following two rules, combined with the stories in the next chapter, will provide the courage you need to trust that this patience will translate into rewards.

Its difficulties aside, it shouldn't surprise you that rule 1 is true. Recall the definition of the Failed-Simulation Effect, which requires that the average person cannot mentally simulate the steps someone took to produce an accomplishment. If you could think up an innovative pursuit from scratch, it follows that you could mentally simulate the steps required to achieve it-otherwise you wouldn't have considered it a possibility. This implies that other people could do the same; so the pursuit, by definition, cannot generate the effect. It's an admissions catch-22.

Groucho Marx famously said, "I don't care to belong to any club that will accept me as a member." You should apply this logic, with a slight tweak, in your admissions journey: you shouldn't care to be involved with any activity that you can easily imagine being involved with. The real path to innovation is often much longer, and it generally has many more intermediate steps. But the length and complexity are what separates accomplishments that are innovative from those that can easily be imagined. Fear not, however. In the two rules that follow, I'll provide you with the guidance necessary to navigate this route.

Rule 2: Innovators Join Closed Communities and Pay Their Dues.

In the world of extracurricular activities there are three types of communities: open, hidden, and closed. Understanding these distinctions is crucial for fostering innovation.

An open community is one that most people know about and understand. School government, for example, is open; you probably know all about becoming cla.s.s president or cla.s.s secretary. There is little mystery about how this world operates: getting elected requires putting up posters, giving speeches, and mixing an aura of responsibility with a dash of popularity. You know that cla.s.s officers hold weekly meetings, plan dances, and can usually effect only small-scale changes in the school-perhaps changing the vending machine contents or negotiating for new parking s.p.a.ces. People may respect your hard work if you succeed in this world, but the process is so well understood that it's unlikely to generate the Failed-Simulation Effect.

Hidden communities are those that are completely unknown to most people. For example, if I told you that I was a second-level game master in a countywide LARP league, this would (hopefully) mean very little to you. LARP, as I discovered from watching the 2008 movie Role Models, and certainly not from personal experience, stands for Live-Action Role Playing. From what I understand, it involves people dressing up like wizards and monsters and fighting in local parks using padded swords. Most normal people have never heard of this community and understand nothing about how it works. It might have required a virtuosic talent to become a second-level game master, and in the LARP world this rank might be considered a very difficult and rare accomplishment-right up there with talking to a girl-but because the community is hidden, the outside world doesn't recognize the value of this accomplishment. The fact that other people can't simulate the steps I took to earn the rank is not enough to generate the Failed-Simulation Effect because the outside observer doesn't understand what it is that I accomplished in the first place.

Then there are communities of the third type: those that are closed. This is the sweet spot for innovation. A closed community is one that most people know about but whose operations they don't understand. Each of our relaxed superstar examples in Part 3 worked within a closed community. Maneesh wrote a book. Everyone knows what it means to be an author, but few know the details of how book deals are done. Kate changed the way a charter school taught reading. Everyone went to school and knows about cla.s.sroom curricula, but few know the details of how these curricula are evaluated and changed. A similar argument holds for Kara and her health curriculum. Everyone remembers health cla.s.s, but few know what it takes to change what a school teaches in this cla.s.s. The combination of familiarity and mystery that defines a closed community is what makes it a perfect breeding ground for innovation.

Once you've identified a closed community, your next step is to gain access. If you walked in the front door of a charter school and, inspired by Kate, declared that you want to do research to help them improve the way they teach their students, the harried teachers would barely take the time to stifle a laugh before escorting you back out onto the street. To take action in such a community you must instead first prove that you belong. There's no shortcut here; you have to pay your dues. As you'll learn in the next chapter, all three of our innovative students paid some serious dues before they gained access to innovative opportunities within their communities.

Students don't always like to hear this message. Many tell me that they're impatient to start something right away that's going to help them shine. I'm always somewhat sad to have to clue them in to the reality of dues-paying, but it's an immutable law. I would go so far as to counsel you to not even waste your time thinking about potential innovative activities until after your dues-paying is well under way. This will prevent you from trying to do too much, too fast, which can spoil the trust you want to establish before it fully forms. There's also a hidden benefit to dues-paying. During this process you'll begin to develop a more sophisticated understanding of how the relevant field operates-an understanding that will prove essential later when you try to develop a project that's both impressive and feasible.

Rule 3: Innovators Leverage Their Way up to Innovation.

Here's the scene: You've found a closed community and talked your way into an entry-level position. For the past few months you've being paying your dues by cheerfully and quickly accomplishing everything the members have pushed in your direction. You've also shown genuine interest and asked lots of questions. It seems as if they're finally starting to trust you. Because you've been working in this closed community for a while, you're beginning to unravel the mystery of how it operates. Once you understand the mechanics, you begin to notice opportunities for projects that would probably seem innovative to the outside world. What do you do next?

Your instinct might be to propose the biggest, boldest, most innovative project possible. I don't recommend that strategy-it rarely works. Even if the members of the community trust and like you, they probably don't trust you enough to give you free reign on something big and important. When you hear the stories of Maneesh, Kate, and Kara in the next chapter, you'll notice that they ramped up their innovation through a series of increasingly ambitious projects before finally arriving at the big accomplishments that earned them the bulk of their recognition. Instead of asking, "What's the most innovative project I could propose?" they asked, "What's a project that I'm well suited to finish efficiently and competently right now?" Each such completion made even bigger, more innovative projects available. By leveraging one project to get to the next-each one appropriate for their current level of experience-they ended up somewhere amazing.

Once again, patience locates itself in the center of your admissions endeavor. Innovators leverage one project to get to the next, moving from small and reasonable to large and innovative. They don't try to leap into the deep end right at the beginning. This strategy is longer, to be sure, but the end results are better and more a.s.sured.