How To Be A High School Superstar Part 12

Living the Three Rules.

Hopefully, the three rules of innovation will help you sidestep the frustration that often accompanies an understanding of the Failed-Simulation Effect. If you abandon the misguided idea that you can think up something innovative right now, and instead enter a closed community, pay your dues, and leverage your way up to larger projects, ma.s.sively impressive innovation can become a part of your student life. The key point here-the point that throws so many students off the innovation scent-is that you cannot predict your ultimate destination until you're well along the path. My goal for the remainder of Part 3 is to give you enough confidence to soldier through this uncertainty to your eventual innovation-fueled glory.

14.

A Tale of Three Innovations.

YOU'VE HEARD the theory; now it's time see some real-world examples. Below, I tell the stories of how Maneesh, Kate, and Kara got started down their roads to innovation. As I proceed, I'll highlight the places where the three rules of innovation played their starring role.

How Maneesh Got a Book Deal.

When I first spoke with Maneesh, in the late fall of 2008, he struggled to answer a simple question: "What makes you different?" After some false starts, he paused for a second and then said: "I want to tell you a story."

A few days before our conversation, Maneesh had been walking through a park when he came across a group of bartenders doing tricks. They were throwing bottles in the air, juggling them, and catching them behind their backs. A crowd had formed. "People where in awe," he recalls. "They were thinking, 'How do they do that?'"

Maneesh walked up to the bartenders and asked if they taught a cla.s.s. ("I thought it would be really cool to learn.") "Dude," one of the bartenders answered, laughing, "we've been doing this for only three or four days; it's not that hard."

Impressed, Maneesh spent the next half hour learning some basic moves. Soon he too was juggling bottles.

"The people around me were really in awe," he said.

Maneesh's entrance into the publishing world has much in common with that day in the park; it was a bold move prompted by an indifference to conventional wisdom. His story begins a decade earlier, when a young Maneesh, infected by the tech enthusiasm sweeping the West Coast during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, became obsessed with computer game programming. Like many young proto-nerds of the era, he devoured technical manuals and learned how to design rudimentary games. He even started a company with his friends, awarding it the solemn t.i.tle Cold Vector Games. He now admits: "We made a few games, but never sold anything."

At this early stage, we see the first two rules of innovation in action. Maneesh didn't start with the idea of publishing a book. Instead, he entered the closed community of computer game programming and began paying his dues with long afternoons in front of the monitor.

At the age of twelve, Maneesh convinced his parents to take him to a computer programming conference held in nearby Santa Clara, California. He recalls: "My hero at the time, an editor of computer programming t.i.tles, was there, and I got to meet him and find out more about his publishing house." Motivated by the encounter, Maneesh went home and began to explore the publishing company's Web site. In one of the company's forums he encountered a post by the editor that listed some book ideas in need of authors. One of the ideas was a computer game programming guide for teenagers.

A wave of inspiration washed over Maneesh. He sent an e-mail to the editor, whom he had just met earlier that day, and pitched the idea that the best person to write a book for teenagers was an actual teenager.

"I will never ever let anyone under the age of twenty-five write a book for me," the editor replied. Crushed, Maneesh abandoned the idea.

The next year, however, Maneesh returned to the same conference. While wandering the convention hall, he stumbled into a young kid messing around with a piece of software called Blitz Basic. This was a computer game programming language that Maneesh had mastered, and it was the same language that he had imagined featuring in his computer game programming book. A new boldness formed. "I could make this book work," he thought.

Returning home, he wrote forty pages of sample material, comprising the first three chapters of the proposed book. He e-mailed the chapters to the editor, telling him, in essence, "I know you said no, but check this out first."

A few days later, the editor replied. "This is actually good," he said.

The editor pa.s.sed the pages on to other executives at the publishing house, and they eventually agreed to the idea of a teenager writing a book for teenagers. Advances for technical guides are relatively small, so there wasn't much to lose.

It took Maneesh a long time to write all thirteen chapters. "I wrote it over a couple of years, spending about two hours per week," he recalls. "In the end, I was a year and three months overdue."

When the book was finally published, it was a minor hit among teenagers who, like Maneesh, wanted a quick guide to programming simple recreational games. His theory had been vindicated-it took a teenager to produce material that could connect with fickle-minded fellow teenagers, whose attention span was short. After a while, some librarians, noticing the influx of kids asking for the t.i.tle, invited Maneesh to speak at their local branches. Somewhere in this period, a producer from the newly launched cable channel TechTV heard one of Maneesh's speeches and asked the young author to appear on a Q&A segment for one of the channel's new experimental shows. The show was soon sc.r.a.pped, but Maneesh's appearances were enough to push his book (briefly) up to number 16 in amazon.com's sales rankings. This made it, in a loose sense of the word, a bestseller-a moniker that would play a big role in Maneesh's college applications.

In this transition from initial idea to bestseller, the third rule of innovation comes into play. For his first projects within the closed community of computer game programming, Maneesh developed increasingly complicated games. He leveraged this activity into a project to write sample chapters to pitch to an editor who was looking for a related book. Only once this project had succeeded did he start writing the full book itself-the eventual source of impressiveness that helped this laid-back star get into Stanford.

Maneesh's path to innovation spanned a relatively long period of time. Years were devoted to mastering computer game programming, and only once this skill was in place did he unleash the rapid series of leverages that led to the book. By contrast, Kate's story of becoming a charter school reformer, which I'll tell next, is contained within a single year. It demonstrates how, with the right strategy, innovation can happen fast.

How Kate Made a Difference.

"My high school cla.s.s was extraordinarily impressive," Kate told me. "We had the highest SAT scores in the school's history, we all took hard courses, and we all studied really hard. The teachers called us 'the good cla.s.s.'"

It is not surprising, then, that during her junior year of high school, Kate fell into a cycle of overwork. She was the editor of the school newspaper, a serious member of the government club, and like thousands of admissions-focused students who came before her, she volunteered at a free medical clinic. In addition, she played tennis and lacrosse, and was on the youth council of her church. She sat for six AP tests that year, and because of this she spent at least three to six hours on homework every night. This load took its toll.

"I was totally sleep-deprived. This made me into a total brat. It was really stressful," she recalls.

Then everything changed.

During her senior year, Kate dropped down to only four courses. Two of them were APs; the others she describes as "really, really easy and low key." She resigned as editor of the paper, reduced her government club responsibilities, and gave up her time-consuming position on the church's youth council. She stopped volunteering at the medical clinic and left the lacrosse team. With this simplification complete, her life became bearable once again.

Looking back on that year, Kate describes the time as "fun and less stressful." She started going to bed at 9:30 most nights, and she estimates that there were only three or four occasions where she got less than eight hours of sleep.

"It was great," she recalls. "I would get up early, make breakfast for my family. I had time to do things on weekends instead of outlining my entire U.S. history textbook."

Yet even after all of these simplifications, Kate was accepted at Princeton. In fact, as she would argue, it was because of these simplifications that she got in. The reason she drastically reduced her schedule was to focus her attention on a single project: working at a nearby charter school. By the end of that year she had set up an effective tutoring program and conducted research that changed the way the school taught reading to its students. These accomplishments were clearly innovative, and the resulting Failed-Simulation Effect got her into Princeton (while her harder-working, higher-scoring friends had to settle for the waitlist). What's important for our purposes here, however, is to understand exactly how Kate made this drastic transformation from a grind to an innovator.

To better explain Kate's story, I'll use the three rules of innovation as a guide. Rule 1 says that innovators don't think up their innovations from scratch. This was true for Kate. Charter schools tend to be insular, and the school where Kate would eventually work was part of a network that has a reputation for being especially suspicious of outsiders (she was worried enough about this to ask that I avoid identifying the school by name). There was no way that she could have come up with her innovative projects from scratch-the school staff would have had no patience with a kid they didn't know claiming to have a big idea.

Instead, Kate's start was humble. During her junior year, she volunteered to be a teacher's aide for one of the fifth-grade teachers at her own elite DC-area private school. Her motivations were simple: teaching interested her, and her dad, who'd attended the same school as a child, had had the same volunteer gig and suggested that she try it. Big innovative projects were not on her mind at this early stage.

"It's hard as a high school student to just sit around and think up some fascinating thing-like some entirely new organization or magazine," she confirmed. "It's much easier to just find something you're really interested in and show them that you could be useful."

During this year, Kate's responsibilities were standard. She would make photocopies or help the students prepare for a lesson. At first she would answer the stray grammar question when the teacher was otherwise occupied. "I might walk over and help if a student was like, 'I don't know what a noun is,'" Kate recalled. Eventually, the teacher allowed Kate's responsibilities to grow. By the end of the semester, Kate was teaching a grammar lesson three times a week, on her own, to a group of students.

Rule 2 says that innovators enter a closed community and pay their dues. This matches Kate's path. She entered the community of teaching and made herself as useful as possible. Eventually the teacher began to see her as indispensable, and this is where Kate landed her first break. It started when her teacher got a new job at a charter school that had just opened across town.

"What am I going to do without you next year?" the teacher asked.

"What am I going to do without my time in the fifth-grade cla.s.sroom?" Kate replied. She had grown fond of her students-an important source of stress relief in the middle of her hectic junior year schedule. The pair hatched a plan: they would try to convince the school to let Kate spend time as a teaching a.s.sistant at the charter school. The teacher helped Kate put together a reading list and devise a series of writing a.s.signments that she would complete in an effort to give the proposal enough academic heft to qualify as an independent study project.

"There were tons of roadblocks," Kate admits, but she and her teacher-mentor finally got the administrators to agree to a plan that had Kate leave school each day at 11 a.m., travel across town to the charter school, and spend an hour and a half in the cla.s.sroom, observing and helping. As part of the independent study project, she was supposed to then return home and spend the rest of the normal school-day hours reading about educational reform and writing essays on what she was learning. This hybrid schedule was what motivated Kate to drastically reduce her commitments during her senior year. She wanted to do this one project very well, and she worried that running back and forth between her charter schoolwork and a dozen unrelated activities would sap her concentration.

Kate quickly earned her keep at the new school. "At first, I would come in and observe for an hour and a half and then leave," she remembers. But as time went on and she got to know the staff better, she began to hang around longer and make herself more useful. "I started to get more responsibility and eventually they were treating me like I was part of their faculty."

Rule 3 says that after you pay your dues, you should leverage your way from small projects into larger projects. Kate followed this rule by leveraging her position as a fifth-grade teacher's aide into a position as an observer at a charter school. Once there, she returned to rule 2 and once again began paying her dues. Only after spending an entire semester working hard at the charter school did she return to rule 3 and leverage herself up to something bigger.

At the end of her first semester at the charter school, Kate proposed a tutoring program called Varsity Study Teams. "I didn't want to just do homework help," she explains. Instead, she identified the thirty most struggling seventh-grade students at the school and then brought in seniors from her private school to work with them on their study and organization skills. "I couldn't have done this if I hadn't gotten to know the faculty at the charter school," Kate says. Their trust translated into permission to begin the project on a trial basis. Because her schedule was otherwise empty, Kate had more than enough time to make sure that the program was a success.

During this same period she had to decide on a culminating project for her independent study. Over the past few months, she had learned a lot about the operation of charter schools and their underlying philosophies. She had also earned the respect of the teachers at the charter school. These factors made serious research possible. She proposed that she study the reading programs at six high-performing charter schools on the East Coast. Her friends at her DC charter school helped arrange for her to observe cla.s.srooms and interview teachers at each of the schools. These interviews would have been impossible to set up without the strong support of her own school-yet another argument for dues-paying.

As Kate traveled the East Coast, she spent a day at a school in the Bronx that had, incredibly, 100 percent of its students reading at grade level. "To have a hundred percent reading proficiency was just astronomical," Kate says.

At the time, the accepted wisdom among charter schools was that reading instruction should be strategy-based and take place communally. At Kate's school, for example, the teacher would introduce a new reading strategy and then walk the kids through applying the strategy together on the same chapters of the same book. The teachers at this school in the Bronx, however, did things differently. As Kate soon discovered, their approach was to get the kids to read as many books as possible each year.

"By the time an upper-middle-cla.s.s student reaches the fifth grade, they've read something like three hundred books total, ranging from picture books to young adult chapter books," Kate noted. With this in mind, the teachers at the school in the Bronx focused relentlessly on closing the gap between those students and their own fifth-graders, most of whom were from less-privileged backgrounds. To accomplish this, they would first introduce the same reading strategies used by most charter schools. But after only eight or nine minutes of discussing a given strategy, they would dedicate the remainder of the cla.s.s period to helping the students read whatever they wanted.

"I walked into the cla.s.sroom, and there were thirty little heads bent over whatever book they liked-the new Harry Potter or something from the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series-all of them practicing the strategy of the day as they read," Kate recalls. "For an entire hour, the teacher would walk around and ask each student individually what's going on in their book." This was a radical departure from the standard model, in which all the students were kept together.

Kate pulled together her research into a paper that she presented to the teachers at her charter school. They immediately grasped the implications. "It changed how they taught," Kate said. "My mentor, for example, now starts every cla.s.s with thirty minutes of independent reading."

Kate's story provides a textbook example of the rules of innovation in action. Instead of trying to think up something fantastic from scratch, she joined a closed community, paid her dues, and then kept leveraging her projects. She started by making photocopies in a fifth-grade cla.s.sroom at her private school, but ended up, less than a year later, conducting important research for one of the country's most successful charter school networks.

By the time she sat down for a Princeton admissions interview, the power of her innovations-in-progress became clear. "My interviews were all about my work at the charter school," she recalls. "They loved that I dropped my extracurriculars and took only four cla.s.ses. They said: 'We see so many students who are in model UN and the debate club, but who know nothing about the real world.'" Kate's subsequent acceptance at Princeton came as no surprise.

In the last of these stories, told below, you'll encounter another student who used systematic dues-paying and leveraging to leap up the ranks of an organization and into the realm where innovation is common.

Kara Gets Healthy.

When you first met Kara, in the introduction to this book, you learned that the cla.s.smates at her compet.i.tive high school were surprised when she got accepted into most of her reach schools, including Columbia, MIT, and Stanford. Kara had ignored the culture of overwork that dominated her high school. Instead, she maintained a reasonable course load and didn't sweat the occasional B-the habit that caused her college counselor endless consternation.

Her admissions success was instead generated by innovation-specifically, the work Kara did for a San Josebased, high-tech community service center dubbed the Digital Clubhouse. By the time she was filling out her college applications, she could report that she had single-handedly developed and tested a health curriculum-focused on avoiding diabetes through healthy eating-that was adopted by school districts in ten different states. When you hear this accomplishment described for the first time, it's hard to avoid the Failed-Simulation Effect. You're probably clueless as to how a teenager could make such a difference all by herself. The result is a wave of impressiveness-the same factor that helped Kara get accepted almost everywhere she applied. What's striking about Kara's story, however, is that her ascent to awe-inspiring innovation was so natural and painless that it took her a while to realize the importance of her endeavor.

"It didn't hit me until near the end of the project that this was a big deal," she told me. "I was thinking about it step by step, saying, 'I just need to get through these next three hours.'"

Like Maneesh and Kate, Kara never experienced a flash-of-genius insight. At no point did she yell "Aha!" and then commit herself to launching a ma.s.sive new health curriculum. Instead, she followed the three rules of innovation, which led her to true impressiveness.

Kara's story starts with two friends, Alex and Greg. The three students helped convince the school to start up a FIRST robotics club, an experience that drew them closer. Kara, however, became annoyed that Alex and Greg were never available to work on Sat.u.r.days. She soon discovered that they were volunteering at a local community center called the Digital Clubhouse. "You should really come along," Greg pressed, fed up with Kara's annoyance. She relented.

When Kara first arrived, she discovered that her two friends were helping with a project to videotape testimonials from the area's aging population of World War II veterans-an effort sponsored by the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution. She had joined a closed community. Now, in the spirit of rules 1 and 2, it was time to pay her dues.

The project required five hours a week. Three of those hours were dedicated to interviewing. Every Sat.u.r.day, each team was given a camera and the address of a veteran to interview (close to fifty student volunteers were involved with the project). They were then expected to find two hours later in the week to edit the interview into the appropriate length and format.

"When I first started volunteering for the project, I would tag along with more experienced members and receive training," Kara recalls. "After a while I worked up to filming my own interviews and training new people."

After investing the effort to learn filming and editing skills, Kara was ready for her break when it came along during her soph.o.m.ore year. She arrived one Sat.u.r.day morning at a veteran's house. At this point, the interview process had become routine. In her head, as the taping progressed, she could imagine the exact points where she would later make the editing cuts. But this morning, it took only a few minutes to realize that she had stumbled into something special. The veteran, an African-American man who had served as a Navy chef because he had been barred from fighting, was a natural storyteller.

"His story was dramatic, and he had this deep, raspy voice that just kept you interested," Kara recalls. "I was good enough at editing at this point to take what I had and make the most of it."

The higher-ups at the Digital Clubhouse agreed. They selected the interview to showcase at a fund-raising dinner. The mix of a powerful storyteller and a compelling narrative made the clip a perfect fit for the event. "I was lucky," Kara notes. So was the Digital Clubhouse-the video helped raise a lot of money.

As a reward for the interview's success, the head of the organization asked Kara if there were any particular projects she wanted to work on. This is where rule 3 enters the scene. Kara was faced with the opportunity to leverage her good work within a closed community into a larger project. She wouldn't let the opportunity pa.s.s.

"At the time I was aware of the diabetes epidemic that was sweeping the area where we lived," Kara recalls. "There had been this big movement at my school, for example, to remove the soda machines because we were seeing all of these new cases in our neighborhood. So I mentioned the idea of working on the issue."

"Oh, yeah, that's been on the news a lot recently," the head of the organization replied. "That's a good idea; maybe you can work on that."

Kara had heard about another project at the organization-the use of a computer-based curriculum to take antidrug education into local schools. It hadn't been terribly successful, and its future was uncertain. She proposed that she could revamp the curriculum-changing the focus from drugs to healthy eating. "This idea was well received," she recalls. "They told me to think about how to craft the project and then come back with a more developed idea."

This step validates the importance of getting to know a closed community before looking for innovation opportunities. Having spent a year working with the Digital Clubhouse, Kara had enough insider knowledge to build a targeted proposal with a very good chance of acceptance. Investigating changes to an existing program was far more palatable to the organization than investing resources in something brand new.

Kara's research on the topic started with the Internet, progressed to books, and then eventually to interviews with doctors. She used the information she'd gleaned to build a proposal for a cla.s.s consisting of modules. Each module was centered on using the computer to complete a project related to diabetes prevention. For example, one of the modules had the students design a poster about healthy eating habits. (A key piece of the Digital Clubhouse's mission is to integrate the learning of computer skills with unrelated educational goals.) "I talked to a lot of people in the organization during this time," Kara recalls. "Every two weeks or so, somebody would ask, 'Have you done anything?' and I would show them what I was up to." Fortunately, Kara enjoyed the work. Because it was self-directed and free of hard deadlines, it became something she wanted to do-a true deep interest. "It was the work I would do when I was bored with homework and wanted to procrastinate," she said. In the end, it took around eight months to complete the proposal.

Eight months.

This point is important enough to merit a brief aside. At this stage in your student career, you've probably never faced a project that couldn't be completed in a couple days of hard work. To adopt a mind-set conducive to innovation, however, you need to recalibrate your understanding of effort. Forget a few days of hard work. Quality results often require, as Kara discovered, months of effort. The key here is that work spread over such a long time doesn't have to be overwhelming. Kara, for example, didn't work late into the night for eight months straight. Instead, she did the work a little at a time, in reasonable bursts. When considering your own dues-paying, keep this in mind. Doing a reasonable amount of hard work each day, over a long period of time, produces better results than doing a lot of hard work in a short period of time. Mastering this approach will separate you from the vast majority of your peers who lack such patience.

After eight months of consistent work, Kara had devised a detailed plan that captured exactly what would be taught at each moment of each course-with copious research to support its lessons.

"I was able to say, 'Look, I have a specific course plan and timeline for this and I know what materials I need and how many people it will require, and I have a lesson plan,'" she said. The extra effort paid off. The organization approved the next step: sending Kara to shadow real teachers and use the information to polish the plan further.

Kara had discovered a common theme of youth accomplishment: If you surpa.s.s people's expectations on small projects, they will reward you with a shot at something big and interesting. After a period of observing teachers in the cla.s.sroom, and using the experience to polish her lesson plan even more, Kara finally got her chance to test her curriculum in front of real students. She was a.s.signed an elementary school in a rundown San Jose neighborhood, and was given one afternoon each week to teach her cla.s.s as part of an after-school program.

"I remember thinking at some point that all of my hard work had come down to making a group of seven-year-olds like me," she recalls. Fortunately, over the ten-week span of the cla.s.s, things proceeded smoothly. "The challenge of teaching a three-hour cla.s.s is to avoid having the kids think, 'Oh my G.o.d, I've been here for three hours!'" Kara said. She had learned from her shadowing experience, however, how to insert huge shifts within each cla.s.s to break it up and make it go faster. "You have to make it feel like things are always moving."

By the end of the experience, the curriculum had undergone major changes-most built around the reality of seven-year-old attention spans. The program was deemed solid, and Digital Clubhouse distributed the curriculum to the other schools in the district that were already using the organization's antidrug program. From here, growth accelerated. After the various schools in the district reported that it had gone well, the organization pa.s.sed on the curriculum to its partner centers in ten different states. These centers, in turn, distributed it to the local school districts that they already worked with. At this point, Kara could claim that she had custom-designed a curriculum used across the country.

Like those of Kate and Maneesh, Kara's path was smoothed by the cycle of dues-paying and leveraging prescribed by the three rules of innovation. It took close to two years of effort from first joining the community to blowing the socks off admissions officers, but the end effect was much more impressive-and much less stressful-than the overload strategy followed by her peers.

Pulling the Stories Together.

All three of these stories emphasize the power of the three rules of innovation. Their message is clear: Stop seeking a flash of insight that will make you stunningly impressive all at once. Instead, get your foot in the door in the right type of community, do good work, and then once you understand the community and have earned its trust, begin to leverage. The utility of this approach is obscured by its simplicity, but don't be fooled-it works.

In the playbook that follows, I'll provide specific advice for making these three rules a practical part of your own life. The goal is to simplify your transition into a student like Maneesh, Kate, and Kara, who traded overloaded schedules and stress for the type of relaxed and self-directed accomplishment that generates the Failed-Simulation Effect.