Perspective & Life Lessons

One essay you might come across will ask you something like: How do your past experiences and present-day perspectives inform who you have become and how you navigate the world?

How do you tackle this essay? Here’s a great example from the web.

You can watch the YouTube Short here. Or you can read the transcript below.

I was given a Magic Pencil when I was little, with a mixture of blue, red, and yellow marbled together on the inside. The first thing I tried to draw was a face. I carefully angled the pencil so the eyes would be blue, the mouth red, and the hair yellow. But my uncle, who gave me the pencil, encouraged me to let it choose the colors for me and not think about anything as the “right” or “wrong” color. As a fellow artist, he was trying to show me how to be more free-spirited with my drawings. But, I didn’t get it at the time, and I went back to my box of crayons where I had control over every color. I think about that moment a lot, and what a missed opportunity it was. It reminds me that when we become rigid in our ideas of how something should be, we lose the chance to see how it could be and discover something new. I’m a professional artist now, and I often forget that what I’m doing is supposed to be fun. It’s easy to get caught up in a routine and do things the same way you’ve always done them. But the real joy of creation is letting go and being open to the unknown.

This essay could be sized up or down. It could get a bit shorter for a 150 word essay, or you could add to it for a 350 word essay. It could even be expanded to serve as the core of your common app essay. Let me show you what else this “essay” does:

Sentences 1 & 2: Simple intro. Not every beginning has to be fancy!

Sentences 3 & 4: He shows that he was very careful, intentional, and striving for some kind of “perfection” or “correctness”. That lays the foundations of where he’ll go next in the essay.

Sentence 5 & 6: We’re shown a possible creative path, but then we face the failure of this guy. He gives up and goes back to what he knows, goes back to control. Control is a very powerful opposite to perfection or correctness because we often think they’re the same, or that control will help you achieve perfection and correctness. But, here we are shown that they can really be opposites.

Sentences 7 & 8: He reinforces his feelings of failure and then clarifies this situation of rigidity and what we can lose when we don’t allow for flexibility. These are powerful lessons, and he accomplished this failure turned life lesson very quickly (in four sentences)!

Sentences 9 & 10: He brings this into his current life and shows how he’s different but not entirely. He still sometimes gets caught up in routine and forgets to have fun. This makes the story feel more authentic because you rarely grow and change in a perfect way such that you never, ever regress. We grow, but we fall back to old ways sometimes, too.

Sentence 11: The ending is definitely a bit cliché, but it’s strongly supported by the essay. A lot of students worry that they can’t ever write a single cliché thing in any essay for college strategy, but that’s just impossible. So many things have been said and thought and felt. Do you really expect yourself to invent brand new emotions? Brand new lessons about what art is? Or what life is all about? It’s terribly unlikely. But, you can take a moderately less cliché lesson and really prove it to the admissions committees with your tangible, believable story. Then, the cliché isn’t the focus; you are.

What to Do About Clichés

For the most part, I am going to encourage you to avoid clichés. Pretty much any good college strategist will. However, sometimes you’re going to have an idea that has been said before. In fact, you’ll have expected ideas pretty often. It would be a HUGE ask to get you to write only and exclusively 100% unique statements in your essays.

So, do you do?

I think clichés are all about the proof. Let’s say you wrote in an essay, “One time, I was talking to my grandma, and I realized that it’s harder to be kind than clever.” Well, that does sound pretty cliché. But it doesn’t have to be totally useless. Check out this story about Jeff Bezos:

When he was a young boy, Jeff Bezos was with his grandparents, both of whom were smokers. Bezos had recently heard an anti-smoking PSA on the radio that explained how many minutes each cigarette takes off a person’s lifespan. And so, sitting there in the backseat, like a typical precocious kid, he put his math skills and this new knowledge to work and proudly explained to his grandmother, as she puffed away, “You’ve lost nine years of your life, Grandma!”

The typical response to this kind of innocent cheekiness is to pat the child on the head and tell them how smart they are. Bezos’ grandmother didn’t do that. Instead, she quite understandably burst into tears. It was after this exchange that Bezos’ grandfather took his grandson aside and taught him a lesson that he says has stuck with him for the rest of his life. “Jeff,” his grandfather said, “one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”

With just a little bit of backstory, the cliché takes on more meaning. It’s still a cliché. But, you could craft a college essay around something like that.

Often, with Life Lesson types of questions, students get really stumped trying to find something perfectly unique, never before said. And it’s totally possible to do that. But, you can also support many clichés with a strong anecdote.

For more examples of this, check out this article.