Source: Study Hacks by Cal Newport
"Let's try a simple experiment. Imagine that you're an admissions officer at a competitive college, and you're evaluating the following two applicants:
•David — He is captain of the track team and took Japanese calligraphy lessons throughout high school; he wrote his application essay on the challenge of leading the track team to the division championship meet.
•Steve — He does marketing for a sustainability-focused NGO; he wrote his application essay about lobbying delegates at the UN climate change conference in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Who impresses you more?
..."
This is an article recommended by my daughter. You can find the full text here: How to Get Into Stanford with B's on Your Transcript
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Lassiter’s Insight
What happened inside your brain when you read the descriptions of David and Steve? According to a clever series of experiments conducted by G. Daniel Lassiter, a psychology professor at the University of Ohio, your first response was to look into the proverbial mirror. Or, as Lassiter describes it, somewhat more formally, in his 2002 paper on the subject: we have a “pervasive tendency…to use the self as a standard of comparison in [our] dispassionate judgments of others.”
Put another way, to evaluate a person’s accomplishments, we imagine ourselves attempting the same feat, allowing your own capabilities to provide a convenient benchmark for assessing others’.
(In Lassiter’s experiments, students took tests made up of difficult mathematical puzzles. He showed that when a student was asked to rate the intelligence of another student, this judging student used a self-assessment of his own intelligence, combined with how well he did on the test, to construct the rating.)
Let’s walk through the logic here. When you first encountered David and Steve, your brain began to compare them to yourself. In essence, your brain asked: “Could I do that? And if so, what would it require?”
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