Fact #1 In life you will find that there will be a number of things you don’t want to do. While you will be an adult and will have the freedom to make your own decisions, you’re still going to need to get a job, pay bills, mow the lawn, and do the dishes. (Read: you’re going to need to have a work ethic.)

Fact #2 When you have a job, whether you work for yourself or someone else, if you aren’t a self-starter—even when the project is sooooo boring—you’re going to either lose your job or stay in the same stinkin’ position until the end of time.

Fact #3 While your parents may pay attention to your grades and homework now, the only person who is going to notice the grades you make as an adult—as measured in your personal satisfaction with your career and the number of dollars in your bank account—will be you.

What does this have to do with test prep?

Fact #4 It’s not a big secret that preparing for a standardized test is not as fun as riding your bike, playing a video game, watching television, cooking dinner, mowing the lawn, cleaning the bathroom, changing the oil in your Grandma’s car…. Ok, you get the idea. Studying for these tests, while they do have their creative moments, isn’t usually going to be the activity you most look forward to during the day.

Fact #5 It doesn’t matter that it isn’t fun. Lots of things that aren’t necessarily fun lead to great things: sweating it out at the gym leads to great muscles, running sprints at practice means speed to outrun your opponent when you need it, and cleaning out the car means you won’t be mortified on your date on Friday night.

Fact #6 Sometimes, it’s not even the immediate result that is most important; instead, it’s the opportunity you create for yourself in the long run—opportunities you may not yet even realize exist. What does this mean? Well, to be direct, your SAT or ACT score is totally pointless if you don’t see it as a key to get you through the door of your dream school, even if you don’t yet know what your dream school is.

The moral here is that the amount of studying you do for the SAT or ACT today, that one extra vocabulary word you learn or the geometry rule you memorize, can directly influence the number of doors that will be opened to you after you send in those applications.

On those days where you’d rather give Fluffy a bath than do another flash card or practice test, just remember that drudgework today is just an investment in opportunity tomorrow.

This seemed great: techniques you could use to guess when you didn’t know the material and the possibility of earning some points anyway.

Thirty years later we have a huge problem. That one simple idea, that there are ways to get around the SAT, completely disempowered students. Why? Because the trend has gone from “here’s how to tackle that last really tough question or two” to “you can’t learn this–here’s how to guess your way to a tolerable score.” 

The minute you tell a student that a question–any question–is so challenging that you can’t teach her the skills to answer it and, instead, you’ll show her how to guess the right answer, she doesn’t gain confidence. Instead, she hears the following:

You can’t conquer this. This test is too hard. The SAT is smarter than you are. 

Well I say enough already. 

The SAT is not smarter than any of us; it’s just a test of math, grammar, and critical thinking skills. 

I’ll rephrase: everything on the SAT is completely learnable. It is not the Holy Grail of knowledge, all elusive and mysterious. It’s just a really long test. 

It’s high time we quit being afraid of the SAT, stop being convinced that it can outsmart us, and instead prepare ourselves with the tools necessary to achieve great scores on the SAT–skills that are transferable to improved college and professional success. It’s time to enjoy the achievement of learning new, relevant concepts and applying them in creative ways. It’s time to be smart again.

Thirty years is too long to be afraid of anything. 

I’m not scared. Are you?

We’ve all been hearing about The Secret for a while now…. Oprah’s talking about it, your community is talking about it. Perhaps you’ve read the book. Now it’s coming to your movie theater?

I can’t take it anymore. I’ve got students with lousy work ethics telling me they’re going to Brown because they’ve put it on a vision board and they’ve told the universe that’s what they’d most like to do. I suspect if I told my students how many of my other students have an identical vision, they’d flip; the admissions numbers and their thought lives aren’t in synch. Sorry to let the cat out of the bag.

It’s time we sort out the differences between wishful thinking (e.g. The Secret or Law of Attraction) and outstanding personal positioning and decision-making (what Rosalene Glickman aptly calls optimal thinking in her eponymous book).

I’m not going to lie: it seems like such a nice idea that if one wants something badly enough that “the universe” (whatever that is) will just line up with her and conspire to make it happen. However, I daresay Hitler really wanted to kill the Jews—and did a pretty effective job for a while there—and I’d hate to think that my universe got on board with his wholehearted, albeit despicable, desires. By the same token, people like Sean Combs, Oprah Winfrey, and Barack Obama aren’t sitting at home writing little journals about how much they want to be media moguls or The President; they’re working their butts off and making the most of every opportunity!

I’m going to challenge you in the midst of all this Secret stuff to buckle down and start thinking optimally. Optimal thinking calls us to decisively weigh out our options, assess the potential outcomes of our actions, calculate the risks involved, and then pointedly move in a direction towards our objectives. That means that if you want to get a high SAT score, you can’t use Professor Harold Hill’s Think System and hope to do well; you have to work at it!

It’s true, the implementation of optimal thinking feels quite a bit like implementing The Secret in that there’s a good deal of focus and meditation on goals. In fact, some of the things that The Secret suggests probably foster the same sorts of outcomes that optimal thinking would. For example, if I have a “vision board” in my locker with some pictures of Harvard and words like Achieve glued to it, I’m subconsciously encouraging myself to give my all at school and not to lose focus. My vision board may ostensibly lead me to get higher grades just because it’s a great reminder.

However, optimal thinking restores your personal agency (that’s your ability to act and make decisions for yourself, rather than being someone who passively reacts to the world). In other words, going to Harvard, achieving great grades, becoming Captain of the Track team are all great objectives, but you’re held accountable for designing and following up with a plan that maximizes the possibilities of those outcomes. Rather than “putting it out there” that you want to be on the debate team, you take every opportunity to assess each moment of your day and look for new ways to become a better arguer, to become more informed, and to improve your ability to see both sides of an issue.

Look, leaving your personal agency out of the equation can be tempting when your confidence is shot; in that case, if getting into Brown was merely a wish and it doesn’t come true, there’s no one to blame but Star Light Star Bright (certainly not yourself!). Ultimately though, I would wager that particularly when we’re working toward those goals that seem like they can’t be achieved without resorting to a flat out wish, we’ll fail without the pointed decision to optimize every situation.

It’s true: sometimes we just get lucky. Every now and then things seem to fall into place, but optimal thinking prepares us to respond to less-than-ideal situations and get as much out of them as we can. The Secret is safe; optimal thinking requires ownership. However, I’m willing to bet you’ll have so much more to own when you set your goals and are brave enough to optimize your life so that they’re more likely to be achieved.