The Paradox of Skill
Why extraordinary kids get rejected from Harvard, no one has hit .400 since Ted Williams, and you got passed over for that promotion
My son Gus is fifteen, and college has started coming up in conversations. He’s not prepping for the SAT or touring campuses yet, he’s just talking about it. I know he’s my kid and all parents think their kid is exceptional, but Gus is honestly pretty dang smart. I think a prestigious college is in the realm of possibility for him. He’s brought up possibly going to one of them, and we talk about what he needs to do to make that happen. I give him the standard advice: get good grades, do well on the SAT, and do extracurriculars.
But then I also add this addendum: you could do everything right — get a 4.0 and max the SAT — and still not get accepted to any of those top-tier schools.
Every spring, an article will appear on the interwebs about some kid who jumped through all the hoops and still didn’t get an acceptance letter to any of the Ivies they applied to. Straight A’s. A near-perfect SAT. A stack of AP classes. Founded a club, captained a team, sang in the choir, and started a non-profit. Still, rejected.
One of these kids, a girl in Texas named Kaitlyn Younger, had a 1550 SAT and a 3.95 GPA and eleven AP classes and a long list of activities, and she got turned down by Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Penn, Brown, Cornell, and a handful more. The headline on the story called her extraordinary. Her college counselor said she didn’t know what else the girl could have done. And she was right. There was nothing else to do. The kid had maxed out everything.
So what happened? How do you do everything right and still strike out?
Well, there’s a name for what’s going on. It’s called “the paradox of skill.” And it can not only help explain why genius kids can’t get into Harvard, but why Ted Williams was the last baseball player to hit above .400 and you got passed over for a promotion.
Today, as I continue my series on the nature of luck, I’ll get into this phenomenon and how to work it toward your good.
