Austin Scholar #62: What AP prep and Taylor Swift can teach your kid about grit
& Life and business lessons from Taylor Swift
Hey, y'all!
This weekend I had the best night of my life–I saw Taylor Swift.
This week, on the other hand, has been awful. I’m heads down every day studying for my AP exams.
Weirdly, I’ve learned the same thing from both.
This week from Austin Scholar...
What AP prep and Taylor Swift can teach your kid about grit
Scholar’s Sources: Life and business lessons from Taylor Swift
What AP prep and Taylor Swift can teach your kid about grit
Technically, it’s break week at Alpha. School is closed. Doors are locked.
But guess who has a key?
My friends and I break into school to do school work… during the break. Literally.
Every day for the past week, my friends and I have been at school by 10:00 AM and we don’t leave until 6:30 PM.
We’ve got our study day down to a science, and we’ve divided the school into sections to help us focus better.
The first section is the study zone–where we work for the first half of the day. We make study guides, flash cards, and take notes on videos.
Then for the second half of the day, we go to the testing zone and complete practice tests.
It’s like a self-inflicted bootcamp.
It’s miserable. We all dream at night (read: have nightmares) about our flash cards and study guides. We can’t wait for this to be over.
And it’s just the four of us at school. Everybody else is off on vacation (in Europe or in the mountains or at the beach). But we’re still at school studying every day.
We’re here because AP exams are next week, and we want to put in the reps and study as much as possible in order to ensure we get 5s.
Our junior year AP scores are the most important of any test we’ll take, because they’re the last academic scores to go on our college application. This year’s APs matter more than any other class we’ve ever taken.
And the four of us care about our future selves going to the college of our dreams–more than we care about getting a tan at Seaside (although trust me, all of us would much rather be there).
So, it’s 3:30 PM on a Thursday, and I’m very very tired. My brain is scrambled–and I still have a practice AP Statistics test to do, but I’ve committed to doing this newsletter every week, no matter what. It’s not a choice.
I don’t ask myself “am I going to write?” Instead, it’s “what am I going to write?”
I’ve spent years building up the grit and drive to be able to do this.
I’ll be honest, lots of weeks I’m exhausted and I don’t necessarily want to write. But I always do.
I’m motivated by two things: my commitment to my audience, and my commitment to my future self.
I want to spend my college years exploring the world and figuring out what I want to do with my life. I don’t want to be stuck thinking “if I’d only done more in high school, I could’ve been set up to live out my dreams.”
Plus, I want to make myself proud of what I do. At the end of every day, I want to look at myself in the mirror and say “I did the best I could with today.”
Those things have been enough to motivate me through long days, brain fog, colds, headaches, family emergencies, and everything else I’ve written through to show up every week.
The key here is that all of this motivation is intrinsic. I’m not doing the work because someone is forcing me to do it (and if I was, I probably wouldn’t write every week because I wouldn’t care). That intrinsic motivation is what drives me to continuously perform at the highest level every day with every task.
I know what you might be thinking. Austin, how can you be motivated to do everything? There must be things you don’t want to do.
And yes, as a high schooler, there are some things I have to do and don’t want to. Requirements.
But, I do them on my own terms.
“I’m going to sign up to take these SAT early this year, and I’m going to take these AP classes this year and do this much homework every day, because I’m choosing to.”
Yes, this stuff is required, but I’m choosing to do it–and do them excellently–because I see it as necessary steps towards an end I deeply want, not just as a necessary box to tick.
It’s hard to explain, but I want to do these hard–sometimes boring–tasks. Even when I don’t enjoy the process, I want to keep going.
Because I want to have done it.
Which is the key lesson for parents: you can’t force your kid to do hard things. They have to do it on their terms.
Maybe they’ll do the hard thing because you asked them to, or to avoid consequences you set in place, but if they do it out of coercion they aren’t really learning. They’ll be doing the hard thing to please you, not for the sake of their own goals (which is what makes knowledge stick).
Parents: you know your kid best. If you want to help them to be more intrinsically motivated, there are three different approaches you can take: