Austin Scholar #80: What is a Masterpiece? And why should your kid have one?

& Ask Austin

Hey, y'all!

This week from Austin Scholar...

1. What is a Masterpiece? And why should your kid have one?

2. Scholar’s Sources: Ask Austin

Unfortunately, I was sick this week. I missed school due to sickness for the first time in years. Throughout high school, when I’ve been sick, I just kind of ignored it and continued about my life. But this meant I was “kinda sick” for literal weeks, which was very inconvenient. This week, I actually stayed home and rested and was back to totally normal in days. The lesson I learned: give your body time to reset and get better. It will be better in the long run.

Also, in case you missed it: last week, I introduced my very own ChatBot, Ask Austin, and I’m super excited about it. Check Scholar’s Sources for the link so you can get personalized advice whenever you need it.

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What is a Masterpiece? And why should your kid have one?

In the past, I’ve talked a lot about Masterpieces. I first defined Masterpieces in my very first newsletter and have made lots of references since. But, with the new school year and the completion of eighty newsletters, I feel like it’s time for me to update our definition of a Masterpiece.

The mission of the Alpha High Masterpiece program (also called AlphaX) is to help students build a project that's aligned with their passion and purpose. The program gives the students time, structure, and resources to develop expertise and build a challenging project). 

As a requirement of AlphaX, each student sets an ambitious, long-term goal. We call this goal (and the project that follows) a Masterpiece. Each Masterpiece has to have an insanely high bar: each student’s Masterpiece must be the equivalent of being an Olympian. Yes, an Olympian.

Being an Olympian means being the best in the world. For my newsletter, that means being the best newsletter in the education and parenting space–not just written by teens, but universally.

The time commitment for any Masterpiece project should be around 400 hours/year (1600+ hours across a high school career). And, of course, the name “Masterpiece” is intentional–the historical definition of a masterpiece is a work of a high standard produced in order to graduate from apprentice to master.

To complete a Masterpiece, kids have to do these things:

• Find their passion

• Develop an Olympian mindset

• Become an expert in their topic and identify their unique Masterpiece topic and goal

• Grow their audience, distribute their work, build minimum viable products, and acquire their first paying customers

• Meet their stated Olympic-level goal

The Masterpiece goal is stated in a one-liner:

Olympic-level one-liner = “I am” + effect of Masterpiece + “by” + measurable Masterpiece goal + “million”

Basically, every kid has to commit to achieving this goal (I am), have a project that is impacting the world (the effect), have a way to go about impacting the world (by the measurable goal), and make it Olympic-level by throwing in the word “million.”

Just for scale, what I did this summer–going to Ukraine to help 500 kids–would not be a Masterpiece. However, turning it into raising $100 million dollars to help 50,000 kids would.

Your kid’s one-liner can have them writing, creating videos, making an app, or pretty much anything they will truly enjoy doing. Here are some one-liner examples:

I am on a decade-long journey to destroy the copy-paste culture of the triple-A gaming industry and to reinvent the multi-billion dollar gaming industry by influencing the rise of the indie-gaming industry through making my own indie-gaming company and create a game with over one million users.

I am reintroducing moral and religious values to the American youth by creating an app that helps one million parents teach these values to their children using entertainment that their child already consumes.

I am going to revolutionize the health and wellness industry by creating the first AI coach which will create personalized lifestyle plans based on each person’s specific genome and will make 1 million dollars annually.

My one-liner is this: I am transforming the way parents view education by creating a top ten Substack newsletter that influences millions of moms and makes a million dollars a year.

Of course, I’m nowhere near close enough to this goal to achieve my Masterpiece before I graduate high school. However, I know that this goal is not impossible for me to achieve–and in the process of chasing it I’ve done some pretty cool things. I’ve gained ten thousand followers on Twitter, written eighty newsletters that have reached some of the best minds in education, written articles for national magazines, been featured in profiles written about Austin Scholar, and worked for the best online writing school in the world. 

All of that was only possible because of my end goal–because I’m trying to do something amazing.

Aside from accomplishing incredible things, why should your kid do a Masterpiece?

The answer is simple: