Vanderbilt is a very unique school. As one of the most selective institutions in the world, prospective students will do anything to one day grace their LinkedIn profiles with the much lusted-after status enhancer: Vanderbilt University. This embellishment says to the world, “I have perfect grades and test scores. I was the valedictorian of my high school. I volunteer. I work. I am the captain of the squash team and the lead in Hamlet. I’ll soon be taking my talents to the White House, the White Sox or Wall Street.” In other words, get out of my way.
However, their LinkedIns might as well say “manic overachiever” — a characterization worn with as much pride as a captain’s C. Overachieving, to the Vanderbilt student, is not seen as exceptional but the norm. It is what every student aspires to be, ought to be. It is the DNA of a winner. This romanticization of manic overachieving is the fuel necessary to cross the chasm of mediocrity and enter the promised land of “better than most.”
Like all things, however, overachieving comes at a cost. The prototypical Vanderbilt student struggles to see value and quality as intrinsically valuable. For these students, value and quality are extrinsic and utilitarian, valuable only in how they can be used, whether put on a résumé or spoken about in an interview. It is valuable if it will make someone say, “Wow, impressive.” But if it offers no ability to market its practitioner, we assume there must be no point. Sacrificing even a second that could be spent doing something that does impart marketplace value would be a giant waste of time.
I fear the price of excellence is far more costly than we Vanderbilt students assume it to be. We forget that the marketable projects in which we engage are entirely vapid unless we derive some bit of value from them. And luckily, we often do. We feel good after shading in our last coloring sheet next to the eight-year-old cancer patient in the hospital or turning off the lights after a long day in the research lab, but we miscredit the source of this brief tranquility. We feel proud not because we did things that “look good” but because in doing them, we did good. They required us to spend time with children far less fortunate than us and to contribute ourselves to something important to the lab — truly good and noble things. We feel this levity and erroneously connect the dots: That which builds my resume makes me feel good, and therefore, “getting ahead” should be my aim. This is the wrong conclusion. The correct one is: That which has intrinsic value makes me feel good.
If, by noticing the times these feelings manifest, we can isolate the source of value and quality, we might find that much that makes us happy is not the sort of thing that would have gotten us into Vanderbilt. They may not be the conventional markers of success at all. They may even be tough to rationalize. By embracing them despite this, we can find deep peace — peace that can be found nowhere else. I have personally found this in writing and surfing, in playing music and cooking. You might find it in dancing or crocheting, stop-motion animation, fly fishing or perhaps something entirely different.
We won’t get to brandish the many hours that these commitments demand of us one day at Wharton or Wells Fargo. But that is okay — this is not why we’ll do them. We’ll do them because they become the umbrella we need to walk in the rain that life often is. At an institution of such prestige, where we spend our days and nights learning almost everything, we mustn’t neglect learning how to be ourselves.
