Kids are stressed out. Thinking about humans and what we are worth.

Kids are stressed out in the United States. Suicide rates are increasing. Organizations such as Challenge Success are evangelizing that kids (and their parents) need to stop focusing the childhood years on getting into the “best” colleges. Using words from their mission statement: “We know that every child has his or her own story and path to success.” So they urge parents to chill and take the pressure off their kids, for the sake of their health and happiness, and instead focus on helping their children be curious learners, resilient individuals and have a moral compass.

It turns out that childhoods are being spent chasing grades and activities to get into the best colleges. The students that achieve this kind of success are described in the book Excellent Sheep written by a former Yale professor. They are adept at chasing test scores and achieving. They’re even adept at looking happy, adjusted, well rounded, and not appearing overly competitive. What they’re not good at is finding meaning, personal connection, developing a love of learning, developing an ability to think — or happiness. Yikes.

So they advocate taking the pressure off their kids and getting into the right college.

Yet, isn’t there some value of graduating from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford or the other elite US colleges? Surely it matters which one of the 4,500 colleges you go to?

I personally loved Harvard. I had a lucrative career before I attended. But it still changed my life, gave me new perspective, and the “down time” allowed for exploration and conversations. It was a good fit for me.

But this is not a conversation about whether these colleges are worth it at the individual level. What is going on at the society level?

Why do we chase the college prize?

Two people may be close to identical in skills, aptitude and experience, yet the one with the “Harvard” stamp on the resume finds it easier to get ahead.

This is due to how hard it is to quantify what a person is worth. It’s the nature of the human brain to look for shortcuts. We’re hardwired that way. Short cuts like “Went to Harvard” make it easier and saves an awful lot of time.

The fact is, the label “Harvard” is used to indicate the value of the human to which the label is attached. Some industries (such as venture capital) almost exclusively recruit from a handful of elite colleges.

As a parent, it is worth knowing — and this is surprising — that kids that turn down an admission to the elite college (and instead go to a non-elite college) end up earning as much as those that accept the elite admission; there is no statistical difference at all for white kids (though there is for minority kids). Read more on this in a recent literature review by Challenge Success.

Can we start to commoditize people?

It sounds bad to “commoditize people”. But it actually could be very good at the society level. If we look at humans as generic containers that have mastered certain things, then what you learned and what you mastered matters far more than where you mastered it. The contents of the container matter more than the shiny (or not so shiny) wrapper it comes in. This helps us get past the elite college problem. It also gets us past gender, age, ethnicity, experience, and other biases. Getting to the point where “Person A” and “Person B” are interchangeable is a very good thing.

This helps us get past the elite college problem. It also gets us past gender, age, ethnicity, experience, and other biases.

Think of an open position for a job as a recipe. The recipe calls for certain ingredients — let’s say, data visualization, which is the ability to analyze and vizualize large data sets using a quick-to-learn programming language, such as Python. Do I need the brand-name ingredient or will the generic brand be fine? Does it matter that much whether “Person B” completed an inexpensive online classes on Coursera and applied those skills in a non-profit company for 2 years, vs. “Person A” completed similar course material at Stanford and did a semester long class project?

We can all probably say, “Yes, I would hire Person B. I’d give them a fair shot.” But resumes are an obstacle to making this real. The problem with resumes is that humans have to read them and so they are short and imprecise.

If a job requires 50% data vizualization work, then that is what the hiring manager should drill down on. Yet a resume doesn’t serve this purpose. It’s a summary meant to catch your eye. There are all kinds of catchy words designed to serve as eye-candy.

What’s wrong with eye-candy?

Here’s an analogy. Imagine you are making a recipe that calls for 5 pounds of white flour. You go to the shelf and spot a bag labelled “Quality Baking Ingredients” and guess it has the 5 pounds of white flour you need for your recipe. It actually contained only 2 pounds of flour, plus numerous kinds of frosting, sprinkles and essences. What you missed was the other bag right next to it that was labelled “Pantry Basics” — that bag had 10 pounds of white flour, and a few other basics.

What we need is a longer, more detailed granular composition of humans. Since it’s just too much information for human readers to comprehend, we need to let software do the reading and find the employer or recruiter what they are looking for.

Not being able to read what is inside the human package is leaving people on the shelf that don’t need to be. And at the same time it’s driving a subset of American kids to unhealthy levels of anxiety as they chase elite colleges, and another subset of kids to assume they are not worth that much.

The passion problem

We’re much more productive when we do things that connect in some way to our passions. Multipliers is based on studying what the most effective managers in the world have done well. It explains that these managers — the Multipliers — look for the “superpower” in employees. They align the tasks with an individual’s superpower to drive 10x results.

What if your passions were also part of the equation:

• she loves communicating with people
• she loves digging around in data; she is deaf to the world and does it in her spare time
• you couldn’t drag him away from solving puzzles; he is so stubborn and tenacious he just won’t give up
• she is a master conflict resolver, she just has a way of dealing with it wherever she goes regardless of the conflict; she thrives with it

Challenge Success is warning us that we are producing a generation of children so laser focused on a narrow definition of success (grades, test scores, college admissions) that they are failing to understand themselves very well. They don’t know what they are connected to and don’t have the tools to find out.

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