Arun is spending this weekend at a training in Miami with College Summit, a non-profit organization that helps under-resourced students get in to college. He’s been volunteering there for seven years, not because he has to, but because he loves the work.
Katie just finished training new counselors in our New York office. Then she hit the road to tour colleges like Princeton, Penn, Villanova, Duke and Sarah Lawrence (where she called us breathless because she was witnessing a student performing an interpretive dance on the lawn—gotta love Sarah Lawrence). She doesn’t have to do it, but she’s a college geek of the highest order. She loves learning about schools and seeing them first hand.
And today, I’m doing a workshop for teachers at Malibu High School about how to help kids with college essays. It’s not a paid workshop—I’m just sharing our college essay seminar that’s worked so well for us. I don’t have to be there. But I enjoy sharing it with teachers who can take it back to their classrooms.
We’re far from the only professionals who do things outside of our normal work responsibilities not because we have to, but because we want to. The doctor who’s been practicing for twenty years and still reads every issue of her monthly medical journals, the teacher who refines his lesson plans every year just to see how he can do a better job, and the lawyer who volunteers at a free legal aid center every other Saturday—they don’t do it because they have to. They do it because they like to learn, contribute, and get even better at what they love to do.
That’s a lot like how happy, fulfilled and successful college applicants approach life in high school. They take difficult classes because they want to learn alongside the hardest working students. They volunteer at the soup kitchen because they enjoy spending time helping other people. They play baseball, take photos for the yearbook, sing in the school musical, enroll in art classes on weekends, play the tuba in the marching band and bake authentic tamales for the Spanish Club meetings not because they have to (or just because they're hoping it will help them get into college), but because they love what they’re doing.
How could you spend more time doing things you want to, not because you have to?