"Does it look good if…?”
"Does it look bad if…?"
Successful college applicants don’t spend a lot of time asking either of those questions. And even if they know the answers, those students still don’t change what they want to do.
A successful student who wants to take a poetry class over the summer is going to do it anyway whether or not Caltech would say it’s a good idea (Caltech would appreciate the poetry course, by the way).
A successful student who absolutely hates being on the football team isn’t going to slog through another two years of torture just because someone told him it would look bad to colleges if he quit. He’s going to quit anyway and find something else to do that he really enjoys.
A successful student who enjoys being in the drama club isn’t going to worry that it will look incongruous with her stellar high school softball career.
Yes, there are basic tenets of college preparation that you should worry about. You have to take appropriate classes and tests, and you have to fulfill the application requirements for whatever schools you apply to. But beyond that, colleges don’t have a magic formula for admission that rewards some actions and punishes others.
Hard work, achievement, making an impact and being a nice kid—those things look good. The polar opposites of those things are probably not good. Everything else is entirely up to you.