The way that Jason Fried, founder and CEO of Basecamp, approaches business is a good model for not just how we try to approach our business at Collegewise, but also how we encourage families to approach the college admissions process.
During a recent interview, Fried responded to this quote from Marc Andreessen, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist who invented the first web browser:
“Every new company goes through tremendous challenges. Ask any entrepreneur in The [Silicon] Valley how their company is going, and “Oh, it’s going great! Everything fine!” But internally, they’re always about to throw up, because there’s always something going wrong, some key employee is about to quit, or some new competitor has popped up, or some product has slipped, or some customer is suing you, or some crazy thing has happened. There’s nothing easy about being in the business.”
Fried’s response:
“That chaos is man-made, which means it can be man-prevented, too.
It is hard. And there are moments where things are especially hard. But I do think a lot of that stress and anxiety is man-made. It comes from paranoia (which is healthy to have some of that). It comes from paying too much attention to things that you can’t control, like competition. You can’t control what your competition is going to do, and yet people are often obsessed by it, and they’re afraid of it, and then they feel inadequate because they’re not doing what everyone else is doing. All these things start to bubble up and create an environment where it breeds more of this anxiety. That’s not to say that we don’t have some of that at Basecamp. But I hope that we have a calm environment as much as possible. I’m trying to be very conscious of not creating—and sometimes I do—but not creating drama and [not] creating things that are man-made, false, scenarios that cause people trouble. There are times when I need to make people uncomfortable because I feel like we’re being complacent, or something like that. That happens, from time to time. But I don’t feel like every business has to be this place where you go in and it’s chaotic and everyone’s sweating. I just don’t feel like that has to be the way it is. And hopefully ours isn’t that way. And I know others that aren’t that way, so it’s certainly possible.”
The entire interview is here (this particular portion starts at 7:25).
The college admissions process is important. There are times when it can be stressful. And there may even be times, like when deadlines are approaching and there’s still work to be done, when a parent might need to make a student uncomfortable.
But much of the stress surrounding the process is family-made. If you fixate exclusively on schools that deny nearly all of their applicants, if you focus on things you can’t control, if you treat the process like an escalating arms race, you’re creating anxiety unnecessarily.
Instead, reject the notion that it has to be stressful all the time. Consciously create a calm and optimistic environment. Make the decision to enjoy the process and you probably will.