There are no guarantees in the college admissions process.
You can take the risk of challenging yourself in an AP class and you might not get an A. You can try out for the school play or varsity tennis or the jazz band and still not get picked. You can volunteer for over a hundred hours, rack up a list of honors and awards, and do everything you could possibly imagine your first choice college would want you to do—and you still might not get accepted.
College admissions is a lot like life in that way.
Many of the things we want—from opportunities to promotions to romantic prospects—aren’t guaranteed, even when we do everything that seemed to put us on the path to getting what we’d hoped for. The options are to (1) not play at all, or (2) go for it and trust that the effort and learning will somehow be worth it down the road even if we don’t get what we want.
Most successful people embrace the second option, and keep doing it over and over again.
This is an important, but difficult, lesson to learn in high school. Can you find the motivation to really pursue your dreams without the iron-clad guarantee that you’ll get what you want if you just work hard enough?
The best path for most kids is to accept that while you can’t control life’s outcomes, you can embrace your ability to influence them. Yes, you’ll stumble along the way. But the disappointments will be temporary, the successes will be more plentiful, and the eventual outcomes will almost certainly be enjoyable if you just keep playing hard.