I’ve got ten book recommendations for high school students:

1. The Cross Country Runner’s Guide to Summer Training without the Burnout
2. Host a First Class Homecoming Dance on a Shoestring Budget
3. Twelve Authentic French Dishes You Can Serve Cold at your French Club Meetings
4. Surviving High School: Wise Seniors’ Tips for New Freshmen
5. Build and Launch your Club’s Website in Five Days or Less
6. Sold Out: The Smarter, Faster Way to Sell Yearbooks
7. Big Shows for Small Dance Teams
8. Starting Over: The New Kid’s Guide to High School from Someone Who’s Been There (Again and Again)
9. Sports Fundraising for Total Rookies
10. The Non-Scientific Student’s Guide to Acing AP Chem: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It

Why no links? Because these books haven’t been written yet. I’m recommending that you write one, or find a topic of your own, and share it with as many people as possible. You’ll help people, you’ll learn a lot, and if you do a good job, colleges will notice.

A few suggested steps:

1. Pick a subject you or your organization know a lot about.

Maybe you’ve started at a new school so many times that you’re something of an expert. Maybe your basketball team raised $2,000 for new uniforms without ever having to sell a candy bar or make a cold call. Maybe you created study guides for your AP class that really helped you and your friends.

2. Write it all down, like you were teaching someone else to do it (because you are!).

Include the steps you took, the mistakes you made, and what you would do differently in retrospect. And most importantly, highlight the steps or techniques that worked best for you.

Yes, you could try to turn this into a real book that you self-publish. But that adds a lot of time and potential expense to what should be something you can make and share easily.

Instead, format it in a word processing program of your choice. Get some feedback from one or two people just to make sure it makes sense, and have someone else proofread it with you until it’s typo-free. Then put your name on it and turn it into a PDF. Or you could turn the book into a series of blog posts and start a blog on this very topic.

3. Share it.

Start by giving it to five friends who might enjoy and benefit from it. Email it to the appropriate people (if you can identify them) at high schools in your area. Share it on social media. Then let the readers decide. If they like it, chances are they’ll share it with people. If it’s good, they’ll help it spread.

4. Consider creating a website or a blog to host the doc.

If you can build a destination site where people can download it, you can probably track the number of downloads. You can also solicit feedback, or even testimonials, which you can include on the site.

Will everyone love it? No way. Will some people dismiss it? Sure. Who cares? If the information was helpful to you, I promise you there are other students out there who would love to have access to it.

Everyone has expertise in something. Whatever yours is, one of the best ways to amplify your impact is to share it with as many people as possible.

Imagine that you could tell a college, “I wrote a guideline for students who were starting at a new school, and it’s been downloaded over 1,500 hundred times.”

When you share your expertise in a format that can spread, your impact goes beyond your immediate circle. And colleges will be eager to have the kind of student whose impact reaches beyond campus.