One of the surest ways to write a clichéd college essay is to choose an activity or experience and claim to have learned “valuable lessons.” It’s not that students didn’t actually learn lessons from what they’ve done. But the stories are often built around a lesson that might sound impressive, but wasn’t actually there. When you write that you learned valuable lessons about leadership, teamwork, goal setting, hard work, commitment, etc., you need to back that story up with specific examples that go beyond just playing the role as it was assigned. A class president who does exactly what the last class president did–who held the same meetings and did the same fundraisers and followed the road map as it had been laid out–might have done a perfectly adequate job. But any lessons learned will almost certainly be nearly identical to what past presidents learned (and wrote about).
If you’d like to actually start learning valuable lessons in whatever capacity that you’ve chosen, this list of advice is a good place to start. You may not successfully embrace them all, but as a first step, I’d start with these five.
1. If you set a date, meet it.
2. If you can’t make a date, tell us early and often. Plan B well prepared is a better strategy than hope.
3. If what you’re working on right now doesn’t matter to the mission, help someone else with their work.
4. Make mistakes, own them, fix them, share the learning.
5. Talk to everyone as if they were your boss, your customer, the founder, your employee. It’s all the same.
You’ll have plenty of valuable lessons to write about if you start creating (and learning) them now.