When I was a senior in high school and we were given the opportunity to pen a senior quote to place below our picture in the yearbook, I had just one objective—to make sure I didn’t write something that would make me look like an idiot 20 years down the line.

It was a mature consideration on one hand, but a silly one on another. Even if I had written something stupid, how many people would actually 1) have access to my high school yearbook, 2) care enough to find my quote, and 3) somehow judge me for it 20 years later? Here I am today and I can tell you the answer—zero.

Most people from my generation don’t have to answer for anything we did back in high school as long as it wasn’t covered by the criminal code. Today’s students aren’t so lucky.

So high school students, with every tweet, photo, comment, or anything else you may choose to post in whatever online sharing platform that I’m too old to even know the name of, please ask yourself:

“How would I feel if this appeared 20 years from now when someone Googled my name?”

I don’t know how others will feel 20 years from now about what you post today. But I can tell you this—it will be a lot easier to find it than it will be for them to dig out my old yearbook quote.

In my life before Collegewise, a former co-worker approached me about joining his college counseling business he’d founded. When I met with him to learn more about the opportunity and how I might fit into it, he had a long list of things he claimed to have accomplished.

Website, logo, business cards, email addresses, full-color printed materials—he laid it all out in front of me. He’d even written a business plan that showed him at that top in charge with other future people doing all the work.

But what he didn’t have was 1) customers, or 2) any plan for what to do if he actually enrolled someone. He’d spent six months hiding from the difficult part by focusing on the easy part.

It’s not difficult to pay someone else to design a logo, print materials, or build a website. The difficult part is putting yourself in front of families who may not buy from you. The difficult part is making promises to customers and keeping them. The difficult part is spending every day learning as much as you can about admissions, then turning around and using that knowledge to do work that changes the college admissions process for people.

So I passed, started Collegewise, focused on the hard part, and spent the next fifteen years finding other people who were willing to do the same with me. The reason there aren’t a hundred Collegewises out there is precisely because of the difficult part. If it were easy, lots of people would do it.

Anything worth doing—a project, a job, a role in an organization—will have a difficult part. Look behind any successful person and you’ll almost certainly see that they faced the difficult part and prevailed.

The difficult part of getting into Harvard isn’t polishing an application to perfection, writing a great essay, or even getting high test scores. The difficult part is spending your high school career doing remarkable work, achieving and pushing and leaning in so that eventually there just aren’t that many people in the college application universe who can look at you and say, “Yep, I did all that, too.”

Parenting, fundraising, leading, managing, writing, playing music, acting–they all have parts that are easy and difficult parts. Just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s necessarily not important. But the difficult part is where the differences are made.

Nobody ever became great at anything just by getting the easy parts right. When in doubt, find and focus on doing the hard part. If you can do that, just about everything else will seem comparatively easy.

Jay Mathews is a Harvard graduate, an education writer for the Washington Post, and a vocal opponent of the prestige obsession in college admissions (I believe he also coined the term “Namebranditis,” which I’ve since borrowed liberally.) In 2009, he penned the column, Elite Colleges Don’t Make Elite People, which posed the question, “Where did your heroes go to college?” The resulting list, which included successful people in fields ranging from business to politics to athletics, showed that the majority did not attend prestigious colleges.

I also suspected, and a decent but not exhaustive Google search confirmed, that few if any were known to have been great at everything they touched back in high school.

Yes, many of them showed teenage flashes of what would eventually be greatness (nobody wakes up at age 30 and decides to become one of the best tennis players in the world). Some even had perfect GPAs, and a few others had perfect or near-perfect test scores.

But in a list of some of history’s most famously successful people, none of their online biographies included any reference to excelling at everything they tried in grades 9-12. I couldn’t find one example of someone who’d excelled in academics, athletics, arts, leadership, music, philanthropy, student government, and testing simultaneously.

Surprising? Not really. Do you know any adults who could make the claim to high school perfection?

Today’s heroes were never perfect. Let’s cut tomorrow’s heroes a little slack.

Jim Collins is a former Stanford Business School professor who spent four years studying the secrets behind the greatest companies and the leaders who helped them get that way. One of the findings that he shared in his book Good to Great was that the path to greatness began with a company’s willingness to confront the brutal facts of their current reality. When a company was disciplined enough to look at a difficult or even dire state for what it really was, the best course of action often became a lot more obvious.

But the companies also maintained an absolute, unwavering faith that they would prevail in the end. Not necessarily that everything would turn out exactly as they’d originally hoped—confronting the brutal facts often changes that outlook. But they never stopped believing that they would ultimately survive and carry on. They were disciplined about confronting facts, but they were also resolute in their hope for the company’s future.

It’s not easy, but if you can do it, this can actually be a wonderful tool for counselors and, more importantly, families.

For example, I’ve met many families who were unwilling or unable to confront the brutal facts of their current college admissions reality. The degree of proverbial brutality varied widely, from a C in trigonometry to a suspension for cheating on an exam. But instead of confronting it for what it was—something that will negatively impact their chances of admission at certain schools the family had chosen—they kept making excuses or searching for a magic solution to make the problem disappear.

“But it wasn’t my fault!”

“Won’t my community service hours make up for it?”

“My co-worker knows someone on the board, so that should probably help my son.”

I understand where they’re coming from. In fact, I started Collegewise specifically because I felt the anxiety in the college admissions process had spun out of control and that families should try to enjoy this time. We want to take fear out of the process, not up the dosage that’s injected.

But there’s a difference between being pessimistic and realistic. The less willing you are to confront your current brutal admissions facts, the less effective you’ll be in identifying the best path forward.

Once you confront the facts, you can then be resolute in your belief that life will go on at whatever college you end up attending.

One grade, test score, or even suspension may change your admissibility to particular colleges. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that you won’t go to college at all. It hasn’t robbed you of your intellect or drive or character. It doesn’t take away all the opportunities you’ll have in front of you at literally hundreds of potential schools.

Confront your brutal admissions realities, but keep believing in yourself and working hard, unwavering in your faith that while things may not turn out exactly as you’d imagined (life works that way a lot), you’re almost certainly going to be OK.

The longer I continue to preach that brand-name schools don’t offer inherently better educations or experiences, that what you do in college will be more important than where you do it, the less likely I am to debate the point with someone who doesn’t agree. Emotional, anecdotal, even statistical evidence doesn’t change minds on this topic. It’s the working example of confirmation bias, maybe for me as much as it is for them.

Parke Muth, a current admissions consultant and former associate dean of admission at the University of Virginia, just posted what I thought was a thoughtful, balanced answer to the question, “Does attending an Ivy League school really matter?” His post looks at the merits and holes in both sides of the argument. And even if you’re in the pro-prestige camp, you’d be well-served to embrace his conclusion below, as just about every knowledgeable counselor and admissions officer would agree that you’re a lot less likely to get into an Ivy League school if you’re applying based only on the name.

“For students, the choice of a school, as I have said again and again to families and students, should be about fit, not about name. A student wants to go to a place full of confidence and a desire to squeeze everything out of the time spent on campus. Students who do this will, for the most part, experience tremendous growth, a great deal of success, and, perhaps, a lot less stress.”