…is before you need to.

It’s true whether you’re trying to get a job or trying to get into college.

Resumes, applications, letters of recommendation—they’re much better at sharing a stand-out story than they are at creating one.

International students, if you missed our free webinar on how to gain admission to US colleges and universities, our Collegewise presenters, Tim Townley and Monica Brown, made a recorded version you can view here.

Tim was an assistant director of international admissions at Boston University and a college counselor at the American School in Switzerland. Monica was a senior admissions and financial aid officer at Harvard for four years where she evaluated hundreds of international applicants.  I can’t imagine two better sources of knowledgeable, helpful advice willing to share it in a format like this. I think you’ll find it well worth your time.

“What’s the worst that could happen?” is actually a great test if you’re honest with yourself.

If the worst that could happen is that you get expelled, fired, arrested, or killed—well, those are some strong signs pointing to, “Not a good idea.”

But if the worst that can happen is:

It might not work
People won’t like it
I’ll get criticized or laughed at
I’ll feel self-conscious…

…those aren’t so bad. Consider the potential upside, do what you can to avoid the worst of the worst possible outcomes (like spending all your savings on an idea that nobody buys), and then take the leap.

Take on a new project at work. Email the local business and ask if they’d consider letting you intern for the summer. Answer a question in class. Learn something new that’s outside your comfort zone. Put your writing, music, or art someplace on the web where people can see it.

Students who can push past the fear of a temporary wound to their self-esteem get more done. They have more college options and are more successful in the long run. And it’s not because everything they try works—they just learn that the worst that could happen (1) usually doesn’t, and (2) isn’t so bad.

Hoping to win the lottery is not a sound plan for your financial future. It would be great if it happened, but it’s probably smart to earn and save on your own, too.

You can wait to write your book, build your app, or record your music once you get a publisher, investors, or an agent. Or you can just make your very best work, put it into the world—a blog, a PDF, or YouTube—and see how people respond to it.

If you want to make it as an actor, you can move to Hollywood and network tirelessly in the hopes of meeting the right industry insider at the right party at the right time. But your chances of success are better if you relentlessly work to become the best actor you can possibly be by taking classes, acting in community theater, and really honing your craft.

And you can hang your hopes of future success on getting admitted to a highly selective college. There’s nothing wrong with wanting big things for yourself.

But like state lotteries, fame, and other windfalls, the mathematics don’t lie—your odds aren’t good. And hoping that somebody else picks you gives them all the power.

The surest bet is to gamble on yourself. Learn as much as you can. and take an active interest in your education. Pursue things that interest you so you can make discoveries about yourself and your talents.

Gambling on yourself pays off no matter which college says yes.

I love this turn of phrase from Twitter founder Biz Stone on his blog:

“Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.”

If you look at the trajectories of successful individuals and businesses, very few of them hit home runs with the first swing. They worked hard, won some, lost some, learned along the way, and just kept going.

High school students, if you want to be successful, it’s not going to happen overnight, and it certainly won’t be determined by an admission or denial from one college.

Work hard, enjoy your successes, learn from your failures, and just keep going. Do that long enough and eventually you’ll be an overnight success.

It’ll happen sooner if you start now.

The world’s largest Laundromat serves free pizza on Wednesday nights and free donuts on Sunday mornings. They have large TVs showing Univision and the Disney Channel (a majority of its customers are Spanish speakers who are there with their children). They offer free Wi-Fi, arcade games, and desks for kids to do homework. Carpeted, clean, welcoming, and safe, it’s unlike any other Laundromat in town (and likely in any other town). And not surprisingly, it’s always busy.

There are two lessons here for small businesses, schools, organizations, and even individuals.

1. You’ll never go wrong if you think really hard about what your customers (or employees, or students, or club members) might really appreciate.

2. Something that’s ordinary by itself (like doing laundry in a Laundromat) can become remarkable when done in a way that’s noticeable and worth talking about.

Are you the world’s best second-chair flutist, Key Club treasurer, or yearbook section editor? Probably not. There are too many people in the world to best all of them, or even to know for sure how you rate.

But you can be the best in your world.

What if you so excelled as the second-chair flutist in your high school orchestra that you’d be missed if you transferred to a different school? What if your work ethic was so good that you actually made the first-chair flutist even better? What if your passion for music was so contagious that you lifted up the entire group and made everyone that much happier to be involved?

You’d be the best in your world.

You can do the same thing scooping ice cream at a part-time job, volunteering at a shelter, or taking pictures for the yearbook. What would constitute the very best for this particular time, place, and group? If you can meet or beat that vision, there’s no need to measure up against other scoopers or volunteers or photographers. You’re already the best in your world.

The world is a big place. Your world is not. And nobody is better informed or positioned than you are to be the best at something in your world. Instead of worrying about how you’ll compare with everyone who’s applying to college, start by making the world smaller. It is your world, after all.

Here’s a past post detailing author and Stanford Business School professor Jim Collins’s take on “creating a pocket of greatness.”

How often do you find an answer to your question on a company’s online FAQ section? For me, that answer is, “Almost never.” Instead of saying to the visitor, “Here are ten things many people who show up here want to know,” most FAQ sections read like they should be titled, “Here’s a bunch of stuff we want to say (whether or not you might be interested).”

College admissions offices, as you prepare for yet another admissions season, here are a few suggestions to launch, or improve, the FAQ section of your site:

1. Identify the “Frequently asked.”
The easiest but most important step is to identify which questions are, in fact, “frequently asked.” Take a poll. Ask every member on the staff to submit the top three questions they consistently find themselves answering in terms of frequency. Include questions that come in by email, phone, and in person when giving presentations. Pick the 10 or 15 that come up over and over again. Those are your FAQs.

2. Find the best person to answer each one.
For each question, find the best person to answer it. It might be the staffer who’s the most knowledgeable (even if that person doesn’t work in the admissions office), the best writer in the office, or just the one who most wants to take it on.

3. Give good answers.
Empower your answer-providers to tell the truth, in clear, honest, helpful language. No wishy-washy double speak. The best way to find that voice when answering the question? Pretend it’s Grandma asking.

4. Consider a “Top Ten Things We Wish Applicants Knew” list
A great FAQ section takes care of those questions that people actually ask. Now, what questions do you wish were more frequently asked? What ten things could you share with applicants that would make their process smoother and your job easier?

For example:

1. Please don’t send us more than two letters of rec. We’ll only read two of them no matter how many you send. If you send four, we’ll still read just two, and you won’t get to decide which two we’ll read.

2. Your decision whether or not to interview during a campus visit has absolutely no influence on your admissions chances. It’s just a time for you to ask questions and learn more about our school (colleges call these “informative interviews”). If you’ve got questions, we’d love to chat! But if not, no hard feelings. Really , we won’t penalize you for skipping it.

Address real questions and concerns in an honest, clear, informative way. Then do the same thing with the information that you know will help your audience. It will make the process less stressful for applicants, and easier for your staff that typically fields the questions. And most importantly, you’ll be setting a tone that the admissions office is run by real people who genuinely want to do right by students.

Where is the line between taking a student’s college planning seriously, and taking it too seriously? One way to find that balance is to look for the effective dose.

In pharmacology, the effective does of a medicine is the dose or amount needed to produce the desired effect. If you’ve got a headache, you’ll need to take an effective dose of Aspirin before you’ll feel any relief. Not taking enough will be akin (from a pain-relief standpoint) to not taking any at all. But there’s also a certain point at which raising the dose no longer increases the effect. Taking 10 Aspirin doesn’t bring you ten times the relief and might even have negative health effects. At a high enough dose, pretty much any substance can be unhealthy or even dangerous. Responsible medicine recommends the dose that will help without hurting.

Clearly, a student’s education and future deserve to be taken seriously. But when that focus stops paying back benefits and starts producing unhealthy side-effects, you’ve exceeded the effective dose.

A student who challenges herself and studies hard is within the effective dose. A student who is so overworked that she hasn’t slept more than four hours a night in the last semester is exceeding it.

Some prep for the SAT or ACT? A good dose. Becoming a professional test-prepper, spending more time with a tutor than you do with your homework or your jazz band or your family? Now you’re exceeding it. You won’t get a corresponding leap in scores, and you’re also likely damaging your college admissions health by sacrificing grades, activities, and sanity.

A student who asks a teacher for help is within the healthy dose. A parent who wages academic war with the counseling office to raise their student’s chemistry grade from a B to an A is exceeding the dose.

Playing baseball because a student likes being on the team even though he doesn’t get a lot of playing time is a healthy dose of pre-college activities. Plodding ahead through an activity a student hates for fear that quitting will reflect negatively on a college application is an over-dose of college planning and likely won’t be effective.

A student who believes she’s found her dream college, who uses her desire to attend as motivation to succeed in high school, that’s a healthy dose. But if she starts believing that the only way she’ll ever be happy is to attend this one school, if she spends her high school years anxiously trying to satisfy a (non-existent) magic formula for admission, especially in pursuit of a school that denies most of its applicants, she’ll be exceeding the recommended dosage.

Remember, the effective dose won’t always be pleasant. Physical therapy can sometimes be painful for the patient, and a student who wants to succeed might frequently need to do things he or she doesn’t necessarily want to do.

But done right, an effective dose of college planning should produce healthy benefits—learning, growth, increased confidence, enjoyment, and an excitement about college.

Is your current college planning producing more harm than benefit—anxiety, fear, loss of confidence, even dread? The best cure might be to change your dosage.

Making the most of an opportunity or experience is a lot different from getting the most from it. Successful people focus more on the making than they do on the getting.

Let’s say you have an opportunity to play for one of the best coaches in your sport. This experience won’t last forever. What are you going to do to make the most of it? What will you do to make this something that you look back on years later and realize how valuable the experience was?

What if you try out for the lead in the school musical and end up with a much smaller part instead? You have two choices—you can lament that you’re not front and center, or you can just figure out how to make the most of it. You can be the best, most positive, team-playing bit-player you can be. You can care more about the production than you do about your significance. You can find a way to make contributions that would be missed if you ever left.

No, you shouldn’t just plod through things that don’t seem to give anything back. From playing time, to stage time, to learning, and even just fun, you should feel like your time and energy is rewarding in some way.

But a student with no elected position in a club who steps up, takes initiative, organizes, and otherwise makes an impact can end up knowing a lot more about leadership than even the club’s president does.

The path to getting the most out of something starts with making the most out of it and giving the most to it.