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A friend asked me a question over breakfast the other day that I didn’t have an immediate answer to: “What was the difference for the kids who got into Harvard? What made them special?”
I thought about my time there. The kids I knew — and the ones I didn’t, that were in the library working at 10pm on a Friday.
The easy answers: they were smarter. More driven. Maybe more privileged. Better resourced.
But none of those felt right. Or at least, none of them felt complete.
Here’s what I finally came to: the kids who got into Harvard were the ones who were best at getting into Harvard.
Let me explain.
Our public education system has a shape. And it rewards — enormously — the kids whose brains happen to fit it. The kids who can sit still and study for hours. Those who test well, and follow the rules of a system built for a specific kind of learner.
This was me. I followed rules. I was a linear thinker. I strove to be told I was good at things. Thankfully I’ve grown since then, but this is the sort of brain that our schools reward.
I’m just not sure that many brains actually work that way.
As Coi Marie Morefield, founder of The Lab School in Memphis, puts it: “Testing tells us which children can perform in learning environments built for neurotypical, linear-sequential processors. It doesn’t tell us who’s intelligent. It tells us who fits the mold.”
This resonates deeply for me. Because I’m watching it happen in real time.
My son is neurodivergent. He’s curious, creative, perceptive and fearless. And for the past seven years, we’ve been trying to make him fit a mold that was never built for him.
We live in one of the best public school districts in the country. He has incredible support. Dedicated teachers. Resources most families would be grateful for — and we are grateful. And still -- it isn’t working. Not because he isn’t capable. Because the fit is wrong.
He catches fire around the things that light him up. Ask him about something he cares about and he will go deep, stay focused, and blow you away. But sit him in a math class to regurgitate algebraic equations and he’s somewhere else entirely.
And the biggest tragedy isn’t his struggle. The tragedy is what the struggle is doing to his belief in himself.
Seven years of trying to squeeze into a mold that doesn’t fit doesn’t just frustrate a kid. It begins to teach him a story about who he is. And that story — I’m not smart enough, I’m not capable enough, I don’t belong here — is the most dangerous thing a child can carry into adulthood.
We’re now looking for a school built for kids like him. Not because he needs more help. Because he needs a different fit — one where his particular kind of brilliance gets noticed and celebrated for what it is.
Which brings me back to Harvard.
The kids who ended up at elite schools weren’t just smart. They were kids whose gifts were visible to the system doing the measuring. And because their gifts were visible, they got noticed.
When I was 8, our 9-year old summer baseball team was short players. The coach invited me to play because I was friends with his son. I knew almost nothing about baseball. He taught me. It changed my life, because it built in me the belief that I belonged on a baseball field. And that confidence allowed me to believe that I belonged in many places.
When I was 9, I got put into a special weekend learning program -- all because I held the door open for our principal one day. Not the typical move for a 3rd grader. She noticed. When she learned I was a decent student, she nominated me. That was all it took.
A teacher leaned in. A coach gave extra time. One or two well-timed moments of someone believing in me became a spark that started a fire. I got 2 years of playing time on a 9-year-old team when other players only got 1. I began to believe that I was academically gifted - because I was put in an environment that told me so. Not even because of my grades. Because of my manners.
Malcolm Gladwell famously documented a version of this in Outliers. He found that the majority of elite Canadian hockey players were born in Jan, Feb or March. The youth hockey cutoff date is January 1st -- so kids born early in the year are physically more developed than kids born in December. In the early years, they’re all lumped together. As they age and develop, coaches sort the bigger, faster, more coordinated kids into the elite programs. Those kids get better coaching. More ice time. Higher competition. And so the gap widens — not strictly because of talent, but because of an early head start that compounded.
The psychologist Albert Bandura called the underlying mechanism self-efficacy — your belief in your own ability to succeed. His research showed that self-efficacy doesn’t come from what people tell you. It comes from what you do. Small wins, stacked over time. Every time a child succeeds at something hard, their belief in what they’re capable of expands. That expanded belief leads to bigger goals, more persistence, faster recovery from setbacks.
I’m not saying talent doesn’t matter. I’m saying talent is far more widely distributed than Harvard’s admittance stats might suggest. The Harvard kids didn’t start out exceptional — at least not predominantly. I think most of them, like me, started out with an early win — in academics, sports, music, leadership, whatever. That win got them seen. They got a bit more support, which gave them more wins. The snowball grew.
For kids who don’t fit the mold, that snowball never starts. It takes longer for their true gifts to be noticed. And the wins, if they come at all, don’t arrive until much later. Often after too many years of being told that they don’t fit.
I spent a big part of my career chasing money instead of meaning. Doing work that I was capable of but that never lit me up. I know what it feels like to perform adequately inside a system that wasn’t built for where your true gifts lie. I know what a bad fit feels like. And when I finally found the right fit, everything changed. Not just my happiness — my energy, my output, my sense of what was possible. I finally felt at home.
That’s what I want for my son -- a place where who he is gets to show up authentically. And he gets noticed when it does. And he feels like he belongs.
Every person has a unique gift. For the Harvard kids, their gifts happened to map perfectly onto the system our culture built for measuring human potential. And so they stacked wins and built their self-efficacy early — and got deemed exceptional.
But most are born with gifts the machine was never built to measure. The kid who knows every state by shape but can’t decode a three-letter word. The one who can tell you the acoustic properties of every speaker system on the market but can’t get through 7th grade algebra. The one who builds elaborate, vivid worlds in their head but cannot sit still. These aren’t broken kids. They’re kids in a system that isn’t built to recognize their gifts.
So here’s my question to you: Have you found the mold that fits you? Or are you still trying to conform to someone else’s version of what your genius should be?
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