“I know of people who get V170 and Q170 just like that, with little or no prep, while for me, who has been slogging for the past so many months, even a 320 remains elusive. This struggle has made me doubt my capabilities.”
Some version of this statement plays out many times in my conversations with students and prospective students.
It is probably a universal human instinct to compare oneself with one’s perceived peers and, if one comes up short in such comparison, to feel inferior and to beat oneself up for this inferiority. We seldom pause to question whether these people whom we regard as our ‘peers’ (and, therefore, legitimate choices for comparison) are actually so.
I too have made such masochistic comparisons. My students compare themselves with others based on their GRE scores and prep time. I used to compare myself with writers based on the age at which they published their first book; later, the basis of comparison shifted to their accomplishments by my then-age.
From my late teens, I must have spent countless hours on synoptic biographies of writers. These readings usually left me drained and anxious, but I often could not resist the temptation when the impulse to look up a writer struck. It took years for a vague suspicion to surface – sometimes – that this information that I so hungrily sought was merely a superficial data-point and that my quest had no other use than distracting me from the fearsome task of writing (and thereby risking the discovery that I had nothing to say or that my writing was not good enough to express my thoughts clearly).
The flash of insight that finally put an end to this nonsense came when I was reading The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin.
In this novel, A.J. Fikry is a book nerd and a bookshop owner. His adopted daughter, Maya, has spent her childhood in the bookshop, reading most of the time, and, at fourteen years of age, she knows – and her foster parents know – that she wants to be a writer. She is utterly disappointed when she gets only the third place in an inter-school story-writing competition. This is how the scene plays out next between A.J. and her:
[A.J. says,] “These things are never fair. People like what they like, and that’s the great and terrible thing. It’s about personal taste and a certain set of people on a certain day… one never knows. But here is what I do know. ‘A Trip to the Beach’ by Maya Tamerlane Fikry was written by a writer.”
[Maya] thinks he’s about to hug her, but instead he shakes her head, the way he would greet a colleague – perhaps an author visiting the store.
A sentence occurs to her: The day my father shook my hand, I knew I was a writer.”
Sometime later, A.J. and his wife buy a house that has four bedrooms and the quiet that A.J. believes “a young writer needs to work.”
I was moved by this part of the book. At 14, Maya as well as the people closest to her already knew that she was going to be a writer. The language she wanted to write in, English, was her native language, and she had already amassed reading time of almost 14 years in this language. She was encouraged to identify as a writer and was provided an environment that was conducive to writing. Crucially, she was already getting a taste of writing-related failure and learning how to cope with it. She could very well have a publishable book ready by 21.
On the other hand, for me, leave alone at 14, even at 21, I had no more than a vague idea of being a writer ‘one day.’ Writing had certainly not been a priority for the 14-year-old me as it had been for Maya Fikry at that age.
I realized, with full clarity, the wrongness of comparing myself with someone like Maya Fikry based on trivial statistics such as her age at the publication of her first book. When the commitment that I had input into writing through all preceding years was a small fraction of Maya’s, why should I expect at 21 to suddenly have the same output (and the same quality of output) as Maya’s at that age?
You reap what you sow. Your peers in reaping are those who were your peers in sowing. Anyone who identifies themselves as a ‘writer’ does not automatically become my peer; Maya Fikry was certainly not a peer for me.
This thought has helped me subdue my comparison-making habit.
Given this backstory, I do empathize with students who compare their GRE prep time and scores with others. However, the fact remains that what was misguided for me in the context of writing is misguided for students in the context of GRE prep.
Just like the Fikry book helped me see what a writer who published at 21 may have been doing at 14, let me paint you a picture of what a student who gets a perfect score in the GRE verbal section at 21 may have been like at 14.
Let’s call this teenager Ravi. A student of ninth grade, Ravi is participating in an intra-school debate competition. The topic is: The United States was justified in bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
He writes a response against the motion and shows it to his mother, who is a professor in English Literature. Her feedback is that he has only made emotional arguments at present; he might consider examining the issue through the lens of utilitarianism.
This is a new term for Ravi. He asks his mother where he can read about it. The list of her suggestions in hand, he goes to the library of the university where she teaches and uses her family membership card to borrow those books. The material seems hard at first, but he perseveres because he wants to win the debate. Since his childhood, he has been reading books above his grade level; he knows that he will eventually ‘get’ these philosophy books too. Based on this reading, he completely rewrites the essay and knows that the present version is superior to his prior attempt.
At the debate, as he waits for his turn and listens to his competitors, he notices that their content is no better than the essay he had shown to his mother. So, when he takes the stage in his turn, he already has the calm assurance that he is going to win.
And win he does. But the highlight of that day for him becomes the moment when his school principal praises him by name as a ‘precocious student’ in his address at the end of the competition. Many senior teachers also compliment him on the intellectual sophistication of his speech.
This tremendous positive reinforcement makes him think affectionately of the philosophy books that acted as his secret weapon. After thanking his mother for her excellent guidance, he asks her to suggest more such books. This one experience has elevated his reading skills and preferences to a new level, and by 21, he is a well-read person who has at least passing familiarity with most big ideas of both the Western and the Eastern cultures.
He takes the GRE after only reading up about the test format and solving a few questions the day before and walks out with a V170.
What should we say has Ravi’s prep time for the GRE verbal section been? A day? Or all the days from his childhood that he has spent reading?
Did the student whose self-doubt begins this essay input similar time and effort to developing his verbal ability? Just because Ravi shares the same label – ‘GRE taker’ – as this student does not automatically make them peers. Only those who sowed like you can be your peers in reaping.
So, what might this student do when he learns how different his learning journey has been from Ravi’s? What might Japinder do when she learns how different her writing journey has been from Maya Fikry’s?
Hopefully, they refuse to flagellate themselves with this information. Hopefully, they remember that:
The outcomes in your life are the lagging measure of your habits . . . you get what you repeat. . . There are no high performance people, only high performance habits.
James Clear in Atomic Habits
They could learn to ask deeper How’s about the impressive achievements of others. They could examine the habits, mindset and environment that contributed to the superlative performance of Ravi and Maya and try to emulate those enabling contexts in their own lives as much as they can, with the hope that improving their inputs will over time improve their outputs. After all, they are still young. If they fill their coming years with learning and with consistently better habits of learning and thinking, who knows what exciting places they may reach in a few decades!