My response: me too.

But I get the bind. Optimize for college and you risk raising a resume-stuffer. Don’t, and you worry you’re being naive about how competitive the world has gotten. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Here’s a confession: when Alec and I started Curious Cardinals, we never talked about college. Then families would demand an answer: “how does this help them stand out for college?!”

So we started talking about college to clarify what felt like an obvious connection. Then we even built a college-strategy platform, The FlightPlan, to further address the burning questions and fears we heard. And now people ask me, “but does this actually help my kid find their passion, or is it just admissions prep?”

The honest answer is that done right, they are the same thing. Let me tell you what I mean.

The Case For Pursuing Your Passion

To share a bit more about this boy: he felt torn between two worlds. World one: he goes to a competitive prep school where “everyone” goes to top colleges, and he wants that too. World two: he’s genuinely not sure college matters anymore. Crazy, but true. High schoolers are asking this question now, and they’re wondering if it’s worth all the hustle and hype.

He also had a hundred ideas and had a hard time finishing any of them. A little shiny object syndrome. Lots of enthusiasm, minimal follow-through.

Our goal for him was never just a trophy to brag about on an application. It was bigger than that: learn what you love. Learn to see something through the finish line. Learn to do hard things. Learn to grow something over time. Because whether he ends up at Stanford, or starting a company, or skipping college entirely, that skill set serves him for life.

He started with a research paper studying the state of environmental education across states. He finished it, submitted it, and realized two things: this type of research and writing weren’t his thing, AND finishing something hard felt incredible. He didn’t win anything for it. But knowing he could go after an ambitious goal in the fall of his freshman year and accomplish what he set out to ignited his self-confidence.

That process surfaced what he actually cared about: helping individuals feel agency in fighting climate change. He realized the “dos and don’ts” felt endless and overwhelming, so people often give up trying. He wanted to understand the psychology of behavioral change, marketing, and then the most practical ways his peers could mitigate their carbon footprint. So he worked with one mentor to go deep on the substance. Then with another to turn what he learned into educational resources. And he didn’t just create the content. He led a school assembly to teach it to others and practiced effectively delivering it. That went so well that he conducted his own outreach to find another high school assembly with a community who wanted to take their own action against climate change to deliver it to. Content, public speaking, distribution, a real problem solved in a grassroots, community-driven way. Last year he led this for three high school assemblies. Now he’s a junior recruiting a co-founder from the Curious Cardinals community to grow this youth climate action campaign across the country.

Take college out of the picture for a second.

What did he really gain? Critical thinking. Self-confidence. High agency. The ability to create value for other people, to make an impact on the world, and build something that lasts. That’s a skill set for life.

And that’s when it clicked for the boy’s dad.

His son is not just doing this for college. But, it also happens to be exactly what differentiates him if he even decides to apply to college.

And the timing of this particular topic matters more than most families realize.

I’ve been asked this in every room I’ve stood in. I still don’t lead with the answer parents expect.

The College News You Probably Missed This Summer

This summer, Tulane, UNC Chapel Hill, Georgia Tech, UGA, WashU, and Miami all dropped supplemental essays for the 2026-27 application cycle. Tulane’s dean of admission said why in an email to counselors: “the evolution of AI and college consulting has compromised our ability to discover which ‘Why Tulane?’ responses are artificially polished by technology (or consultants).”

So where does the weight shift?!

To the track record. The activity sheet. What a kid has actually done.

In an AI world, “I coded a video game” means nothing to an admissions officer or an employer. Who can tell if you spent hundreds of hours building or “vibe coded” it into existence in an afternoon?!

You know what does mean something? Users. Did two people play it every day? Did you teach a workshop and inspire peers to change their habits afterwards? Did you build something someone else needed? I run a company, and I won’t hire someone without a track record of work they can point to. Colleges are getting there fast.

And in a world where external recognition matters more than ever to validate your work, colleges are preparing to fact check that record too. Tempted to exaggerate a number or claim? Schools like CalTech have established what the Wall Street Journal calls a “fraud squad” responsible for verifying applications in response to growing accusations of untruthful submissions.

These Four Years Are Bigger Than College

So here’s the reframe I’d offer. Instead of “college admissions pressure,” what if we treated the four years of high school as an opportunity to gain clarity, exposure, and legitimate experience before what’s arguably the most significant milestone in a young person’s life? Four years to figure out what your kid wants their next chapter to look like, and to build a track record that shows what they’re capable of.

And when you read “shows what they’re capable of,” forget admissions officers for a second. What does it show your kid about what they’re truly capable of?

Whether that next chapter is Stanford, community college, a gap year, an apprenticeship, or a company of their own.

So look at your child’s activities and ask one question: if college disappeared from the equation tomorrow, is what they spend their time on still worth doing?

If yes, you’re building for both futures at once.

If no, you’re spending their most formative years on something the colleges will increasingly see through.

Me with Jenny Anderson, co-author of The Disengaged Teen, in front of Crystal Springs’s college rejection letter wall.

This is exactly why we built The FlightPlan.

Remember the bind we began with? Damned if you “optimize,” damned if you don’t. The FlightPlan is how a family escapes that bind. Your student focuses on what they genuinely care about and pursues it wholeheartedly. The FlightPlan quietly takes care of “what’s strategic for college,” connecting the dots, surfacing the next dream opportunity, and holding them accountable. The magic is that your student never feels the “college layer” shaping the direction. They just feel agency and a clear sense of direction.

Learning how to do something a teacher never assigned is the most valuable education there is. And actually doing the hard thing, working towards a long term goal, and putting the work in week over week is a master class in self-confidence.

EXPLORE THE FLIGHTPLAN

Want to learn more? Join a virtual event. The next one is tomorrow, Friday, August 28, at 9:30 AM PT / 12:30 PM ET.

Stay Curious,

P.S. If you want to try FlightPlan out yourself, sign up for a free one week trial here.

P.P.S. A mentor gives your kid a relationship: someone they look up to, see themselves in, trust. The FlightPlan gives them the strategy: an always-on game plan, honest feedback on where they stand, and the scaffolding to take agency over their own journey instead of waiting to be told what to do.

“Are we too late?”

“How do I make sure he has no regrets a year from now?”

Moms of rising juniors asked me these questions all week. So Benjamin on my team sat down with their sons to hear the other side.

What the moms said and what the boys said didn’t match. Not even close.

And that gap reminded us of some invaluable lessons about parenting teen boys that I want to share with you all today.

What the Moms Told Me

Every mom described a bright, curious, genuinely good kid she believes in. And nearly every one of them, in her own words, was still project managing his life. Carrying the weight. Researching programs. Remembering deadlines. Finding competitions. Scheduling SAT practice tests.

One mom named it perfectly: “I want him to become independent, but I feel like if I stop managing all of this, things will fall through the cracks.”

Another said something I can’t stop thinking about. Her family hired a counselor back in eighth grade, specifically to get ahead of junior-year panic. Two years later, she was still finding the opportunities herself. Still articulating his story herself. Still asking, “Are we doing this right?”

There’s a painful irony in that. We did everything we were told to do, and I’m still sitting here junior year wondering if it was enough.

Me speaking to one of the amazing moms in our community after an event :)

What Benjamin Heard From the Boys

Benjamin studied bioengineering at Stanford and was one of our very first mentors. He worked in biotech consulting, then recently rejoined us to build The FlightPlan, because we’re building the exact thing teenage Benjamin wishes he’d had. He’s also a bit of a teenage-boy whisperer. So I sent him to find out what the boys were actually worried about.

He told me to tell the moms the following:

Your son may care every bit as much as you do. He’s just experiencing the problem on a completely different timescale.

While mom was asking me whether her son even stands a chance in elite admissions, her son was telling Benjamin something much more concrete.

Mom Can See Three Years Ahead. Her son sees Thursday.

That’s what I replied to Benjamin after he shared his initial reflections with me.

Mom sees junior year, then summer, then applications, then college. Her son sees the test next week. Practice tonight. The project he thinks is cool. His friends this weekend.

She’s carrying anxiety about a future he doesn’t experience as urgent yet. Neither of them is wrong. They’re just living on completely different timelines.

This is Benjamin as a high schooler. When he speaks to students, he remembers what it was like to be in their shoes.

What This Looks Like In Practice

Two of the stories Benjamin shared stuck with me. (These are real students. I’ve changed the details to protect anonymity).

Meet “Ethan.” He’s a junior into climate tech, debate, and entrepreneurship. He’s been sketching out an idea for a low-cost air-quality sensor and wants to enter a science competition. But school’s about to start back up, and last spring, when things got busy, the project was the first thing to slip. So his parents became the reminders: Did you order the sensor? Did you email your teacher? What ever happened with that competition?

Ethan’s parents worried whether his story was differentiated enough. Ethan worried about exactly one thing: “I know what I want to do. I just need help actually doing it.” He didn’t want one more adult telling him which extracurricular to pick up or drop. He wanted deadlines. Accountability. Someone to help him break a big project into weekly steps before school swallowed it whole.

Ethan’s family fear: “We’re doing a lot, but are we doing the right things?”

Ethan’s fear: “I don’t want the things I care about to stall.”

Now meet “Max.” He’s a junior obsessed with sports analytics, filmmaking, and basketball. He thinks building an NBA shot-selection dashboard sounds amazing. He’s also never written a line of code. So the questions pile up fast. What data? What should it even show? How do I start? How long is this supposed to take? The gap between “cool idea” and “finished project” feels so enormous that he could abandon the whole thing before he starts.

Max’s family fear: “He has so much potential. I’m scared he’s losing momentum.”

Max’s fear: “Don’t hand me a giant, vague thing I’m supposed to succeed at. Show me how to start with what I’m actually into.”

What the Science Says

There’s real science underneath all of this. In one study of more than 10,000 people, the executive-function skills that connect a distant goal to a present-day action don’t reach adult levels until somewhere around ages 18 to 20.

Read that again. Your junior isn’t short on ambition. He’s still building the wiring that turns “college in two years” into “here’s what I do this Sunday.”

Three Things You Can Use This Week

1. Don’t mistake a lack of planning for a lack of ambition. You’re thinking junior year, then summer, then application narrative, then college. He’s thinking test Thursday, then practice, then the project he’s actually excited about. He may want the outcome badly and still have no idea how to build the road that gets him there.

2. Start with his interests, not your strategy for him. The boys came alive talking about what they wanted to build. Not once did anyone light up about his “college narrative.” And here’s the irony: following a real interest all the way down is usually what creates the differentiated story you wanted in the first place.

3. Make the first step almost absurdly small. “Work on your passion project” is huge. “Find three datasets by Sunday” is doable. One boy kept asking Benjamin some version of “But what does that actually mean?” That’s not resistance. That’s a kid asking for a real first step.

4. Outsource the accountability. A teenager will happily tell someone else, “I need your help to make sure I do this.” The exact same reminder from Mom lands as nagging, purely because of the dynamics between the two of you. Hand the check-ins to someone outside the relationship, and the pressure stops feeling personal. Often your relationship with him gets better because of it.

What it looks when you outsource and your student lights up at the possibilities they can unlock :)

The Reframe I Keep Coming Back To

Instead of asking:

“How do I get him to care about his future as much as I do?”

Try asking:

“How do I make the future close enough that he can act on it today?”

And instead of being his project manager, you get to be his coach and his sounding board:

Where are you trying to go? What’s the next step? Where are you stuck? Do you want my help, or do you just want me to listen?

Your teenager doesn’t need to carry your college anxiety a full year before he applies. He needs help figuring out what to do this week.

Why We Built The FlightPlan

I know. Easier said than done. This is exactly why we built The FlightPlan.

It does for your teen what you’ve been doing at 11pm every night, except it isn’t coming from you (which, as we just covered, changes everything). It helps him put words to his interests, pick a direction, set real goals, and scope them around his actual schedule. Then it turns one huge, vague idea into small weekly steps.

For Max, “build an analytics dashboard” becomes a first week of “find a dataset, pick three stats, set up the page.” When he gets stuck, Sky, our AI voice agent, walks him through the next step or offers to connect him with a human mentor. And every step he finishes gets logged as he goes. So when application season hits, he isn’t scrambling to remember what he did sophomore year. He’s already sitting on a real record of things he built, in his own words, ready to become the story he tells.

Here’s what that means for you: an honest, data-driven read on where your kid actually stands against the goals he says he wants. And here’s what it means for him: not more work. Total clarity on what’s already on his plate, and someone in his corner helping him knock it out.

It’s the guidance I’ve given one family at a time for years, finally available to every student, and made even better with data-driven feedback on exactly where he stands against his college goals. Max doesn’t need to know how to build the thing before he starts. He just needs a path from “that sounds cool” to “look what I made.”

Benjamin and me at a FlightPlan event :)

Come See It Live

This Sunday, August 23, I’m hosting a free virtual workshop to introduce The FlightPlan and walk through exactly how it works. If you have a freshman, sophomore, or junior, come see how we take a kid from “I’ll deal with it later” to finishing something they’re genuinely proud of.

RSVP FOR THE VIRTUAL WORKSHOP

Stay Curious,

P.S. Too eager to wait? You can sign up for The FlightPlan today, right here.

I have a story that proves the opposite can be true. Sometimes the thing that feels like the biggest failure is the thing that changes everything.

Rewind to the summer before freshman year. He was a serious player on the Academy team, an hour each way to practice, three hours a day, Monday through Friday, hoping to play in college one day.

Going into ninth grade at Harvard-Westlake, he got cut.

The news crushed him. At fourteen, when the thing you’ve wrapped your identity around rejects you, it feels personal.

But about a week later, Alec sat down and asked himself a question I wish more fourteen-year-olds knew to ask:

If I’m not spending fifteen hours a week on soccer, what am I going to spend them on instead?

He came to two different answers. At the time, he had no idea what either would amount to.

The first was flying. Flash back to seventh grade: his school ran a career day where kids shadowed a parent. While his friends picked the chefs and the other fun-for-a-day jobs, he chose the pilot, his best friend’s dad, and spent the day at the airport. He came home and told his parents he wanted to learn to fly. They didn’t tell him it was a cute hobby. They took him seriously. His parents told him: first, learn physics. Understand how planes actually work. His mom sent him articles. They introduced him to people who flew. That pilot became a mentor. Alec eventually got his pilot’s license before his driver’s license and started doing physics research alongside it.

The second didn’t come from a single spark. A few ordinary things collided: a language he’d taken since lower school, a book he happened to read, and a summer suddenly wide open. He’d been taking French since middle school and with a mom from Uruguay, he knew he had to spend time abroad to actually learn the language. Everyone he knew who wanted to master the language went to France. “Lame,” he told his mom. Around the same time he read Banker to the Poor, by Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing microfinance to Bangladesh. He became obsessed with microfinance. So, with his mom’s help, he founded a microfinance program in Senegal and spent the summer after ninth grade there, bucket showers, onion rice, and all. He went back the next three summers.

When Alec returned to school after that first summer, Harvard-Westlake launched its first social entrepreneurship fellowship. Super busy, he almost skipped it. His mom encouraged him not to invent something new, but just to write about what he’d already done that summer and where he could take it next. So he applied. Another student applied with an idea involving shoes in India. Their teacher read both applications, awarded them both the fellowship and told them to join forces.

And Soles4Good was born. They collected around ten thousand pairs of shoes from schools across Los Angeles and filled an entire shipping container. The clever part was the economics: through the microfinance organization, they found borrowers in Senegal who bought the shoes at a deeply discounted rate, and that revenue covered the next shipment. He was fifteen and already thinking about how to build something that could sustain itself. It’s still running today.

And it was not easy. The container sat in customs for weeks. They didn’t have the right permits, so a fifteen-year-old ended up on the phone with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Shoes went missing. He negotiated freight rates, sorted the tariffs, and hired people to run the warehousing on the ground.

That struggle mattered. Anyone can say they started something. Actually making something work when it gets hard is different.

Four years after getting cut from soccer, this boy was accepted to Stanford.

And this boy ended up becoming my co-founder.

We met freshman year at Stanford. Alec graduated with the #1 GPA in his class at Harvard-Westlake, studied aerospace engineering, and left Stanford early to start Curious Cardinals with me during the pandemic.

For the past few months, he has been coding twelve to sixteen hours a day, six days a week, building The FlightPlan.

And today, we reopen it to 100 families.

Alec built this platform for his younger self. He wouldn’t have found many of the opportunities that shaped him if it weren’t for his mom spending hours finding them, taking his interests seriously, introducing him to the right people, and pushing him at the right moments. Or the mentor who inspired him to get his pilot’s license and supported him each step of the way. Or Mr. Levin, who still supports Alec today (and reads this newsletter!), encouraged him to make the most of Harvard-Westlake’s resources, and helped him navigate the journey.

Alec knows how lucky he was to have that kind of support around him. The FlightPlan is his way of making sure more students get it too: a platform that helps them spot what lights them up, find the right opportunities, and keep going when the going gets tough in pursuit of their most ambitious goals.

Alec also built The FlightPlan for his mom. It would have made her life a lot easier, and frankly eased the toll on their relationship being an involved mom inevitably takes on your relationship when you have a teen who wants to rebel and not listen to you.

We opened it in May for the first 100 families and it sold out in less than 2 days. We’ve been heads down this summer learning what’s working, what’s not and making it as valuable as we can. We have a new and improved product with new features as well.

SIGN UP NOW

How It Works

For the past six years, families have been asking us versions of the same questions:

How do I help my kid figure out where to spend their limited time? How do we know which interests are worth going deeper on? Where do they find the research position, internship, competition, fellowship, or place to publish their work that actually fits them?

That’s what we built The FlightPlan to help students answer.

High schoolers only have so many hours outside of school. To help them figure out how to spend that time as intentionally as possible, we built a data-driven system that helps them understand where they stand, uncover the themes already emerging in their story, decide what is worth pursuing, build a plan, and actually follow through on it.

Here’s how it works:

1. Review your profile

We start by getting to know your student really well: what they love, how they spend their time, what they’ve already accomplished, their courseload, their goals, and where they want to go.

The plan should be built around who they actually are, not a generic checklist of what a strong college applicant is supposed to do.

2. Understand where you stand

From there, your student gets a data-driven Scorecard that helps them understand where they stand today in the context of their goals.

It gives them a clearer picture of what’s already strong, where there may be gaps, and where they have room to grow.

3. Uncover your Narrative Threads

Then, we look across their classes, activities, projects, and interests to find the themes that are already taking shape.

What does your student actually care about? What is worth going deeper on? What could become more meaningful if they took it further? Which activities may be taking up a lot of time without really serving them?

The goal is not to manufacture a story. It is to help students see the one they are already building and be more intentional about where they take it.

4. Find the opportunities that fit

This is one of the questions families have asked us most over the years:

Okay, but what should my kid actually do?

Everyone tells students they should do research, publish their work, find an internship, enter competitions, build a passion project, or do something that helps them stand out.

The hard part is figuring out which opportunities actually make sense for your kid.

The FlightPlan helps find those opportunities. That might be the equivalent of Alec’s Senegal program, an entrepreneurship fellowship, a research opportunity, a competition, an internship, a place to publish, or something else entirely.

5. Turn strategy into a plan

Finding a great opportunity is only useful if your student knows what to do next.

The FlightPlan turns the bigger picture into concrete next steps through Missions built around your student’s actual goals and calendar.

So instead of wondering, What should I be doing right now?, they have a plan.

6. Actually follow through

And then there is the part that is often hardest: actually doing it.

Every week, Sky, our AI-powered guide, checks in with your student. What got done? What got in the way? What comes next?

Sky helps break bigger goals into smaller steps and follows up with reminders and accountability. Parents get enough visibility to know what is happening without having to be the one constantly asking.

That’s the part I care about most: helping students take more ownership of the journey while giving parents enough confidence to step back a little.

So as your child heads into another school year, I’d ask one question:

If they suddenly got fifteen hours back tomorrow, would they know what to do with them? Would they know what they care enough about to go deeper on, which opportunities are worth pursuing, and what they can let go?

Getting cut forced Alec to answer those questions early.

The FlightPlan exists because we more students to have the kind of support that helps them answer those questions by figuring out what matters, knowing where to go deeper, and having confidence in what to do next.

CLAIM YOUR SPOT IN FLIGHT 2

Stay Curious,

P.S. Want to see a demo of The FlightPlan? Watch Alec walk through the platform using the profile he would have had as a high schooler here.

The advice I give is almost never what parents expect. Not “add another AP.” It’s something else: do fewer things, go deeper. As deep as you can. That’s the key.

Let me tell you about the freshman who took that advice, and got into Harvard and Dartmouth this past admissions cycle.

When Abby and her mom first called me, Abby was doing everything: basketball, soccer, lacrosse, tennis, volunteering all over the place, none of it connected. She loved debate and knew she liked STEM, but had no clue what kind. She was a freshman. She had the benefit of time. So we encouraged her to sample.

She started with neuroscience and wrote a research paper on mental health in athletes. Six months in, she realized it wasn’t her thing. Her favorite part was “talking to someone a few steps down the road and seeing what their life was like,” so she decided to explore a different aspect of STEM with another mentor.

She tried engineering, and realized this was her thing. Her mentor Vanessa became her engineering inspiration, and together they built a full portfolio, culminating in a 3D-printed pill bottle dispenser for people with Parkinson’s. And when Abby wanted to give other kids that same STEM exposure, she looked for a Society of Women Engineers chapter nearby, found none, and started one with a friend.

All the while, debate continued to grow into her other core passion. Sophomore year she made a hard call and quit all sports to go all in. It paid off: by the end of that same year, as one of the youngest in the room, she qualified for the Tournament of Champions.

Her mom reached out to ask whether Abby should skip a debate summer program, since she was already doing plenty of debate. I told her the opposite: don’t add new things, go deeper in the ones she loves. Let her go.

So she did. And here’s what going deep actually looked like.

One evening, Abby’s mom came home to a strange sound humming between the floors of the house. She was sure it was a swarm of bees somewhere in the walls, and went upstairs trying to figure out how they’d get rid of the hive. Standing outside Abby’s door, she realized it wasn’t bees. It was Abby, running speaking drills to build her speed, night after night, until the words blurred into a hum. Around the same time, Abby traded her favorite show, Gilmore Girls, for college debate rounds on YouTube. She’s now watched every available high school and college round three times through, both for fun and to study how the best debaters build their most advanced arguments.

That’s not a kid “padding a resume.” This is what authentic obsession looks like. She didn’t debate because it looked good for college. She loved it, so much that she never missed a single practice and won her team’s perfect-attendance award.

And she went far. Junior year, at the NDCA National Championship, Abby lost her first two rounds. Then she won every single one after that, all the way to the title. In the final she faced the top-ranked debater in the country, the only student that season with more championship bids than her, and won on a case she’d spent months researching herself. She became the first Marlborough debater to win it since the 1980s.

Here’s what folks misunderstand.

Abby wasn’t chasing a flawless transcript or resume for college. Something deeper drove her. What did this look like in practice? She decided not to take AP Spanish on purpose, not because she couldn’t do it, but because she’d rather protect the thirteen weekends a year she spent traveling to tournaments. Surrounded by such ambitious, talented girls at Marlborough, even a girl as impressive as her wondered if she measured up (this is human; we all experience this!). So when she built her college list around debate teams instead of rankings (because she wanted to keep debating), she was sure there was no way she’d get into Harvard or Dartmouth.

She got into both.

And now, despite her extraordinary humility, she is able to say: “I’m pretty confident that I’m someone who deserves a place in certain competitive spaces.”

Why am I so proud of her? Not the acceptances. One of the greatest privileges of this job is watching a kid I’ve known since freshman year grow into someone who knows exactly who she is. Abby stayed true to what lit her up, unapologetically. And she’ll walk into Harvard knowing she belongs.

What this means for your student:

1. Take exploration seriously, then pivot without guilt. Abby spent six months on neuroscience before deciding it really wasn’t for her. So she pivoted to engineering, which clicked for her. That time wasn’t wasted. It’s how she found the real thing.

2. Make the sacrifice that lets them go deep. Debate only became Abby’s when she gave up tennis for it. (Sammi quit ballet and ended up at Yale. Nahla, who coined our “3am test,” went all in and ended up at Harvard.) Sacrifice in the areas that matter tends to pay off.

3. Build the college list on reasons unique to each school. Abby chose hers for the debate teams. Admissions officers can tell the difference between a kid chasing a ranking and a kid who knows why she belongs there.

I’ve spoken to every type of student, and I empathize. The one who does the thing because “it looks good for college.” The one who starts too late, never gets to sample, and sticks with something they don’t love because they think they have no other choice. The one doing everything, but nothing all that well. Or the kid not applying themselves at all. And none of them realize how much these small decisions shape their future, and which doors they unintentionally close because of naivete freshman or sophomore year.

This is exactly why we built The FlightPlan. Because we wish we could give every high schooler this clarity and agency over their journey. Abby would have been the dream FlightPlan student. (She gets it so deeply that her mom just signed her younger brother up with a mentor and FlightPlan too.)

After I interviewed Abby, I texted her mom to say how proud she should be. Her reply meant the world to me.

She called our conversations “a human version of what FlightPlan is.”

For years I’ve given this guidance one family at a time, on calls exactly like the one I had with Abby as a freshman. FlightPlan is how we finally get this hands-on guidance to every student, but better: data-driven, always on, always available. It shows your child where they actually stand, helps them differentiate the signal from the noise, empowers them to go deep on what they love, and maps the path from there.

On August 11th we reopen The FlightPlan, and I’m hosting a virtual workshop to introduce it. Come see how we help a kid go from “there’s no way I’d get in” to knowing they belong.

RSVP FOR THE VIRTUAL EVENT

Stay Curious,

“What are you interested in?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you like doing when nobody’s telling you what to do?”

“Nothing, really.”

Every answer was short. Casual. Almost rehearsed.

He had the cool shrug down perfectly.

At first I wondered if he was simply checked out. But the longer we spoke, the more I realized:

He cared deeply. He had just decided it was safer to look like he didn’t.

(As I sometimes do, I’ve changed identifying details and combined a few stories to protect student privacy.)

We’ve been hosting Friends of FlightPlan dinners to share what we’re building. Again and again, guests reflect on the stories that once limited them—and how differently things might have felt if someone had helped them see what they were capable of sooner.

What Was Hiding Beneath the Shrug

This “disengaged” kid wasn’t disengaged at all.

He’d taught himself to repair old cameras from YouTube videos. He could spend hours breaking down why one director chose a certain shot, how a film pulled off its visual effects, or which new technology made an iconic scene possible. When something genuinely caught his attention, he went all the way down the rabbit hole.

But when I probed, he dismissed these interests as: “Nothing that serious.”

The problem was never that he had no interests. The problem was that he’d learned to discount them before anyone else could.

Somewhere along the way, he’d started telling himself a story. My grades aren’t good enough. Other kids are already ahead. Even if I try now, it probably won’t matter.

And once a kid believes the outcome is already decided, withdrawing becomes rational. It’s a form of protection. Why risk trying out loud when failure might confirm your worst fear? Much safer to say “I don’t care.” “It’s not that serious.”

If you haven’t already heard me rave about Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop’s book, The Disengaged Teen, I couldn’t recommend it more! The central insight captures this story perfectly: disengagement is rarely the whole story. There is usually something deeper underneath.

The “I Don’t Care” Defense

Parents often interpret this behavior as laziness, immaturity, or a lack of ambition. Sometimes it is. But often, indifference is armor.

A kid who admits “I really want this” also has to face the possibility he won’t get it. That’s mortifying for a teenager who already doubts himself. So he builds an escape hatch: if I never really tried, I’ve never failed.

The cruel part is that the armor creates the exact outcome he’s afraid of. He assumes trying won’t matter, so he stops trying. Because he stops, he has fewer swings at bat. Because he has had fewer chances to prove himself, he’s even more sure he isn’t capable. The story becomes self-fulfilling.

You Can’t Argue a Kid Into Confidence

You can tell your child he’s brilliant and capable all day long. When he doesn’t believe it himself, the words bounce right off.

Confidence isn’t built through reassurance. It’s built through evidence. A kid needs an experience that lets him say: I did something hard. I followed through. It was mine.

Researchers who study this describe it as the gap between a “fixed” and a “growth” mindset, and Stanford’s Carol Dweck has spent decades showing that kids who believe ability can grow outperform those who think it’s fixed, even when they start in the same place.

The summer before freshman year at Stanford, I volunteered to translate asylum forms, I also helped care for the families’ children. That experience later inspired me to teach English to Stanford’s janitorial staff—and ultimately to start Curious Cardinals. You never know where one “yes” will lead.

Why Summer is the Window

Summer gives a kid something the school year almost never does. Space to try with no fear of a bad grade on the other side of effort and no classroom full of peers watching.

That safety, no one judging, nothing to fail publicly, is often exactly what lets a shut-down kid break free.

The goal isn’t a polished addition to their résumé. It’s one win that’s genuinely theirs. Something small enough to actually finish and real enough that they can point to it and say I did that:

• Sign up for a 10K and cross the finish line

• Go to a summer program where they know no one, and find out they can hold their own in a room of strangers

• Write the personal essay they’ve been avoiding, start to finish

• Build the drone and get it in the air

• Grow something in the garden and cook one dinner for friends with it

• Shoot a short film on their phone and actually post it

That’s it. One win, no audience, no grade. Enough to interrupt the story they’ve been telling themself.

By the end of our call, this kid hadn’t transformed. He still said “I don’t know” plenty. But when I suggested a concrete first step, he didn’t shrug. He said, “Yeah. I could do that.”

Tiny sentence. But that’s where confidence begins.

So before school resumes, I’ll leave you with the question I couldn’t stop thinking about: What story has your kid started believing about themself, and what’s one small win this summer that could prove it wrong?

Stay Curious,

On behalf of the Curious Cardinals Team

P.S. This is exactly why we built The FlightPlan. Kids don’t need more vague pressure to “do something impressive.” They need help seeing what’s already there, naming the next achievable step, and building enough momentum to believe a bigger future is possible. We reopen The FlightPlan in 20 days. RSVP for our virtual launch events on August 11th (9 AM PT) and 12th (5 PM PT). Let’s find your kid’s first win before the summer window closes.

But she didn’t start high school that way.

At Exeter, she was spread across, in her words, “50 bajillion things.” Theater. Speech and debate. Model UN. A growing pull toward politics and social justice.

At first, she took the right approach: say yes.

She joined Model UN because a friend signed up. Why not? She initially thought it sounded lame. She ended up becoming president of the team.

She said yes to a school trip to Alabama on a civil rights track, working with the Equal Justice Initiative on mass incarceration. That’s where advocacy stopped being an abstract interest and became something she could see a path in.

Before that trip, she said, “I hadn’t ever seen a path of how it could be possible for me to make a difference.”

Her interests began to crystallize: educational access, socioeconomic inequality, and mass incarceration.

But eventually, all that saying yes left her chronically overextended and exhausted.

Nahla, pictured doing some of the “50 bajillion” things :)

The Night It Started

One night, Nahla was at her laptop far too late, staring at prep for one of her activities, when she asked herself:

“Would I really crack open an energy drink for this?”

The answer was no.

Nahla loves her sleep. So she created a test for every activity on her schedule:

“Would I happily stay up until 3am for this?”

In other words: Do I love this enough to make sacrifices for it?

Around the same time, her best friend, an aspiring surgeon, would practice sutures in their room for fun. While her friend stitched, Nahla would talk through political strategy: If we call this senator before the vote, here’s what might happen.

One day, her friend looked up and said, “Nahla, you talk about advocacy the way I talk about surgery.”

That made something click.

She realized that in order to focus on the thing that lit her up, she was going to have to cut some things.

The first activity to fail the test was speech and debate. Her close friends were on the team. She had been doing it since middle school.

She quit anyway.

Not because she couldn’t do it, but because she realized it wasn’t what she cared about most.

The 3am test was born.

The Part Most Parents Miss

Cutting an activity feels terrifying to kids. We see it constantly: students frozen between “I need to find the perfect thing” and “I can’t give anything up.” Then a quarter passes, and they have made no decision at all.

Nahla’s advice is simple: Never ask a student to cut something before they can picture what will fill the space.

Her version of that question: “If I had an extra hour in my day, what could I do with it?”

For her, the answer was advocacy with non-profits in the UN system alongside a mentor she admired. The more that mentor told her about her work, the more Nahla thought, “Whatever is going on here, I want that.”

Once she knew what she wanted more of, quitting felt easier.

That’s the lesson for parents: don’t make your kid choose before they know what genuinely lights them up. Start with what they want more of, not what they need to give up.

The One-Rule House

August, a rising junior at Yale and another Curious Cardinals mentor, grew up with a version of this. His parents had one rule:

“You have to be busy. We won’t tell you what to do, but you need to be doing something.”

He tried a handful of clubs, then quickly pruned them. Theater and writing survived. The two things that made him come home saying, “You won’t believe what happened today!!”

Sammi, Yale ’24, now a working actor and licensed EMT, reached a similar crossroads between ballet and musical theater after growing up as a semi-professional child performer in New York. She could not level up in ballet and do every musical she wanted. She had to choose where to go deepest. Her takeaway:

“You can have both breadth and depth, as long as the breadth is contained.”

She didn’t have to abandon dance. But she did have to decide which passion would receive the greatest share of her time, energy, and commitment.

None of them found focus by identifying one perfect passion. They explored widely, paid attention to their energy, and then made increasingly intentional choices.

August (left) and Sammi (right), mid-scene, years before Yale.

Three Questions to Steal

So how do you notice what energizes your kid without interrogating them about their “passion”?

I asked all three of these mentors what parents should ask to get more than a one-word “good” or “fine” answer.

• Nahla: What was your favorite part of your day?

• Sammi: What are you not liking?

• August: How much do you have left in the tank?

Notice they’re all really asking about the same thing: energy. Your kid might not tell you what they care about. Their energy will.

So if you want to help your kid zero in on what they love most this school year, try Nahla’s practice:

1. Ask: what’s something you love? For Nahla it was sleep, but she says it works as the ice cream test or the pizza test too, whatever your kid would hate to give up. Then go activity by activity: which of these would you give it up for?

2. Encourage them to ask close friends: What do I seem to love? Where do I light up?

3. And finally: If you had one extra hour in your day, where would you want to spend it?

The goal is not to make narrowing down feel like a loss. It is to make room for something more exciting.

If your teen ran the 3am test on their schedule tonight, what do you think would survive?

I had the privilege of learning all of this from Nahla, Sammi, and August during a mentor panel last week.

The mentor panel in question :)

We’re hosting more conversations like this throughout the month. Come hear directly from young people who have recently made these choices—and who your kid may actually listen to.

RSVP FOR THE NEXT MENTOR PANEL (7/24 AT 9:30 AM PT)

Stay Curious,

P.S. Nahla, Sammi, and August all work one-on-one with Curious Cardinals students. If your teen could use someone a few steps ahead to help them run their own 3am test (and build what fills the space), schedule a call here.

By every conventional measure, he’s doing everything right.

And still, when I asked what he actually wanted to go deep on this summer (outside of SAT prep), he had nothing.

So we started excavating. Not the surface layer of Legos, video games, and hanging out with friends. The layer underneath. It turns out Lucas loves engineering because it’s logical and it’s physical. He would rather build a real solution with his hands than reason about one in the abstract. He’d just never connected that to anything a high schooler could actually do.

I didn’t sugarcoat it.

“Lucas, if you want Penn, you’re not doing enough. Your grades are awesome, but grades are table stakes. I love hearing about your interest in engineering and building physical things, especially with applications to climate. But none of that is on your activity sheet. If I’m an admissions officer and I don’t see a single hour of it on your record, I have no reason to believe you. If you really want Penn or a school of that caliber, you need evidence of your interests and proof of the impact you’ve made.”

And that record gets read fast. Back in 2017, Penn’s dean of admissions told the Chronicle of Higher Education that initial application reviews had gone from at least fifteen minutes to about four. Volumes have only grown since. Four minutes is the first pass on four years of work. Whatever your kid loves has to be visible in that window.

The process doesn’t reward what you say you love. It rewards what you can prove you did. And fifteen, with a whole summer ahead, is plenty of time to build proof.

We didn’t invent a story out of nothing. We found the thread already there: the recycling program, the plastic waste angle, real climate work already happening on his own block. Then we asked what it could become if he stopped treating it as a side project and started treating it as the project. A physical solution he could build for families. A mentor to give him the structure he thrives on. A competition eighteen months out, a reason to keep building once school starts and life gets loud.

By the end of the call, Lucas wasn’t overwhelmed. He was relieved. Someone had finally looked at everything he was doing and said: here’s what’s missing, and here’s how we raise your odds. (No guarantees in this process. There never are. But odds you can actually move.)

My next call was with Josie. I pulled up her activity list before she joined and felt overwhelmed just reading it. A rising 10th grader: an innovation program, two community service commitments, an organization she founded that teaches girls to build with AI, field hockey, dance, and the school microfinance club.

Her question for the summer: “What do I do next?” Her instinct, like most kids’ instinct, was to start something new.

“You’re doing more than enough,” I told her. “Let’s cut something first.”

Then, instead of adding, we mapped what it could look like to go deeper with what she has already built. Run the workshop for more girls this fall. Turn it into a multi-part series. Find a collaborator in another city and grow it beyond her zip code. Do real research on AI and kids, the benefits and the harms, and submit it to a journal. Or enter the whole thing in a competition. Not because she expects to win (you can never expect to win) but because a deadline gives the work a shape and a date.

She can’t do it all. She gets to choose which path inspires her most.

Same interest. Ten times the substance.

Carmen, founder of NEUROSPARKLY, teaching her workshop this past spring.

The Two Camps

Lucas and Josie were two of the user research calls I’ve been doing since we opened The FlightPlan to our founding 100 families in May: thirty-five conversations so far, all to understand how families are using the product so we can keep making it better. And after all of them, I can tell you that almost every high schooler falls into one of two camps.

1. The kid not doing enough. A sport, maybe a club or two, coasting, suddenly a rising junior wondering if it’s too late.

2. The kid doing too much. Six activities, no depth, spread thin, stressed.

If your kid is in the “not doing enough” camp:

• Check for alignment. What they say they love and what their activity sheet shows should tell the same story. When they apply, you want consistency between what they want and what they’ve done.

• Pressure-test the dream. If an Ivy is the goal (theirs or, be honest, yours), make sure they actually want to do the work it takes to get there. Julia on our team says it best: “If you don’t like the journey to Harvard, you probably won’t like Harvard.”

• Start somewhere and time-box it. The worst mistake I see is wasting months over-intellectualizing the perfect opportunity. Pick something and start. Worse case scenario you don’t like it? Reflect at the end of the season what you learned, why you don’t like it, and take those learnings to choose what’s next.

• Don’t reinvent the wheel. Before adding anything net-new, look at what they’re already doing that could go further. Lucas didn’t need to start from zero. He could take the one-off initiative he already led as a springboard.

If your kid is in the “doing too much” camp:

• Stop. Don’t add more. Find at least one club, fellowship, or activity to cut. How else are they going to have time to think?

• Go deep with what they’ve got. Don’t just participate in debate or mock trial. Prep hard to place at tournaments, and show up like a leader now to become one by senior year.

• Become an expert. Conduct research on the topic or pursue an independent study at school.

• Beware shiny object syndrome. Going deeper with what they already have is an asset. Depth builds true expertise. A seventh activity reads as (and feels like) noise.

So here’s what I’d contemplate this week. Which one is your kid: the one with room to build, or the one with no room to think?

And then the harder question, the one I recommend asking your student: when high school ends, what do you want the headline of your story to be? Not the college name. We can never guarantee that. The description of the impact they’ve made, the legacy they’re leaving.

This all gets at the work we do inside The FlightPlan, and it reopens in August. If you want your high schooler in the next cohort, create an account and join the waitlist.

JOIN THE WAITLIST

Smiling with amazing mentors Andy & Sammi pre FlightPlan launch event in NYC!

And if your teen wants some college inspiration in the meantime, our weekly summer panels are open to everyone.

📅 Join Us This Summer: Free Virtual College Panels

We’re hosting live panels with our mentors all summer for families thinking about the college journey:

• Tomorrow, Friday, July 10 at 9:30 AM PT: covering how to help your child take their 100 interests and find direction.

• Monday, July 13, at 5:00 PM PT: defining what “impact” actually means to a college, beyond the buzzword.

• Friday, July 24, at 9:30 AM PT: sharing real ways your child can make a difference in their community and why it matters

• Tuesday, July 28, at 5:00 PM PT: explaining why saying no to another activity often helps students more than saying yes.

• Tuesday, August 4, at 5:00 PM PT: breaking down how to start crafting an authentic college story, early.

Stay Curious,

Audrey on behalf of the Curious Cardinals Team

P.S. Hello from the team building The FlightPlan :)

“Honestly? I’m proud of you. But you had way too much left in the tank at the end.”

I rolled my eyes. Then we both started laughing.

You might read that and think: how could he be so hard on you? But I felt the opposite of crushed. I felt taken seriously. My dad watched my race like it mattered, because to him it did. And a kid who genuinely believed she might be an Olympian in the making needed exactly that: someone who treated the dream like it was real enough to coach.

Here’s the thing about my parents. They never played the same role, and I think that’s why it worked. My mom would come to a meet, watch me run ten seconds off my best mile, and beam: “Great job, honey!” She had no idea what my best time even was, and I loved her for it. My dad knew every split. If they’d both shown up the way he did, it would’ve been too much. But because they played different parts, his honesty landed as something rare instead of relentless.

I used to say I was bad at math. He wouldn’t hear it. “Where does this come from? You’re good at anything you put your mind to.” He said I’d run a business one day, not become a lawyer like I’d planned, and I rolled my eyes at that too. Then I started Curious Cardinals, and he was the first person to say, “You might have a real business here.”

Believing in yourself usually starts with someone believing in you first. My dad has been that person since I was a little girl jumping into his arms when he came home late from the office, somehow never too tired to be thrilled to see me.

When I left Stanford, it wasn’t an easy call for my parents. It was my dad who gave me the sign of approval, who decided that doing something unique was worth investing in. And honestly, Curious Cardinals exists because of him in a more literal way than people know. During the pandemic, I was FaceTiming my freshman-year boyfriend constantly, and it was my dad who insisted he come quarantine with us, because he couldn’t stand that college kids were losing their freshman year. He told that boyfriend’s parents that something good would come of it.

That boyfriend became my co-founder, Alec. The good thing was Curious Cardinals, born from the two of us overhearing each other’s mentorship sessions under one roof. All because my dad believed something good was on the other side of a hard moment.

There’s research that backs up what he did instinctively. In study after study on what psychologists call the “Pygmalion effect,” the expectations adults hold for a child measurably shape how that child performs, not because the child is told to try harder, but because being believed in changes what they believe about themselves.

My dad never read that research. He just told me the truth, every time, because honesty was how he loved me. People only tell you the truth when they care. But the honesty was never the whole thing. It came wrapped in 4:45 wake-ups to drive me to a marathon start line. In showing up at my launch event last month, beaming, and in the LinkedIn comments that are the public, slightly embarrassing version of who he’s been behind closed doors my whole life.

That’s the part I don’t want you to miss. It was never just that he was honest with me. It was honesty plus showing up plus an overwhelming amount of love, all at once, for as long as I can remember. The truth only felt like belief because I never once doubted he was in my corner.

So in lieu of this Father’s Day, here’s the question I keep coming back to, and the one I’d offer you:

Does your kid know you take them seriously? Not that you’re proud, not that you love them, but that you believe what they care about is the real deal, worth your honest attention, worth being coached on?

Because that’s the thing that taught me to take myself seriously. And I’m not sure anything else would have.

Stay curious,

I read for five minutes every night before bed. Most nights my eyelids get heavy after two pages. But every so often I find a book that pulls me in like a magnet, and I can’t stop turning pages. That second kind of book is the one I want to help your kid find.

Here’s my confession. I’ve been reading a 400-page book on the AI race for far longer than I’d like to admit, especially for someone who holds herself to a book a month. I may or may not have fallen behind.

Then last week I needed something for my flight home from Europe. I told myself I’d work the whole way, but I knew there’d be gaps that would otherwise get filled with Instagram reels. So I stopped at the airport bookstore, and let out an actual “yes!” out loud when I spotted Strangers, Belle Burden’s memoir. Trusted colleagues had recommended it. So had my Instagram algorithm.

One day later, I’d finished it. More like devoured it. I’d barely opened Instagram. I just read, page by page, in every gap of that travel day.

It was a reminder I keep having to relearn: we do more of the things that are good for us when we actually enjoy them. We read instead of scroll when we find a book that makes us more curious with every page.

So as summer starts, here are the books I’m recommending to you, for you to model reading and for everyone important in your life.

For you:

Strangers, Belle Burden. The one I devoured. A Curious Cardinals mom who’s a wealth advisor told me it’s a must-read for every woman. I don’t disagree. I’d add: anyone who wants to understand what another person is going through, divorce, motherhood, all of it.

Mom Needs a Moment, Cassidy Freitas. For new moms, or moms in the thick of it, who could stand to be kinder to themselves. It’s about breaking cycles, the pressure mothers feel to be perfect, and letting yourself off the hook. Like therapy in a book. Cassidy is an expert therapist and a Curious Cardinals mom. She’s the first to acknowledge that moms can’t do it alone and must lean on other resources: a CC mentor works with her daughter on a science fair goal so Cassidy can focus on what matters, being present, taking her for boba. She practices what she preaches.

Culpability, Bruce Holsinger. On the surface it’s a family story. Underneath, it’s about AI: its limits, and the question that keeps surfacing, who’s actually culpable when it fails? A genuinely engaging read that I kept turning over after I finished. If AI is on your mind, this one will stay with you.

For the graduating senior in your life:

How to Start, Jodi Kantor. “Wonder, intrigue, excitement: when you feel those, run to wherever they lead.” It’s deeply practical but also aspirational, optimistic about what work can and should mean for an often-jaded generation (cough cough, mine). It covers the lessons college doesn’t: from writing an insightful thank-you note to finding a boss you respect, so a new grad enters the workforce informed and hopeful.

For your teen:

Now, the real challenge: sparking a love of reading in your teen.

So I went to the source. A Curious Cardinals legend. When she was in 7th grade, I wrote a newsletter about her: offered anything for her bat mitzvah, she asked for books. She’s a rising 10th grader now, and her passion project is a book club. I asked her what books a teen would actually love. Here’s her list:

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, V.E. Schwab for teens who love unconventional plots that blend fantasy and fiction and want a book they’ll think about for weeks.

Carrie Soto Is Back, Taylor Jenkins Reid a fast-paced story about sports, fame, and downfall. For teens who want a fun, inspiring summer read.

The Gilded Ones, Namina Forna a fantasy page-turner with a fully built-out world. More of an investment, but she still thinks about it four years later.

Sylver’s Book Club is built to help teens rediscover the joy of reading. Through monthly picks across genres, fantasy, mystery, romance, historical fiction, members explore new kinds of books and find what they genuinely love. Whether your teen is already a reader or trying to get back into it, there’s a place for them. Learn more at sylversbookstack.com.

With Sylver in our office - such a super star :)

I understand the reading burnout so many high schoolers feel. When every book is assigned for a grade, the love of it drains out. It’s incredibly common.

When I got into Stanford, I started reading a book a week. Suddenly I had the appetite to read for its own sake, not toward some other goal. Summer is the perfect window to find that again. But it starts with the right book.

So don’t be afraid to put a book down 20 pages in if it isn’t landing. The goal is the book your kid can’t put down, and I promise it exists.

Picture it: your teen reading at the dinner table, and instead of telling them to put the phone away, you’re pleading with them to put the book away.

Us reading in the “Cardinal Crib” when we started Curious Cardinals as a pandemic passion project in fall of 2020 :) we’ve always been eager to make reading cool!!

A few ways to get there this summer:

• Take them to a cool bookstore and let them wander until they find something they can’t wait to start.

• Use social media for good. BookTok and Reese’s Book Club are full of great picks. So is the list above.

• Read together. By the pool, on the beach, on a picnic blanket somewhere beautiful in the city. Make it the bonding activity, not the assignment.

At a trendy bookstore with my high school bestie Ben after senior year

Here’s to finding the book your kid can’t put down. Reading is the “gateway drug” to so many other healthy interests, passions, and pursuits. It can be the start of something real and new for your kid this summer.

Here’s to less scrolling and more stories this summer,

Me with iconic feminist books gifted to me by my iconic history Professor Estele Freedman from Stanford

We were just… sitting there.

I was very fortunate to have just spent a week blazing my way through Europe with no stone unturned. Art fairs, biennales, hikes, cities and countryside. Now we were on a beach in Croatia. I’d done my morning run. I’d read my two chapters. And I had the audacity to ask my mom what was next on the agenda.

She rolled her eyes at me.

“Audrey, I’m going to teach you something important. I’m going to teach you how to relax — because you don’t know how to not do anything, and that’s a problem.”

I was, as kids say now, a productivity-maxer. At sixteen.

Every cell in me wanted to move. But she made me laugh about it, and we stayed. And it turned out to be one of the most valuable hours of my adolescence — not because of what we did, but because of what we didn’t.

I think about that beach all the time now. Especially in June.

My mom and me on our travels :)

Why I Still Think About That Beach

As someone who loves nothing more than checking off the boxes on my to-do list, allowing myself the proper time to unwind and recharge has been a continual growth area for me.

How do I navigate not over-scheduling as a busy founder? I make as few plans as humanly possible on weekends.

How do I approach phone-detox? No phone before bedtime. I try to read and journal three things I’m grateful for every night before I go to bed, no matter how busy I am.

What I’ve come to realize is that there’s a difference between over-scheduled and phone-inundated. Over-scheduled may look like daily extracurriculars, constant plans and nonstop go, go, go. Phone-inundated is different: any spare minute, out comes the phone. Any ounce of discomfort, boredom, fear, revert to the phone.

They’re different, but both dangerous in their own rights. Combined? They’re toxic. No time or space to think, or to be with your own thoughts.

Real boredom happens on a free schedule, yes, but also phone-free. It happens when you have nothing to fidget with, nothing to escape into, and you have to stay with your own thoughts. That’s where the breakthroughs live. The reflections. The eureka moments.

Anyone can occupy themselves with a screen. But do you know how to find the joy in your own thoughts? In a free afternoon?

When I look back on my own high school summers, the moments that mattered weren’t the “optimized ones.” They were reading Shakespeare in Oxford, not occupied with the fear of a bad grade, but instead learning for the sake of it. Taking the train one or two stops further than we were allowed to explore a new place. Running our annual lemonade stand for the Robin Hood Foundation, committed to breaking last summer’s sales.

The unstructured fun. The freedom to explore, to play, to make memories I’m still proud of at twenty-five.

The lemonade stand in question :)

The Aunt Jetta Breath

Every summer my dad and I take beach walks, and my instinct is always go, go, go. He’ll stop me, tell me to wiggle my toes in the sand, and take what he calls an “Aunt Jetta breath.”

Aunt Jetta was his beloved aunt. Not wealthy (she worked at the post office, her husband was a schoolteacher), but he says she lived a richer life than almost anyone he’s known. She took him to Coney Island as a boy, sat him on the sand with the roller coasters roaring behind them, and just… breathed. The salt air. The ice cream. The kids laughing, the seagulls squawking. At the top of the Empire State Building, on the Circle Line, she’d stop him and tell him to take in the view and breathe.

She was teaching mindfulness decades before anyone called it that.

He passed her breath down to me. I’m passing it down to you.

Bing.

My phone, right on cue, even as I write to you about stillness. The pull is constant. You can be trying your absolute best to take in the view, and it’s a noisy little impediment. So I put it on silent.

First selfie, then Aunt Jetta breath :)

This Week: Teach the One Skill That Lasts

Here’s the thing about stillness, about rest, about knowing how to recharge: no one is born with it. Someone has to teach it. My mom taught me on that beach. Aunt Jetta taught my dad on the sand at Coney Island. It gets handed down.

Summer is the time to teach it. By the CDC’s own data, only about a quarter of U.S. teens get the recommended amount of sleep on a typical night, and rest is tied directly to the emotional regulation, focus, and steadiness we all want for our kids. The phone is usually the thief.

So this summer, I have two hopes for your student:

First, I hope they go after something. Dive deeper into a passion, explore something brand new, chase a real goal — read a stack of books, train for something, build something that matters to them. Summer should be exploratory and a little ambitious.

Second, give them the opposite. The unstructured time. The boredom. The permission to sit on a beach with no plan and discover they can survive it — even love it.

Some of it you can even “engineer”:

• Take them somewhere with bad cell service, where disconnecting isn’t a choice anyone has to enforce.

• Drop them in a new city with a couple of must-sees and no tight plan, and let them wander between them.

• Make it easier for them to see their friends! In person, no need for phones.

• Encourage them to get a job with downtime built in — lifeguarding, scooping ice cream, camp counselor. The boredom between rushes is where the daydreaming happens, and they’re getting paid to sit with their own thoughts.

Because the most powerful thing you can give a kid isn’t another structured program. It’s the ability to take care of themselves, to rest, to unplug, to sit on a beach with no plan and feel okay. That’s a skill they’ll use at sixteen, at twenty-five, and long after you’re not the one reminding them.

So I’ll leave you with the question I keep coming back to: What do you want your kid to remember about this summer ten years from now?

It probably won’t be the most productive week. It’ll be the new place, the long laugh with a friend, the book they couldn’t put down, and maybe, the afternoon someone who loved them taught them how to take a breath.

Here’s to a summer of adventure, exploration, and learning how to take an Aunt Jetta breath. :)

Stay Curious,

P.S. Want a mentor this summer? Schedule a consultation call here.

Practicing what I preach! Visited a best friend in London. Had to work remotely, but we made the most of our mornings together. Here’s me biking back from a swim in the ladies’ pond in Hampstead Heath. Peak summer city adventure!

1. In high school: For overscheduling myself and not having any time to rest or recharge

2. In high school: for taking something that was hers without asking and lying

3. Summer before freshman year of college: for scratching the car and lying about how it happened

Notice what’s not on the list.

The Car Story

The summer before heading to college, I was borrowing my brother’s car with my friends. One of them tried to park, misjudged the spot, and scratched it. I started crying. Not because of the damage, but because I was so worried about disappointing my brother and my parents.

My friend said, “Just tell them someone backed into it in a parking lot.”

I didn’t have the sturdiness to push back. I was so worried I’d upset them. So that’s what I told my mom.

She found out the truth. And she lost it.

Not because of the scratch. Mistakes happen. Cars get dented. Earrings get lost. Material things are material things.

She lost it because I lied.

That moment is etched into me. I have never lied to my mother since. And the lesson stuck deeper than that: no matter what mistake I make, I will be truthful about it. Because my mom drew a line that wasn’t about achievement or being perfect. It was about character.

My mom has always taught me to focus on what matters most - like having fun :)

What She Didn’t Get Mad About

I genuinely cannot remember a single time my mom asked me what I got on a test. Not once.

I’d out of breath walk off the track, ten seconds off my mile PR and she’d say, “That was amazing Auds!” I’d roll my eyes — “Mom, that was terrible” — and she’d just shrug. She didn’t care about the time. She knew I was working hard. She knew I was ambitious. She didn’t need to micromanage it.

When the pandemic hit my freshman year at Stanford and Alec and I came home mid-finals, my mom was filming a documentary. We sat down to study as she was hanging with her film crew. She looked at us like we were aliens.

“Why are you guys studying? The world’s about to end. Have a drink.”

The day before, we’d been at a friend’s house where the parents had told us, “Make sure you’re not distracting each other. It’s finals week.”

Guess which kid regularly calls their mom. Here’s me on FaceTime with my mom twinning because she helps style me, and I love to call her :)

Pick Your Battles

Here’s what I want you to hear:

What you fixate on becomes what your kid believes you value. What you get upset about becomes what gets etched into their soul. The questions you ask them — How was the test? What did you get? Did you finish the application? — those are the questions they’ll one day reflect on when they think about how you parented them.

My mom picked her battles. Lying was the line. Overcommitting until I burned out was the line. Grades were not the line.

And the wild thing is… I ended up at Stanford anyway. Not because she pushed. Because she didn’t.

When I got in early, I started reading a book a week. I never read for pleasure in high school because I was too wound up. The confidence to indulge my intellectual curiosity for the sake of it, rather than for a grade, only kicked in when I was operating from a place of abundance rather than fear.

And remember: that fear came from me. Not my parents.

But the ambition to work hard, to get the best grades, to become president of the debate team — that existed because I was in the driver’s seat. Because no one was projecting their hopes onto me.

That’s how motivation works for teenagers. It almost never works when it’s forced or imposed. It works when they feel ownership.

Why I’m Telling You This

A lot of parents ask me how my parents parented. What fueled the ambition. How I ended up where I ended up.

The honest answer is: my parents focused on the right things. They got mad about lying, not about grades. They valued character over scores. And that’s the version of me that walked into Stanford — not anxious, not performing, not burnt out. Just curious and grateful.

That’s why we built The FlightPlan.

Because right now, kids are going to Reddit rabbit holes and TikTok rumor mills for college guidance. They’re absorbing pressure from everywhere: counselors, peers, college acceptance Instagram accounts. They’re crippled with angst, spending their time doomscrolling — which only fuels more angst — instead of doing the real-world work that actually builds self-confidence (and, not coincidentally, leads to better college outcomes).

The FlightPlan is built to turn the temperature down.

To give kids accurate, trusted information about where they actually are.

To redirect their anxiety and overwhelm into action: small steps, real projects, opportunities they can actually pursue.

I like to say: “if something feels overwhelming, it just means the first step isn’t small enough.”

The FlightPlan makes the first step digestible. Actionable.

So when the inevitable college anxiety hits (and it will), they feel like something has their back. And what that something is telling them to do is go do the thing that matters in the real world. That it doesn’t have to look like solving climate change or publishing research. That there’s something digestible they can do tomorrow, and it makes a difference.

To learn more about The FlightPlan, RSVP for tonight’s virtual event

One Last Thing

You only have your kid in the nest for so many years. And the values you transmit shape the adult they become: what you fixate on, what you celebrate, what makes you lose it. They will one day be 25 in the real world. How they reflect on you will be a mirror of what you chose to care about.

Pick your battles wisely.

Stay Curious,

My mom is genuinely my favorite person. Here’s a pic of us at a retreat we went to together as the only mama daughter duo :)

That was the first line of Aarya’s submission.

She didn’t lead with the technology. She led with her grandma. Then she told us what she built: a CRISPR design tool that targets only disease-causing mutations, without touching healthy DNA.

And just like that, I was wide awake.

Which is saying something, because I had no business being awake.

It had been a go-go sprint. Four FlightPlan launch events in one week. Our founding 100 class filled in under 48 hours! By the time I got back to San Francisco late Friday, I was running on fumes.

From our NYC launch event!

But Sunday morning, I was at the office anyway. Hundreds of submissions had come in for our second annual Timeless Skills in an AI Era Pitch Competition. While we’re lucky to have assembled a strong judging committee, Alec and I, as the co-founders, believe in the importance of weighing in.

Coffee in hand. Tired, but ready.

Aarya’s was one of the first I opened.

What started as a working Sunday turned into one of the most energizing days I’ve had all year. By Sunday night, Alec and I had reviewed countless submissions. While our team unfortunately cannot provide feedback on each individual submission, I want to share five patterns that emerged across the projects that rose to the top.

These are the patterns that win college admissions. The patterns that will define which kids thrive in the AI era.

1. Start with the WHY

The strongest submissions didn’t open with “the market opportunity is…” They opened with their people.

Aarya opened with her grandma.

Abhijay opened like this:

“My grandfather passed away from a lung disease after years working in a husk-fueled commercial kitchen.”

From that one line of grief, he built Pneuma: a low-cost, electricity-free filtration system using oxidized biochar. Why? The WHO estimates household air pollution from cooking causes 3.8 million premature deaths a year and exposes over 500 million kitchen workers. Existing solutions are too expensive. So a teenager built a better one. In his lab tests, it removed 87-94% of pollutants.

Sidharth opened with his twin brother Adi, who has autism. Adi was Sidharth’s first user for Adio Reading, a free reading comprehension app for autistic children. Sidharth wrote three lessons he learned from building it. The first one is a profound reminder for every startup founder too:

“You have to stay close to the person that you are building for.”

💡 The Parenting Takeaway: Don’t ask your kid, “what are you building?” Ask, “who is this for, and why do you care?” The why is what motivated these kids to put in the extra work. Their projects connected to something deeply personal to them.

2. Solve Problems that are Relevant to You

One submission was technically dazzling. Alec and I looked at each other and were like, whoa.

Then we clicked the GitHub link. Two reasonably smart adults could not figure out what this kid had actually built. If we couldn’t, no user ever will.

Compare that to Ellie. I cannot stop thinking about her project because it nails what so many kids miss: solve real, personal problems with real, practical solutions.

Ellie loves talking to her dad, who works in finance, about the markets. He sends her articles. The articles go over her head. So she built Dollars & Sense: a tool that takes complex financial articles and makes them digestible for teens.

I had so much fun throwing complex articles into it and seeing what came back.

It’s not fancy. It’s not abstract. It is useful to her, and to every kid like her.

💡 The Parenting Takeaway: Empower your kid to solve problems they actually have in their life. Shoot for the moon, yes, but encourage them to start where they can make a tangible impact this week.

3. Presence is Everything

In an AI world, anyone can write a perfectly polished script.

But how you show up matters more than the words you say.

We don’t need every kid to be a perfect public speaker. But do you smile? Do you bring energy? Do you bring passion? If you’re not naturally dynamic, what effort did you put into making your presentation memorable? Did you edit your video well? Add b-roll? Make eye contact?

Presence and effort go hand in hand.

A submission with typos in the deck? Automatic no. It just doesn’t feel like the student cared enough.

It’s like the college students applying to be mentors who wear blazers to remote interviews — we remember. How you show up, what you wear, how you present yourself, the effort you put in. It matters. And in an AI era, this is one of the only competitive advantages your kid still has.

💡 The Parenting Takeaway: Teach your kid to carry themselves with care. The world notices.

While people always tease me for wearing yellow, note the effort! I strive to always be on brand. We ask our mentors to come in uniform to events too. How you show up is how you’re remembered.

4. Make Your Kid Articulate Their AI Use

We required every submission to articulate exactly how they used AI. I expected boilerplate.

What I got back was some of the most thoughtful student writing on AI I’ve read.

Kennedy built Kiki Straws — metal straws she’s pushing her school to adopt, born from her love of sea turtles and her passion to fight microplastics. In her submission, she wrote that she used AI to help brainstorm. Then she added:

“But the idea was mine, and my passion for sea turtles? AI can’t fake that!”

She’s right.

Aadhav put it differently:

“While AI reduces my manual effort, it cannot replace my creativity and resilience.”

These kids are wrestling with the hardest questions about what AI can do and what only they can do, and they are answering them more clearly than most adults I know.

As someone who often writes about what AI is breaking for kids: this weekend gave me real hope.

💡 The Parenting Takeaway: Don’t ask your kid, “did you use AI?” Ask, “where did you use AI, and where did you decide not to?” That second question is the one that builds judgment.

5. Give Your Kid a Finish Line Worth Running Toward

Almost every submission came in on deadline day.

For better and for worse, that’s the power of a finish line.

If your kid has only ever been assigned things — by a teacher, for a test, on someone else’s timeline — they have never learned what it feels like to work toward a deadline they committed to.

The competition itself isn’t the point. Every kid who submitted, finalist or not, learned how to identify a problem they cared about, build something real over weeks of effort, articulate it to strangers, and put themselves out there with no guarantee of winning.

That’s the skill. The trophy is the byproduct.

💡 The Parenting Takeaway: Find your kid a finish line that isn’t a test. A pitch competition. A community event they have to present at. The most important work in your kid’s life is the kind they learn to assign themselves.

The Pattern that Should Tell You Everything

Last year’s first place winners?

One was an incoming Harvard freshman at the time. The other is now headed to Princeton.

They didn’t build their projects to get into college. They built them because they cared about the work.

The Ivies came after.

That’s the actual pattern. Authentic curiosity. Sustained effort. Real work. Those are the table stakes for elite admissions and the differentiators in an AI world. The pitch competition is one of the rare environments where kids practice all three on their own time, with no grade attached.

Here’s the Part You Can Only See Live

You can read about Aarya. You can hear about Abhijay’s filtration system. But there is no substitute for watching a 14-year-old defend their work in front of three industry leaders firing hard questions in real time.

That’s what’s happening this Sunday.

Sunday: 12 Finalists. 3 Judges. One Hour You’ll Remember.

Ages 7 to 18. Pitching live to:

• Michael Seibel — General Partner at Y Combinator

• Laura Modi — CEO of Bobbie

• Zarna Garg — comedian, producer, and author

Virtual. Supported by Google.org. Real prize money on the line.

Most of these kids worked with Curious Cardinals mentors to build their projects. What you’ll see Sunday is the proof of what’s possible when a kid commits to something real, and has someone in their corner pushing them to finish it.

RSVP HERE — FREE & VIRTUAL

Watch with your kid. What we’re actually celebrating here is young people solving real world problems and grappling with what it means to have agency in an AI world. That’s something we can all appreciate and learn from.

Rather than celebrating the prize money or the victory itself, celebrate the hard work that went into it. The clear why. The months of effort.

Then ask your student: What did this inspire? What does it make you want to go after?

Sometimes all it takes is seeing someone your age, or younger, shooting for what you thought was out of reach.

Stay Curious,

A 10th grader at Scarsdale High, Claudia, sat at a loss for words next to her mom as the college counselor delivered the verdict — flatly, without much softening. The door she’d been walking toward her whole young life had just been closed by someone whose job it was to help her open it.

Her mom refused to accept that. “Well, what can she do?”

The counselor’s answer was crew. She should row. Maybe she could get recruited that way.

So her Chinese mom, doing what first-generation immigrant parents do, shipped her off to crew camp that summer.

She lasted one day.

Because Claudia’s actual passions weren’t on the water. They were in the debate room and the science lab. That’s where the hours disappeared. That’s where she was eager to go deep.

So she did. She ignored the “well-rounded checklist” and went all-in on the things that genuinely lit her up. She didn’t dabble across twenty activities to look impressive. She chose excellence in the things she actually loved.

She got into Harvard, where she studied computer science and architecture — continuing to march to the beat of her own drum and follow what she loved.

Today she’s one of my best friends in San Francisco. Forbes 30 Under 30. Podcast host. Exited her company. Now a product leader at Uber.

Around a Yellow Table

Last week, I hosted some of my closest friends and colleagues at our office for a pre-launch dinner. Alec and I have been so heads down building, we wanted to show our friends what we’ve been preparing to launch to the world. Seated around a yellow table, I asked them: What do you wish you could tell your high school self about navigating the college process and your future?

Claudia said this:

“A lot of kids are told to do all these different things to seem well-rounded, but they don’t go deep, and they don’t strive for excellence in the thing they love. What you’re doing with The FlightPlan — helping kids figure out what they’re actually passionate about — that’s what’s going to cut through the noise in an AI world.”

She’s the inspiration for our launch video. Because her story is the one we’ve seen, over and over, for six years.

On May 1st, we launched.

Watch the launch video!

If it resonates — please like, comment, and share it with a friend. That’s how we reach the next little Claudia.

What We Built (And Why)

Pre-AI, purpose and passion were brushed off as nice-to-haves. In an AI world, they become existential.

The FlightPlan is our first step toward becoming the purpose engine — the place that helps young people find what carries them to their dream destinations. We’re starting with college because it’s what families have been asking us for since we founded Curious Cardinals six years ago. We finally found a way to address our families’ greatest pain points while staying true to our values.

Which brings us to those values. There’s a lot of tech out there that has massively harmed kids. Our goal is to use it to build tech that unleashes opportunity and potential in students instead. So we want to share the values that drove us at every step of the build:

1. We start with the student, not the application. We don’t manufacture a kid for a school. We surface who they already are — and the blind spots they can’t see themselves — to help them reach their full potential.

2. We don’t predict outcomes. We improve inputs. College admissions is a probabilistic and opaque process. No tool can — or should — promise a Stanford acceptance. What we can give you is radical clarity on the things you actually control: how time is spent, what gets deepened, what gets cut.

3. The student is the pilot. The parent is the co-passenger. If you feel like you’re micromanaging your kid, it’s usually because there’s no system for updates. The FlightPlan gives your student a place to log progress and gives you visibility from the cockpit. Less nagging. More trust.

4. Radical transparency, paired with a path forward. We’re not a sycophantic AI that tells you what you want to hear. Sorry. We leverage data and pair it with a growth mindset to tell you the truth — and what you can do about it.

5. An Apple Watch, not an Instagram. We don’t want your kid staring at our platform. We want them doing things in the real world. Everything we build drives one outcome: more hours spent on what matters, fewer on what doesn’t.

6. A tool, not a relationship. The FlightPlan doesn’t replace a school counselor, a Curious Cardinals mentor, a dean, or a trusted adult. New research from The Rithm Project makes the stakes clear: the kids at highest risk from AI are the ones without a trusted adult in their life. The kids who thrive with it have humans who make them feel they matter. We built FlightPlan for the second kind of household — and we’ll never pretend to replace the first kind of relationship.

Hope you’ll check it out!

Stay Curious,

She walked me through her extracurriculars: competitive sports, volunteering, community service with the elderly community. All solid. All expected.

Then, almost as an afterthought, she mentioned she loved writing horror stories.

I stopped her.

That’s the most interesting thing you’ve said. And it’s nowhere on your list.

She looked at me like I was a little bit crazy. Horror stories didn’t feel like a “college approved” activity. It felt like a “cute hobby.” Not only was it the most unique aspect of her interests, it turned out to be the most genuine.

We love shattering the myth that doing “what you love” and “what looks good for college” don’t align.

Admissions Are More Competitive Than Ever

Harvard’s Regular Decision acceptance rate this year: 2%. Yale: 3%.

There are counselors charging $120,000 a year to manufacture the perfect applicant. So I wanted to know… what do they actually think gets kids in?

Here’s what the founder of one of those firms said in the New York Post “Ivy League admissions are no longer about whether a student is valedictorian or received a perfect SAT score. Elite schools are looking for students with singular focus and demonstrable passions.”

This is exactly what we see.

The lottery is real. But the lottery favors the genuine.

So what actually gets in the way? After hundreds of conversations with students and families, it usually comes down to three things.

The Three Mistakes That Hurt Even the Most Motivated Students

Mistake #1: They hide what actually makes them interesting.

The student mentioned above is not alone. Last week I got off a call with another student — passionate about brain tumors. Her dad had one. She’d been reading everything she could find, following the research, genuinely obsessed. And she was signing up for generic entrepreneurship camps because she didn’t think her interest was “legit” enough.

I had to stop her too.

That interest isn’t just the coolest thing about you. It’s the most meaningful thing to you. That’s your thread.

Two different students. Two different reasons for hiding what made them extraordinary. One thought it was too quirky, one thought it was too personal. Same result: the most compelling, which also happened to be the most genuinely meaningful, thing about them was buried.

💡 The Parenting Takeaway: Ask your kid what they think about when nobody’s watching. The answer they give sheepishly, the one they almost don’t mention — that’s usually the thread worth pulling.

Mistake #2: They wait for permission — from the school, the system, anyone.

I spoke to a student at a top private school who had this whole sustainability project planned, launching in conjunction with the school’s new recycling program rollout. One month passed. Three months. Six months. She was still waiting.

I’ve heard a version of this countless times. It pains me.

Don’t rely on the school. Do something where you have agency, where you’re not held back by an institution that has to move slower than you do.

💡 The Parenting Takeaway: Help your kid find something they control. Not dependent on a school committee, a teacher’s availability, or a program rollout. Start small. If something feels overwhelming, that usually means the first step isn’t small enough.

Mistake #3: They put all their eggs in one basket.

I spoke to the mom of a 9th grade girl who wants to run track in college. Her times are solid. She loves it. The dream is real.

But there’s no guarantee those times lead to recruitment. And when I asked about everything else — her interests, her projects, what else she was building — the answer was pretty much: track.

That’s when a sport stops being joyful and starts being terrifying. When one outcome has to carry the weight of your entire future, the pressure poisons the very thing you love.

The students who thrive aren’t the ones who found the one thing and went all in at the expense of everything else. They’re the ones who have a primary passion and a foundation elsewhere, so that whatever happens (injuries, losing a love for the sport, you name it!), they land somewhere solid.

💡 The Parenting Takeaway: How is your child “diversifying” across interests? Not to distract from what they love — but so that no single outcome becomes everything.

Me at the indoor state track meet with two of my favorite teammates! I had various injuries throughout high school, which made these moments all the more special, and made it possible for me to dive deeper into my other extracurriculars.

What I Actually Want For Every Student

When I submitted my Stanford application, I was terrified. I crossed my fingers, toes, and prayed I’d get in.

But underneath the fear, I felt something I didn’t expect. I felt proud.

Stanford requires many supplementary essays. But what I submitted felt so authentically me that I remember thinking: whether they like me or not, this is who I am. I spent four years showing up as myself. And no matter where I ended up, I was proud of what was on that page.

That feeling — not the acceptance, the confidence in who they are — is what I want for every student going through this process.

There are no guaranteed outcomes. But you can put yourself in a position that when you’re submitting apps for the November 1st deadline you can feel proud of who you are, assured that you made the most of your time, and confident that you’ve communicated it to the best of your ability. And no one can take that away from you, no matter the outcome!

Submitting my early apps to Stanford back in 2018!

Why We’re Building Something New

For six years, we stayed away from the college counseling world. Deliberately. Because everything we stand for — authentic passion, genuine curiosity, real purpose — felt incompatible with an industry built around manufacturing outcomes.

I remember a family we had worked with since their son was a 7th grader. By the end of freshman year, he had built a program bringing tech literacy access to underserved kids in his community. He won a national award for it. The impact was measurable. The work was genuinely his.

Then they hired a college counselor. All their friends were doing it. It was their first and oldest kid and the pressure felt too real to resist. They pulled me onto a call to help weigh in.

Within thirty minutes, the counselor suggested he expand the program to serve elderly communities. Not because he had any connection to that population. Not because he’d expressed any interest in it whatsoever. But because — and I’m quoting here — “it would read well to admissions.”

The counselor talked about his passion project in terms of “landing and expanding.” She said he didn’t want to be “too narrow.” She pulled out something she called “three buckets” — a framework for reverse engineering a kid’s identity into tidy categories an admissions officer could digest.

At one point she said the quiet part out loud: that he could add some “ornamental adjacencies” to make the application look broader.

Ornamental adjacencies. To describe a fifteen year old’s life.

(I had to look it up after the call. It means decorative add-ons. Things that look good but don’t actually connect to anything real. Which is, apparently, a strategy some people charge a lot of money for.)

I sat there thinking: we spent the last three years helping this kid find something he genuinely loves. Something interesting and compelling and meaningful to him. And now, one call in, there’s a new voice in the room rebranding his soul as a marketing strategy — and his parents were nodding along because they thought “this is what everyone else must be doing.”

What happened next was painful to watch. He stopped making real progress. Every decision became a negotiation between competing frameworks. He was exhausted before he even sat down to do the actual work. The kid who had been building with real momentum started performing for the adults in the room instead — managing everyone’s opinions about his impact rather than making any.

That call is part of why we stayed away for so long.

But here’s what we kept seeing: families who shared our values were still going somewhere for college guidance. And that somewhere was often exactly this. Parents weren’t choosing between authentic development and college strategy. They were doing both — separately, with different voices pulling in different directions — and their kid was the one paying the price. Paralyzed. Exhausted. Stretched thin.

We’re not anti college counseling. Some of the best counselors we know share our values completely. But we watched too many families have to choose, and we decided that shouldn’t be the choice. So we built something that starts with who your kid actually is, tells them the truth about where they stand, and helps them get somewhere they’re proud of. No ornamental adjacencies. No rebranding their soul as a marketing strategy.

That’s what we’re launching in 16 days. I can’t tell you more than that yet, but if you want to be the first to see it, join us at our virtual launch event.

RSVP for the Virtual Launch Event on May 1

Stay Curious,

Our most impressive success stories are almost always our most authentic. This is me with a mentor whose student’s research was published in the Stanford Science journal; they wrote about ACL injuries, inspired by the student’s own ACL injury from soccer.

“It’s time to build your daughter’s narrative,” it read.

Her message back: lol isn’t this what we’ve been doing since we started working with you all in 6th grade?!?!

Because her daughter has been with Curious Cardinals since middle school. What’s happened in that time wasn’t narrative-building for the sake of it, but instead we’ve had a front row seat to watching a scientist emerge.

It started with a general love of space, broad and wonder-driven as a 6th grader. Then it narrowed: telescopes, then star visibility, then why she couldn’t see the stars from her own backyard anymore. She’s a high schooler now, working with a CC mentor to map light pollution across her county — and she’s already in conversations with a local observatory about advocating for dark sky ordinances.

There’s no narrative to “build.” It already exists. The only job left is helping her focus it, find the right opportunities, and navigate the college process with rigor yes, but most importantly intention.

The Take We’ve Been Holding Back

A lot of parents tell us: eighth grade feels too early.

Here’s the analogy I keep coming back to: Imagine going to college and deciding freshman year is too early to think about your career. Like, how else do you figure it out? You don’t need to know exactly what you want, but you need to start trying things, putting yourself out there, building some exposure. Applying for internships. Choosing why your major makes sense for you. What do you gain from not beginning?

And then think about your own career. How long did it take you to figure out what you actually wanted? Four years? Six? Maybe ten?

Now imagine if you’d gotten a taste of different paths a little earlier. How much would that have changed things?

That’s all we’re talking about. Not a college-crazed kid. Just a kid who gets a head start on figuring out what lights them up — so by the time junior year rolls around and everyone’s in a panic, they’re not starting from scratch.

We’ve been saying this quietly for years. We’re saying it loud now: starting in 8th grade isn’t pressure. It’s the antidote to pressure.

A Harvard study backs it up: 3 in 5 young adults don’t know what their purpose is. Half of young adults reported that their mental health was negatively influenced by “not knowing what to do with my life.” They “achieve to achieve.”

Starting early is so much greater than college. It’s about beating that statistic before it becomes your kid’s story.

What Happened When One Family Started in 8th Grade

Last week, I got an email from a mom. Her daughter got into not one but two Ivy League schools.

We’ve been supporting this student since 8th grade. I had the front row seat to watch the whole journey: the early exploration, the narrowing, the project that became her story. Nothing was manufactured. No consultant built it for her. It evolved naturally because she had time and support to actually figure out what she cared about.

When I read that email, I wasn’t surprised. I was just happy it paid off the way it was always supposed to.

Our favorite thing is getting to know students over the course of their journey… when they start with us as early as 6th grade and then go on to become mentors!

The Thing That Will Sabotage All of It

Starting early is only half the equation. The other half: let your kid own it.

My co-founder and I were walking home from the office recently, laughing about the single most counterproductive thing parents do. We landed on the same answer at the same time: calling the school.

You know what I mean. Kid gets a bad grade. Parent picks up the phone. Problem “solved.”

Except it isn’t. It leads to a few dangerous outcomes:

1. The lesson to your kid: You can’t handle this yourself.

2. What it tells the school: We’re that family.

3. It robs your kid of the ability to advocate for themselves — to send the email, go to office hours, figure out how to make it right. Those are learnable skills. But only if you let them practice.

Most kids are already dreaming about college. Whether they watched Gilmore Girls and decided they’re going to Yale, or they’re an athlete who wants to play in college — it’s already on their radar. You’re not introducing stress by starting a conversation. You’re just meeting them where they are.

The college version of calling the school is driving the process when they’re 16 or 17. Steering their narrative. Cleaning up their choices before they can feel the consequences. At that point, hopefully they’re the one driving.

Start early. Then get out of the way.

Something We’re Finally Building

For six years, families have been asking us to help with the college process. We’ve stayed away — beyond mentors helping with essays or passion projects (arguably the substance of the narrative itself) — because we didn’t want to become something transactional. We genuinely believe the kids who find college and life success are curious, passionate, and have real impact to show for it.

We’ve finally found a way to help with this burning problem that doesn’t compromise our values.

We’re launching something new on May 1st — National College Acceptance Day — designed specifically for 8th, 9th, and 10th graders who want to figure out what they love and set their future up for success while they still have time to write their own story.

If you’re a parent of a junior reading this: we see you, and we’re rooting for you. But this particular tool is built for students with enough runway to change the outcome — not just document it.

We’ve hosted a few intimate early access product demo sessions at our office - we can’t wait for you to join us for future ones!

The college process doesn’t have to feel soul-sucking. Done right, it’s a forcing function — your kid comes out the other side clear on who they are and where they’re meant to be, no matter the outcome. That’s what we’re building. We hope you’ll be part of it!

Stay Curious,

P.S. When I submitted my Stanford early decision application, I remember feeling genuinely proud — not because I knew they’d accept me, but because no one could take away what I’d done or the clarity I’d found. I was terrified. I really wanted in. But I knew I’d spent my time on things that mattered to me, and that was mine regardless of the outcome. That’s me. I did that. Not my parents. Not a consultant. Me. That feeling is what I want for every kid. By the time they hit submit, they should be proud of what they’ve built — no matter what the letter says. Let’s build toward that.

What I did next, my friend still teases me about.

I sat down and wrote my coach Todd a full paragraph. Explaining myself. How I’d make up for today’s missed run. Apologizing.

She stared at me like I had three heads. Why do you owe him an explanation?

She wasn’t wrong to ask. But she also didn’t understand what I was feeling. I wasn’t scared of getting in trouble. I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. I genuinely didn’t want to disappoint him.

That’s a different kind of motivation than “my parents signed me up for this.” He believed I was capable of greatness. He laid out a plan for me to hit my goals. I took missing one training day very seriously.

How It Started

Go back a year. I’m in 6th grade at Trinity, and we have the infamous mile fitness test. We head out to the reservoir. Take our mark, get set, go. I ended up in second place in my grade, right behind my crush at the time, obviously. 5:50 mile time. My sister’s boyfriend at the time, Nick, a serious track athlete, heard about it. “Auds, you could be a track star.”

Coming from him, it landed differently than it would from anyone else. He held all the records at Trinity. He was a running star.

I started asking Nick questions. He connected me to his coach, Todd. My parents said yes. That June after 6th grade, I ran my first real race. Nick and my sister took me. Then a week later, I ran my second race, 3rd in the regional junior olympics. Todd was there.

That fall of 7th grade, I won every single race in cross country.

My running coach Todd and I had a ritual. 6:30 AM before school. Weekends. A plan, a process, a real routine. He took my running seriously before I could even fully articulate that I was a runner.

That’s what made me want to write him that paragraph in August. Because it felt like the real deal.

At the Regional Junior Olympics with coach Todd - my second race ever!

The Part Nobody Talks About

Here’s what I don’t share enough: it didn’t stay perfect.

By 8th grade, I stress fractured both shins. Went through puberty. My times from 7th grade suddenly felt like someone else’s. I wasn’t crushing it anymore.

But I still believed I was capable. Because my running coach Todd believed it. Because Nick believed it. Because my dad believed it. When you have that many people genuinely invested in you — not just rooting for you from the sidelines, but actually in it with you — you hold onto the belief even when the results aren’t there.

By junior year, I shattered every time ran by younger Audrey. The belief was just waiting for the body to catch up.

From my Trinity middle school XC days

Why This Has Never Mattered More

I run a mentorship company because mentorship shaped me. I’m biased. I know that.

So when I saw this data, it hit harder than anything I could say from personal experience.

A March 2026 survey from the Rithm Project studied 2,383 young people ages 13–24 on how AI is reshaping their relationships. The researchers wanted to know: what protects young people from the risks of unhealthy AI dependency?

The answer wasn’t screen time limits. It wasn’t digital literacy curricula.

“The factors that best protect youth against high-risk AI use are having people in their lives who show them they matter, and feeling they can be their real, unfiltered selves in those relationships.”

In an AI world, the strongest protection you can give your teenager from AI isn’t some screen time app. It’s a human who believes in them. Who makes them feel like they matter.

So How Do You Find That Human?

A few things that actually worked for me, and for the thousands of families we’ve worked with since:

1. Surround them with older kids. Siblings, their siblings’ friends, family friends, cousins.

   1. I listened to Nick in a way I never would have listened to my parents. He was going through the pursuit of running greatness himself and he felt credible.

2. Get them a coach or mentor — not a tutor. There’s a difference. Tutoring often feels remedial. Something is wrong with me and I need fixing. Mentorship feels elite. I’m being invested in because I’m capable of something great. That distinction matters more than parents realize.

   1. NOTE: THIS DOES NOT JUST APPLY TO ATHLETES! Every kid deserves a coach/mentor in the discipline of their interest. That’s what we do at Curious Cardinals - match students to mentors in their field of expertise who they look up to and see themselves in.

3. Ask them who they look up to. Not who you think they should look up to. Who they actually do. That person is already shaping your kid’s sense of self. You want to know who that is.

Nick came to my last race senior year. Funny enough, he’s now a VC. I’m a founder. The dynamic continues.

Mentorship has a long half-life.

Nick visiting me in our previous SF office :)

Schedule a Free Consultation Call

Every week, I meet students who are capable of so much more. They just haven’t had someone make them feel like it yet. Let’s talk about finding that person for your kid.

Stay Curious,

P.S. If you have a student ready to build something real this spring, that’s your sign to get them a coach/mentor! Our annual Timeless Skills Pitch Competition — sponsored by Google.org, with cash prizes — is the perfect forcing function. Register here. Submissions are due May 9th.

It was the best decision she ever made.

The Girl Who Quit

Serena joined debate because everyone told her it was the path to a top college. The club head pointed to past students who’d won competitions, gotten into prestigious schools. The message was clear: this is the move.

She hated it.

When musical auditions came up, the rehearsal schedule conflicted with debate practice. After convincing her mom, she quit and auditioned for the musical instead.

She fell in love with theater. It became the subject of her Stanford application essay. She was even nominated for the Brother Patrick Trophy for outstanding achievement in performing arts.

Upon graduating, she was one of 259 students out of 160,000 worldwide to earn a perfect score on the IB Diploma.

She was doing the thing that lit her up, and it showed everywhere.

I met Serena my freshman year at Stanford. We were in the same pre-orientation group. She came to help at a Curious Cardinals event recently, and it was no surprise she’d been a theater kid. She worked the room with poise, warmth, and a kind of presence you can’t fake.

Serena and I at a recent event we hosted to share our new product in beta :)

Serena and I at Stanford Pre-Orientation hiking trip in 2019! Fun fact: Ashwin in the back, one of our very first mentors and founding team members, was our trip leader!

The Numbers That Should Worry Every Parent

I’ve been thinking about Serena a lot lately, because I’m reading Jeff Selingo’s Dream School, and one number has been living rent-free in my head ever since:

Duke received a quarter of its current applications when its Dean of Admissions started his job in 1992. In 2024, they received nearly 48,000 regular decision applications — up 37% since 2019.

Dean Christoph Guttentag has to say no to two-thirds to three-quarters of every application he reviews. Fewer than half even make it to a full review.

So what gets students in?

Not just the best grades in the hardest curriculum. That’s table stakes.

What distinguishes the kids who make it: proof that they’ve gone beyond the strong students at their school in pursuing their academic interests.

Not performing interests. Actually having them.

A helpful read for parents navigating the college process

What I See Every Week

Every week I talk to parents still optimizing for the resume. More clubs. Harder APs. Whatever “signals impressive.”

Here’s what I want to say: you’re not helping your kid by forcing them to check boxes. You’re helping your kid by figuring out what genuinely lights them up, and building real work ethic toward that.

The odds are brutal. But they favor the genuine.

How To Build This — Starting Now

So what does that look like in practice? A few things I tell every family:

1. Start with the quirky thing.

Think about your kid’s most specific, unusual interest. What’s unapologetically them? Is there any evidence of it? A project, a portfolio, something on their calendar? That quirky, authentic thing is probably an amazing essay in the making… one no other kid has, and one that’s actually theirs. Encourage them to lean in and do something with it.

2. Do community service that actually means something.

Before you think about what looks good on an application… stop. Service isn’t a box. It’s a chance for your kid to contribute to something bigger than themselves, and that matters regardless of college. Find a cause they actually care about. The ripple effects are real: kids who serve consistently become more empathetic, more grounded, more aware of the world outside their own ambitions. And yes, colleges notice that too. But that’s the bonus, not the point.

3. Start wide, then narrow — on purpose.

Freshman fall: try everything. Freshman winter: start to narrow. Freshman spring: decide where to focus. Sophomore year: commit. Junior year: go deeper.

Here’s something most parents don’t know: the Common App Activities Section only has room for 10 activities. And colleges pay close attention to which ones span all four years. Sustained commitment reads very differently than a junior-year scramble. Start with that end in mind.

4. Let the story build itself.

Let me paint the picture of what this looked like for me:

I joined debate freshman year because the upperclassmen seemed cool. I stuck with it, got into politics, started listening to NPR’s More Perfect. Meanwhile, I’d been volunteering weekly with children of immigrant families since 7th grade. Then a summer homestay in Spain. Then I read Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. By junior year, immigration reform, criminal justice, and law weren’t separate interests anymore — they were one story. I created an independent study on the history of Hispanic immigration to the U.S. I never planned any of it. Curiosity just kept pulling me deeper.

One of our parents said something that stuck with me: her daughter started with Curious Cardinals in 7th grade doing broad environmental science. It narrowed to sea turtles. Now she’s deep in microplastics. When college counselors tell her to “build her story,” her mom just laughs — her daughter’s been building it since middle school.

The story isn’t something you construct for an application. It emerges when you let your kid follow what genuinely pulls them — and keep pulling that thread.

What This Actually Looks Like

Here are some examples of what a strong thematic narrative actually looks like:

• Passionate about film → volunteers with immigrant community → starts social media account to humanize their stories: Using storytelling and film to document underrepresented immigrant voices — starting in my own backyard

• Watched family struggle with money → tutors first-gen peers in math → builds financial literacy workshop at school: Building financial literacy programs for first-generation students, because no one taught my family how money works

• Plays an instrument → takes psychology class → volunteers at memory care facility → researches music’s effect on dementia patients: Exploring the intersection of neuroscience and music — how rhythm affects learning, memory, and mental health

• Lives near industrial area → notices environmental burden on their neighborhood → takes environmental science → organizes community advocacy: Merging environmental science with community organizing in under-resourced neighborhoods that bear the most climate burden

• Notices neighborhood inequality growing up → takes economics → interns with city council → writes about housing policy: Obsessed with how cities work — urban planning, housing policy, and why some neighborhoods thrive while others don’t

• Loves coding → passionate about wildlife → uses ML to analyze real migration datasets: Using machine learning to study animal migration patterns, because climate change is rewriting routes that took centuries to form

Notice what all of these have in common: there’s a “why this kid” built right in. They’re not just interests. They have a point of view, a tension, or a personal origin. That’s what makes them stick with an admissions reader.

The Bottom Line

It’s a lottery. And the lottery favors the genuine.

If you want help figuring out what genuinely lights your kid up, and building something real around it, that’s exactly what we do.

Schedule a call here

Stay Curious,

• “My kid has a million interests but can’t pick a lane—how can you help them?”

• “My kid loves sports (or fashion, or video games), but has no real passion. How can you help them?”

Let me set the record straight: that’s not what worries me. Kids without clarity? We work with that every day. What actually predicts success is something most parents never think to ask about.

The Mentor Response That Broke My Heart

A few months ago, a parent reached out frustrated that their daughter’s engagement wasn’t progressing. When we checked in with the mentor, she shared something hard to hear:

“I’ve tried about 100 projects with Anna and don’t really know what to say other than with everything I try it’s always ‘I don’t care’ or ‘I’m not interested’ or ‘I’m bored.’ It’s always the same thing: Anna on her phone while we’re meeting, not paying attention to anything I’m saying. I thought of Anna as a challenge for myself that I really wanted to overcome, but at the end of the day I can’t force an outcome if Anna just isn’t interested.”

That response could have been the end of the story. Disengaged kid. Failed match. Move on.

But we tried something different.

The Pivot That Changed Everything

Instead of strategizing with her parents about how to “fix” the engagement, we asked to speak directly with Anna. Not about her. To her.

I won’t pretend it was magic from the start. When Julia from our team got on the Zoom, Anna was guarded. Short answers. “I don’t know. My school is very stressful. I don’t think I can handle anything else.”

Fair enough. Julia didn’t push. She just kept asking questions.

“What do you criticize when you buy clothes?” (”The sizes aren’t accurate. The colors look different on models than on real people. And stuff doesn’t last.”)

“What would you ask the CEO of Zara?” (”How do you know what’s in right now? How do you make people actually want to buy your stuff? How do you make a store interesting enough that people walk in?”)

Anna was analyzing marketing psychology, brand strategy, and consumer behavior. She explained why that weird Super Bowl coffee creamer ad was actually genius—so strange and memorable that the product sold out everywhere.

This was the same girl who’d been “bored” and “not interested” for months.

Then came the turning point.

Julia said: “What if we just pretended to build a fashion brand together? No homework. No pressure. Nothing outside the hour. Just roleplay being a CEO for an hour a week.”

Anna’s entire face lit up. “That sounds SO fun.”

Julia pushed further: “What should I know to find you the right mentor?”

Suddenly Anna had a lot to say: “Someone patient. Someone who will push me but not too hard. Someone who gives me ideas but lets me start them myself. And someone who works at a cool brand.”

This was a kid who supposedly couldn’t engage.

No. This was a kid who’d never been asked what she actually wanted.

Rebeca Winthrop, co-author of The Disengaged Teen, at our recent event. Her “Four Modes of Engagement” is the research behind everything you just read about Anna. Catch co-author Jenny Anderson at our next event in the Bay Area this April — RSVP here.

Two Lessons from Anna’s Story

First: When you center your kid in the experience, we can almost always find the spark.

Anna wasn’t uncoachable. She was a kid who’d been signed up for something without being consulted, briefed by her parents on what she “needed” without anyone asking what she wanted.

When the experience was set up for her instead of with her, she checked out. Of course she did. Wouldn’t you?

Second: Yes, some kids genuinely aren’t ready. But that’s rarer than you think.

There’s a famous SNL sketch where Adam Sandler plays a travel agent who warns customers: “If you’re sad in New York, you’ll be sad in Italy.”

Adam Grant cites it in Think Again to make a point about mindset versus circumstances.

And let me be clear: there are things we can and cannot do as well.

Curious Cardinals:

Here’s what I hope Anna’s story reveals for you: most “disengaged” kids aren’t actually closed off. They just haven’t been given the opportunity to lead. They’ve been talked about instead of talked to.

Give them agency, and watch what happens.

What You Can Do at Home

If your child seems disengaged, try this before assuming they’re “just not motivated”:

1. Ask, don’t tell. Instead of “You need to find a passion,” try “What are your favorite TikToks? If you could design your school schedule, what would it look like?” Anna’s entire CEO roleplay idea came from Julia simply asking about her.

2. Let them design the experience. Julia didn’t tell Anna what her project would be. She asked: “What should I know to make this fun for you?”

3. Remove the pressure. The breakthrough came when Julia said: “No homework. Nothing outside the hour. Just play.” Suddenly there was room for excitement instead of dread.

4. Brief them before decisions that involve them. One of the most painful patterns we see: a parent schedules a consultation, doesn’t tell their kid anything, and our team has to explain everything while the student sits there resentful. That’s not fair to anyone…especially not your kid! If you’re exploring something for them, explore it with them.

The conversations I have with parents after events are what inspire newsletters like this one.

One Final Story

A mom told us about her son who was obsessed with sports but showed zero interest in anything academic. One afternoon, she overhears him laughing. Hard. Ugh, is he skipping his mentorship session to mess around with his friends on FaceTime?

She storms into his room, ready to intervene. Then she sees him on Zoom with his Curious Cardinals mentor.

Embarrassed, she pauses. Closes the door quietly. And hovers there, listening.

They’re coding sports analytics together. But they start every session talking about his favorite teams, debating players, geeking out. Her son is engaged in a way she’s never seen with schoolwork.

Six months later, he had a sports analytics website showcasing all his projects. Summer came and she planned to pause mentorship.

He begged her to continue.

If there’s genuine excitement and an environment where they thrive, we can nurture that into something extraordinary!

Your Child’s Turn

If you’re reading this thinking, “My kid has that spark somewhere. I just need help finding it,” that’s exactly what we do.

But here’s what Anna taught us: we can’t find it by talking to you about them. We find it by talking to them.

So here’s my ask: bring your kid to the conversation.

Not a call where you brief us on their “needs” and they sit there silent. A real conversation where we ask them what sounds meaningful, what they’d want to build, what kind of person they’d actually want to work with.

And be honest with yourself about where your kid is. It’s not about having a perfect resume or a clear passion. It’s about being open to being coached. And usually, that just means giving them agency over what they’re being coached in.

Schedule a Call—With Your Student

If you use this link to schedule a consultation call by Sunday, March 22, we will give you $95 in free credits towards your first session.

Stay curious,

P.S. When you book the call, loop your kid in first. Tell them what it’s about. Ask if they’re open to it. That small act of including them is already the first step toward everything working! Show them our instagram to browse the projects other students have worked on for reference.

P.P.S. Is your kid motivated by competition? Prize money? Encourage them to register for our Timeless Skills Pitch Competition, where top winners receive cash prizes to take their projects to the next level. Learn more and register here.

Nothing more powerful than having students alongside parents in the process.

That’s what a 10th grader told me when I asked his favorite class. He’s in honors math — a combined algebra, geometry, and pre-calc course where the problems teach you, not the teacher. He clearly loves it.

But he couldn’t say that without undercutting himself.

His mom — an executive at a major national nonprofit, longtime family in our network — had emailed me the week before: “My son says yes to every idea I suggest, which is my problem. I want him to find something HE truly enjoys, not just an impressive project I’ve helped him seek out.”

She’d done everything right. Curated a list of options tied to his actual interests. Connected him to professionals in her network. Laid out paths she thought would click.

He was eager to do all of them. And committed to none.

I hear this every single week. “My kid has no passions.” “He has no idea what he wants.” And almost every time, the diagnosis is wrong.

Five Words, On Repeat

I got on a call with him. The pattern showed up immediately.

Favorite class? Math. “But I’m not that good at it.”

Clubs? Mock trial. He loves the excitement — thinking on your feet, the planning, the performance. “But I’m also not good at thinking on the spot.”

Sports? He’s the starting point guard on his school’s basketball team. They made it to the state championship — the first time in his school’s history. With less practice than his teammates.

Even THAT came with a qualifier: “We kind of fell apart at the end.”

A kid in honors math who thinks he’s not smart enough. A mock trial competitor who thinks he can’t think on his feet. A basketball player who led his team to a historic run and credits everyone but himself.

This kid doesn’t have a passion problem. He has a confidence problem.

Since founding Curious Cardinals, I’ve spoken with thousands of students. Those conversations have taught me so much about how kids actually think, learn, and grow. It’s also why our entire family admissions team is made up of former classroom educators—people who truly understand students.

What “No Direction” Actually Looks Like

Once I changed the questions, everything changed.

He lit up about his philosophy class — not vaguely. He rattled off moral frameworks: virtue ethics, consequentialism, the ethics of care. Then immediately deflected: “There’s no career path for philosophers.”

He told me WHY he loves the Lincoln Lawyer — the high stakes, the cliffhangers, the way a defense attorney builds a case and thinks fast. That’s exactly what he loves about mock trial. He just hadn’t connected those dots.

When I asked his superpower, he paused and said: “I think I like solving problems.” Then he linked it himself — math, ethics, mock trial, history. All problem-solving.

This kid had already identified his own through-line. He just didn’t realize it yet.

Students are capable of incredible things. Sometimes all it takes is someone in their corner (who isn’t their parent).

The Moment It Clicked

I asked who inspires him.

He said his mom. She’s helped thousands of kids through her work. His mom later told me she didn’t know he felt that way — he’d never said it to her directly.

Then he told me about his grandfather. His grandpa had a rare form of cancer. But what haunted this kid wasn’t the illness — it was the systems around it. His grandfather didn’t speak English well, so the doctors wouldn’t hear all of his symptoms. The hospital failed him in ways that had nothing to do with medicine.

I asked: What if you used AI to build something that solved that problem? Something that helped patients who fall through the cracks get the care they actually need?

His energy shifted completely.

I showed him our Timeless Skills in an AI Era Pitch Competition — real projects by students his age, sponsored by Google, with cash prizes and judges like the CEO of Y Combinator. Other students had built tools inspired by their own grandparents: an app for Alzheimer’s patients, a dementia care nonprofit.

“I’d want to do that.” Why? “It’s like a competition.”

“So you’d want to win?”

“Yeah.”

We went from “my son has no interests” to a kid building an AI tool to improve patient care — inspired by his grandfather, driven by problem-solving, motivated by competition. One conversation.

We LOVE speaking to parents and their kids! This is Sophie, one of our Family Admissions team members, who was previously a teacher at Chapin. You can schedule a consultation call with her here!

Why It Had to Be Someone Other Than Mom

This mom did everything right. Curated thoughtful options. Connected dots. Gave him space. And still — he said yes to everything without committing to anything.

That’s not because her ideas were wrong. It’s because she’s his mom.

The things teens care about most often connect back to their families. But they can’t always articulate that TO their families. When mom suggests an idea, it feels like an assignment. When someone else asks “what matters to you?” and just waits — something different happens.

He told me things in 30 minutes that he hadn’t expressed to her. Not because he was hiding anything. But because he needed someone to push back when he said “but I’m not good at it” — someone to say, “Come on. You’re in honors math. You made the state championship. Stop selling yourself short.”

That’s not a parenting failure. It’s how teenagers work.

Before You Panic, Ask the Real Question

If your kid seems stuck, pause. Then ask yourself what’s actually going on:

• Is it that they have no interests — or that they dismiss every interest before it takes root?

• Is it that they lack direction — or that they lack the confidence to claim something as their own?

• Is it that they haven’t found a passion — or that they haven’t had enough experience to discover one?

You don’t build conviction without experience to back it up. Most teens labeled “passionless” aren’t lacking interest. They’re lacking exposure, reps, and someone who believes in them enough to push past the hedging.

What Happened Next

He registered for the pitch competition. He’s getting matched with a mentor who will keep him accountable, push back when he undercuts himself, and help him build something real.

He doesn’t need someone to “hand him a passion.” He needs someone to help him see what’s already there.

If your child is stuck — saying yes to everything or nothing, hedging every opinion, going through the motions — don’t wait for clarity to arrive on its own. It won’t. Clarity comes from doing. And sometimes the breakthrough starts with letting someone else have the conversation.

SCHEDULE YOUR FREE CONSULTATION CALL

Let us talk to your kid. You might be surprised what one conversation reveals.

Stay curious,

P.S. Is your kid motivated by “winning?” Encourage them to register for the timeless skills pitch competition here!

Me introducing the Timeless Skills in an AI era pitch competition to parents

I loved this book because the research validated everything we’ve seen over six years at Curious Cardinals. And the framework I reference daily? The four modes of learning.

Picture a simple chart. The X axis is engagement. The Y axis is agency. That gives you four modes every student cycles through:

• Passenger — Showing up but checked out. Doing the bare minimum, coasting through the day.

• Achiever — The perfectionist overachiever. Collecting gold stars in everything, but chasing perfection over learning, and falling apart when they can’t get it right.

• Resistor — Plenty of gumption, pointed in the wrong direction. Acting out because the system isn’t working for them.

• Explorer — The pinnacle. Learning for the joy of it, driven by genuine curiosity, and willing to struggle because they actually care.

Here’s why this matters:

50% of middle and high schoolers are in Passenger Mode, getting decent grades but feeling bored and disconnected from what they’re learning.

Fewer than 4% of students regularly spend time in Explorer Mode at school.

And yet, 20 years of randomized controlled trials show that Explorer Mode kids get the best grades AND have better wellbeing because they’re driven by curiosity and purpose, not just performance.

Four percent. That number haunts me!

Photo of me alongside co-author Rebecca Winthrop pointing to the chart on page 18 mid discussion because I love this framework so much!

I Lived Every Single Mode

I didn’t just read about these modes. I lived three of the four.

In math, I was a Passenger. I hated it. While I lit up in English, history, and Spanish, in math I told myself I was bad. When I’d struggle, negative voices would crawl in my head: You’re stupid. You suck at this. I had a great math tutor, but that didn’t change anything. What I really needed was someone who I wanted to become who could model for and instill in me that I belonged in that classroom. Imagine a cool female engineer at Stanford who was also in the sorority who could’ve shown me that it wasn’t about competence. I was totally capable. It was about confidence. If only Curious Cardinals existed when I was in high school 😜

I have one regret from high school: dropping honors math junior year because I feared getting a B+. I switched to regular math. I was capable of staying. I just didn’t believe in myself, and the idea of getting a “bad grade” was so painful that I opted out. Achiever mode !!!

In humanities and Spanish, I was an Achiever AND an Explorer. I wanted the gold star, the check-plus, the extra credit. A bad grade stung. But I also genuinely loved it. I loved my Constructing America class at Riverdale so much that when my section wasn’t reading The Great Gatsby, I created a 1920s literature independent study to go deeper with one of my teachers.

I remember the boy I had a crush on making fun of me for being a “kiss-ass” and “doing it for college.” That hurt. Because I genuinely lit up learning this material. High school is hard. You care what people think. You want to be cool. And peer pressure is one of the invisible forces that pushes kids OUT of Explorer Mode.

I’m telling you this because the forces that pull kids out of Explorer Mode aren’t always obvious. It’s not just boredom or bad teaching. It’s anxiety. Perfectionism. Peer pressure. Fear of standing out. Fear of falling short.

9th grade me vs. geometry homework. Passenger Mode x Achiever in action. 🤣

Then Everything Changed

December of my senior year, I got accepted early to Stanford. And my entire relationship with learning transformed overnight.

I could breathe. I could study for the sake of learning, not for the grade as the end goal. I started reading a book a week. Going to museums several times a week. Giving myself space to explore, discover, and pursue free from the fear of failure.

I reached pinnacle Explorer Mode.

I remember writing an essay the day before it was due for the first time that January. The words and ideas flowed from my head to paper like a river. Before, I’d be paralyzed, staring at a blank screen a week before the deadline, afraid each sentence didn’t sound right. With the mental block lifted, everything changed.

So I get it. Kids are paralyzed by fear. And I love Rebecca and Jenny’s book because it gives parents a framework to understand what’s happening, and what you can actually do about it.

With Rebecca Winthrop (co-author of The Disengaged Teen), Eric Kim, and Christine Leong Connors. Eric and Christine are Curious Cardinals parents who co-hosted the event — and Eric crushed it as moderator!

The Secret the Research Confirms

Here’s the part that matters most for your family: The Disengaged Teen cites two Harvard researchers, Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine, who spent six years studying what makes American high schools work. Their conclusion?

“Much of the most powerful learning seemed to occur not in core classes, but rather at the school’s periphery—electives, clubs, extracurriculars.”

This tracks with everything I’ve experienced. Extracurriculars were invaluable to building the timeless skills that serve me in life today.

Running taught me resilience. In 7th grade, I won every cross country meet. Then I stress fractured both shins, went through puberty, and didn’t break that time until 10th grade. Three years of watching competitors I once beat sail past me. Three years of looking up at the clock expecting a personal best and seeing defeat.

But I didn’t give up. When injured, I cross-trained ferociously. When healthy, I went to bed early, ate well, and did my planks before bed. By 11th grade, I finally had my breakthrough and broke all the school distance records and qualified for the state meet.

When I decided not to run in college, it felt like failure. All that work for nothing? But at Stanford, I realized all the energy I’d poured into running could be applied elsewhere. I applied for every fellowship, emailed every professor, and crushed school with more confidence than I’d ever had.

Now when people ask what set me up to be a founder and CEO, I respond without hesitation: my experience as a competitive runner. I failed again and again, but kept trying and never stopped believing.

Middle school Audrey winning my age division in the Fifth Avenue Mile!

Find Your Kid’s Explorer Mode

I won’t lie to you: the school environment is difficult to change when kids are wired around grades and college acceptances. But you CAN cultivate growth mindset, curiosity, and resilience in other environments, and those skills will eventually trickle into the classroom.

The key? Give your kid an environment where they can pursue something real without fearing failure. Where the goal isn’t an A, but impact. Where the finish line belongs to THEM.

The Pitch Competition: A Finish Line Worth Running Toward

That’s exactly what our second annual Timeless Skills in an AI Era Pitch Competition is built to do. This year, Google.org is sponsoring the competition.

Your kid doesn’t have to be an aspiring entrepreneur. They just have to identify a problem they want to solve, work at it, and pitch their work on May 9th. Winner receives $2,500.

Last year, we had 100+ submissions. Finalists ranged from a third grader to an incoming Harvard freshman.

The deadline creates the motivation. The work builds the skills. And your child ends up with proof of what they can actually do.

REGISTER FOR THE FREE PITCH COMPETITION HERE

And even if your kid doesn’t think they’ll win… good! Help them put themselves out there for something that doesn’t come with a guaranteed trophy or an A. That’s part of life. That’s Explorer Mode!

We want every kid to have a finish line worth running toward.

Your Action Step This Week

Ask your kid: Which mode are you in right now—in school, and outside of it?

Share the framework. Let them name it. You might be surprised by what they say.

Then give them something to be an Explorer in. A pitch competition. A Curious Cardinals mentorship. A project that’s theirs.

Because if someone had asked 16-year-old me which mode I was in, I would’ve said Passenger in math without hesitation. And if someone had then said, “That’s not who you are — that’s just where you are right now,” everything might have changed sooner.

Don’t wait for Stanford to set your kid free. Give them Explorer Mode now.

Stay curious,

Audrey

As you can probably tell, I am VERY passionate about this topic! Rebecca’s co-author Jenny Anderson is coming to SF this April and we’re hosting another event — reply to this email if you want in.