At the time I took the Landmark Forum I was a sophomore at Yale University. The reason I got into Yale was the same reason that I had success in other areas of my life: I was good at being different. I had created a resume built on the principle of standing out from the crowd, either by performing at a higher level than average or by doing things that my peers didn’t. For instance, only a handful of people from my hometown in Oregon went to college out of state; so I applied almost exclusively to out-of-state colleges. And when I wrote my application, at every possible moment I highlighted the unusual things about my background: whitewater rafting since a young age, living in foreign countries, starting a jazz combo, and so on. During my freshman year I had the odd experience of talking to someone who was at the table when they were deciding whether to admit me, and learned that what tipped the scales was just that – I came across as unusual. Different.
What I didn’t get is that being different is not a silver bullet. Eventually I ran into situations where being different didn’t work. I began to distance myself from many of my peers, and did not participate fully in my classes. To do so would have made me “one of the crowd” – which would have meant giving up that very thing that had gotten me where I was. If I weren’t different, who could I possibly be? Because I didn’t participate in my communities, I began to lose power in my life; I discovered that almost anything you want to do in the world requires you to rely on other people, and since I was alienating myself from everyone around me, my ability to get anything done in the world was continually shrinking.
If you had asked me why I was frustrated with my life at the time, I could not have told you. I had no idea it was because I was attached to being different; it was a blind spot, something I couldn’t see because it was so much a part of who I was. But I got it when I took the Forum. It was suddenly absurdly obvious why I was getting stopped in life, why my life was frustrating. And once you know something, you can act on it. I started to treat my community as something I was a part of, and began to participate fully with my peers and in my classes. And almost immediately results started to come back. At the time I was working on getting a group of students to travel to a post-conflict zone near Russia, and the project was about to collapse from lack of funding. Soon after the Forum an individual in my community stepped forward and offered a means to funding. I began to engage with my professors, who mentored me and provided advice and wisdom that revolutionized my academic career. In short, my life took a dramatic leap forward after the Forum. And it was all from learning how to engage with my community; with engagement came the power to create the life I wanted to live.
