The ‘F’ Student Who Crushed His SATs

We become the stories we tell ourselves.

Here’s just one incredible example of what I’m talking about, an anecdote from sports mental coach Trevor Moawad…

“…my dad had gone to a Toastmasters early on… He comes back and tells me, “I just had a chance to hear one of the most successful magazine entrepreneurs in the world speak… This guy was failing out of high school. He was struggling. He was raised by a single mom in the Midwest, but he promised his mother he would take a test called the SAT.”

“So he takes the SAT in May of his junior year – doesn’t expect anything – gets his score back in June… Well, this guy is bombing, he’s failing out of school. He doesn’t expect anything… Well, he gets a 1480 out of 1600. So he gets the score, and his mother, doing what any mother would do knowing her kid, says, “Did you cheat?” And he says, “I swear, I tried to cheat. But the way the numbers were on the Scantrons and the bubbles, you couldn’t cheat.” So she says, “You mean to tell me, you really got that score?” He said, “Yeah, I got the score.”

So what he decides is, because he realizes he’s smart… now he starts to go to class. He doesn’t hang out with [the kids] he did when he didn’t go to class. Teachers see him in class and they said, “Hey… maybe we missed the boat on this kid.” So they start to treat them differently. Well, as the guy would tell the story, he graduates, goes to a community college, goes on to Wichita State, goes on to the Ivy League, and becomes this massively successful magazine entrepreneur. So I said, “Okay, well, the guy was always smart. He just needed a standardized test to unlock it.” My dad said, “No, that’s not the story. This is what I want you to understand… Twelve years after all this guy’s success, he gets a letter in the mail from Princeton, New Jersey. He opens it. True story – turns out the SAT board will periodically review their test taking procedures and the policies. The year he took the test, he was one of thirteen people sent the wrong SAT score.

His actual score was a 740 out of 1600.”

“Wild story, Matthew, but wait… this illustrates the opposite of your point – this guy DID buy into a false narrative, that he got the high SAT score.” No, the real false narrative was that he was stupid, worthless, and incapable of success. Once he stopped believing that, his whole world changed.

So, what story are you telling yourself?

And what would change in your life if you changed that story?