Raise Your Study Abroad Target 100x

Why not just go for 20 million, or 30 million?

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

That line comes from a talk about raising sponsorship. Before going to the US, the speaker said, the plan was to find two or three hundred thousand in sponsorship. By the end, more than a million had come in. And then the question: why not go straight for 20 million, 30 million?

The speaker thought it over and found that it works. When you are only after a few hundred thousand or a million, you tell one kind of story. When the story you are telling involves a commercial return above 10 million, you are no longer talking at that level, and your strategy changes with it. You start asking who in history has pulled this off.

And it turns out Masayoshi Son did. In the speaker’s telling, many years ago, when Son was starting out, he wanted to raise 30 million, or maybe 20, and at an internal meeting he wrote a formula on the board: 300 thousand from each, times 100 companies, equals 30 million. The people in the room laughed at him. He did it.

So why don’t we set our targets higher? Take on a problem that can’t be solved and it suddenly gets interesting, and your whole approach shifts. Thinking at 100x or 1000x brings a whole chain of changes in what you can do and how you think.

When I heard this, I thought: applying abroad works the same way.

When your target is a top 50 school, what are you thinking about? A slightly higher GPA, a slightly higher TOEFL, a few more filler internships. You are patching weaknesses, meeting the bar, avoiding mistakes. You are using small logic to meet a small standard.

When your target is the top 5, that playbook doesn’t come close. You are forced to ask a question at a completely different level. What real problem am I trying to solve? What unique value can I create? How do I tell a story in my statement that only I can tell, one that makes the committee feel that turning me down would be their loss?

Two questions, two completely different paths. The first sends you grinding for scores, internships and letters. The second sends you to do research that matters, to build real academic relationships with professors, and to explain what problem you see and why you are the one to solve it.

Asking for two hundred thousand, you talk about exposure and return on investment. Asking for twenty million, you have to talk about where the industry is going and why you are the one who will catch the wave. Applications are the same. Being qualified gets you in the door. It is not what makes you competitive.

There is something counterintuitive here. You don’t build the ability first and then set the high target. You set the high target first, and that is what forces the ability and the thinking out of you.

What is the worst case? You miss the top 5, but what you built while going for it gets you into a school you would not have dared to aim for. Isn’t that better than staring at the top 50 from the start?

So set the target at a height that scares you a little.

Then watch how your whole way of thinking changes with it.