The Blue Ocean Strategy: A New Way to Look at Application Essays

Daria Levina

‘Think about what’s unique and differentiating about you and write about it in your essay.

When you google how to write a personal statement or a motivation letter, this type of advice is very common.

How incredibly NOT helpful, isn’t it?

Advice like this immediately puts you in a comparative mindset, and a comparative mindset is the one of lack and scarcity.

The consequences are three-fold:

1/ first, it’s guaranteed to make you descend into despair and action paralysis.

 You'll probably think really hard about what's 'unique' about you, and you'll probably get stuck and feel unable to find anything.

2/ second, it’s impossible to execute.

Just think about it. To adequately compare yourself to other people, you’ll need to:

  • do the random sampling
  • have a control group
  • identify the commonalities among people in the sample
  • identify the differentiating factors
  • make conclusions
  • write about it in an essay.

To do that adequately and accurately, you need to know who you are competing against, and it's simply impossible to know in the context of graduate applications.

3/ third, you can't create from the comparative mindset.

To write a winning essay, you need to be in a creative mindset.

However, comparison kills creativity.

You just can’t produce a convincing interpretation of your life experience if all you think about is how you fare compared to other people.

So what's the solution?

The blue ocean strategy.

Discard the attitude of competition.

Think of yourself as a category of one.

In all descriptions of yourself and the things you did, be as specific as you can.

Don’t use generic categories. Generic categories will allow the admissions committee to put you in a box. A large box. With a lot of people in it. And in a large box, there is a lot of competition.

Instead, be as specific as you can in anything that you use to describe yourself. Give names to locations, accomplishments, influences. Redraw the boundaries of boxes and make the competition irrelevant.

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