Scott Barry Kaufman

I was like, again, you can't escape it.

And I wrote a very, very from the heart personal essay, which I still have saved, saying our notions of human potential are really inaccurate.

We need broader notions that go beyond standardized metrics to understand the real achievement potential of humans.

And I wrote that from my heart and I got rejected from the Cognitive Science Program at Carnegie Mellon, presumably in large part to my lower SAT scores.

And I was like, you know what, let me sing Stars to them in the opera program at Carnegie Mellon.

Maybe I can get in that way.

I went to the audition, and I sang my heart out.

Everything in that moment of like frustration, anger, like I put it into that song.

And they told my parents that they thought I could be a real good opera singer, and they accepted me on a partial scholarship to Carnegie Mellon, when the other department at the university, they rejected me.

So I didn't bother to tell the music department, just so you know, I've already been rejected in another part of your school.

I didn't do that.

It reaffirmed how much I love psychology.

You know when you meet something, you're like, this is me, and then you go away from it, and you come back to it, and it's still this is me?

That's telling you something.

That's important information.

And I was like, I've got to do this.

I was so nervous and excited.

I didn't know if I was going to be able to be as intelligent as I needed to be to be a research assistant at Cambridge University.

It was almost hard for me to fathom that I would legitimately be intelligent enough to be worthy of the situation.

I was like, Scott, even with all your grandiose fantasies and everything, this is a little...