I'm lost.

How should I start this off?
So all of us know that it is the time of the year when you find out whether you got accepted to a certain college or not right? At the same time I just found out that a couple of seniors at my high school were accepted to Harvard University and it made me wonder how they got in. It is not that I want to be accepted but rather my curiosity got the best of me.
So, I googled and clicked around a bit until I found this rather interesting article:
http://blog.prepscholar.com/how-to-get-into-harvard-and-the-ivy-league-by-a-harvard-alum

After reading a bit of the article above, it made me question everything about what I was taught about the college application. Like does being well balanced or well rounded and all the typical stuff that I heard of actually work?

All in all I would love to see how everyone else on here views this.

For any Ivy/top 50 college you need to be a little well rounded, you cant only do one thing. What this article is trying to say is dont spread yourself too thin. You need to have a point, one or two very strong passions that you are good at. That will help you get into place more. For example, if you have someone who did math league and got best in county and also did the same with science olympiad versus someone who went to nationals for ML and just participates in SO the going to nationals one sounds more impressive. This is what the article is trying to get into.