You also did very well in the college admissions process! You are about to attend a fantastic school. You are clearly very intelligent and accomplished if you were admitted to Lehigh.
My willingness to apply myself. I’ve never really been willing to put my full effort in and I always have excuses like “it’s good enough” and “I’ll do better next time”. Now I realize that there might not be a next time. What I do now matters a lot more then what I want to do, and the gap between those needs to narrow.
I’m going to say something that is maybe going to sound weird or perhaps unpopular, especially on an achievement-driven space like CC, but of tremendous value in life is knowing when enough is enough.
I’d argue that you definitely are willing to apply yourself. You made it into Lehigh, after all. And I’m not about to argue that not applying yourself ever is a solution, either. I’m pretty good at applying myself, lol. But I don’t think that endlessly applying yourself to go ever higher - when you’ve reached a place that is workable and makes you happy - is desirable, either. There’s such a thing as working too hard, and there are unproductive upward comparisons if you have everything you need and want.
In a more abstract sense, you also can’t do everything at 100% capacity 100% of the time. Learning when to pull back on things, when not to give full effort because you’re attending to other things or other things are more important to you, is important too! You’re not wrong that what you do matters more than what you want to do - but what you want to do (not what you think you should do or have to do) creates the foundation of what you do that’s meaningful.
I’ll tell you this in a backwards-looking way: I got my BA from Spelman, a small liberal arts college in Atlanta. It’s an excellent school, but it’s not a top-10 Swarthmore/Williams/Harvard/Stanford type of deal. (It’s actually pretty close to Lehigh in the national rankings.) Because I am here often and volunteer with college-bound seniors, sometimes I wonder what my life would’ve been like had I attended one of those schools, had I known more about college admission and financial aid when I was a teenager. But then I say: to what end? I am in exactly the kind of place I always wanted to be, with all the trappings of what success means to me. And I loved my undergraduate experience and am passionate about my alma mater. Would going to Harvard or Swarthmore have changed that for me? Made things better? Better how? I don’t think it would’ve. (And I don’t think I’d think about it at all if I weren’t here and doing the volunteer work that I do.)