This is an excerpt from my latest book Dear Hannah: 70 Methods I Used and Abused to Change Who I Am.

How My Team Won ThinkQuest

Date: November 27, 1998

Age: 16

Location: Los Angeles, CA

Subject: Do It to Learn, Round I

Hi Hannah. I can’t believe this is happening. I just won the $20,000 Adobe Design Award from ThinkQuest, and I’m trying to piece together how I got here.

Exactly a year ago today, during my first go-around with the contest, I was in a hotel room, alone, crying into a pillow. Earlier that evening, my teammates and I were in the banquet hall for the awards ceremony, waiting for the winners to be announced. We were seated in the front row and the founder of ThinkQuest, Al Weis, kept shooting us knowing looks. He even made a reference to “a group of students in Southern California” in an anecdote about inspirational youth. Carlos, Paul, and I looked at each other, knowing these were good omens. But what we realized later is that Al has a preternatural ability to make everybody feel like the center of the universe.

As he gave out the awards, he started from last place to first, and one by one, teams around us stood up to accept runner-up prizes, then fourth place prizes, then third, etc. Initially, we thought each announcement meant a better prize was being saved for us. But after an hour of waiting around, a dread sunk in. What if we didn’t even rank? What if we were the ones who got sent home with just a certificate? No trophy, no scholarship, not even a photo op with Al.

As Al opened the envelope for the grand prizewinner, a small voice inside of me thought, “What if we won the grand prize?” (A $25,000 scholarship for each teammate.) But I knew what was already about to happen. So I got up during the announcement and went straight to my room.

First, I cried. Then I punched my pillow. I kept thinking to myself, “What was this all for?” Did I really spend my weekends and summer vacation locked indoors for this? All that struggle with my teammates’ apathy, all that striving to impress judges. Why?

And then an even darker thought settled in, one that shook me to my core: “What if I really did waste my time?” Despite all the work I had put into adding JavaScript doo-dads to our site, it didn’t make me a better web designer. I had spent most of that time copying and pasting code snippets, without really understanding how they worked. Nearly every feature I had added to The Sciences Explorer was because I thought the judges would be impressed. The real loss for me wasn’t the prize, but rather that I hadn’t learned how to make better websites.

I resolved then that there was only one proper response: re-enter the contest, but on my own terms. I decided that instead of worrying about the judges this time, I would focus on learning. Victory would be determined not by a panel, but by how well I had grasped advanced concepts of web design.

A year later, I’m still in awe of how everything has transpired since then. Every time I found myself re-reading the judge’s rubric on ThinkQuest’s website, angsting about whether or not we were on target, I would close my browser and open Programming Perl. Every time I found myself chomping at the bit for my teammates to pull their load, I would alt-tab out of ICQ, and explore more of the menus in Photoshop.

I got so completely absorbed in learning that I had this awesome moment a few months into the contest. My parents and I were driving to IHOP on a rainy Sunday morning, and I calmly looked at the windshield wipers go back and forth. In that moment, I realized just how deeply happy I was. I had spent the entire week absorbed in programming tutorials and graphic design exercises. I hadn’t argued with my parents. I didn’t get distracted with playing Quake. Everything was just right. And I determined then, that I wanted the rest of my life to be like this.

The funny thing is, by focusing on this separate goal of learning, it actually made me much better at winning. I put together a new team for ThinkQuest ‘98, and we created a website called EgyptWorld. We iterated over the design many times, and each time I learned something new about Photoshop Layers, Masks, and Effects. I took many breaks to learn new technologies, and as a result I learned Macromedia Flash. For example, I spent a weekend on Gabocorp, one of my favorite flash sites, re-creating its spinning menus and swooshing lettering. It’s a lot like when you brought your sketchpad to the Sistine Chapel, copying and imitating masters. You said your best drawings came then, while you were studying how to draw, rather than just drawing. It’s exactly this kind of deliberate and substantial effort that set us apart from the competition.

And now I’m a better web designer. I have proof in the form of this award, but by the time the awards ceremony rolled around, I didn’t need it. I had already landed my first web design gig. With my newfound confidence, I simply asked everybody I knew, “Who do you know who needs a website?” and now my inbox is full with requests. Everybody wants a site done in Flash, and the price tags are in the thousands of dollars. I predict that in a few months, they will total much more than my scholarship.

I said it once, and I’ll say it again, I want the rest of my life to be like this.

- Phil

As a principle, “Do it to learn” is something I still value. More importantly, I often think of the more generalized concept of “off-goal targeting,” whereby you focus on something else to achieve the thing you really want. However, the flipside of this epiphany is that it cursed me for years. I often struggled to find that perfect blend between intrinsic motivation and massive reward, and in some cases, it led me to depression and career anxiety.