Verbal Advantage - Manifesto Pt. II: The 90th Percentile Mindset

2015 GMAT Club Verbal Advantage Article

GMAT Assassin's Manifesto Pt. II: The 90th Percentile Mindset Difference
The Do or Die Mindset Shift
By Max Peterson, EMPOWERgmat


Does This Sound Familiar?
If you’ve read any posts on this forum, you’ve invariably come across a user expressing that studying for the GMAT is frustrating and difficult. You’ve also probably read those stories about test-takers who’ve gone from 510 to 770. Why is the GMAT so beatable for some people, yet seemingly so unbeatable for others?


The Difference
In GMAT Assassin’s Manifesto Pt. 1 ( ◀ GMAT Assassin's Manifesto Part I - How to Master Content & Tactics) we talked about how to train. In Part II, we’re going to discuss a decision that all successful GMAT students make... Some students are naturally pre-wired with the right mindset (it’s in how they see life in general); others make the decision deliberately. The EMPOWERgmat Course was programmed to implicitly build this decision into how you will view the GMAT.

The Decision: To earn a huge GMAT score, are you ready and willing to find victory in the PROCESS of building your skill and not just in a score?

Without an enjoyment of the skill-building process, prepping for the GMAT will feel like work, it will be boring, and frustrating. Don’t look at it as work. Instead, you have to look forward to practice. You need to be able to dive into total immersion as you’re prepping, practicing, reviewing, and taking your real GMAT. If you want your best GMAT score then you should be totally immersed in growing and refining your skill instead of obsessing about a score.

Once you decide to shift to the mindset of valuing the PROCESS, you will feel empowered. You will not find the GMAT prep process “painful”, but rather a challenge to be savored. If you make that choice, then you’ll be able to earn a much bigger score, and earn it faster.

Let’s make it specific and explore the Assassin’s mindset.


The GMAT Assassin’s Mindset
When you review a question from a Quiz, a CAT, GMAT Club, etc., there are four properties you need to possess to extract maximum improvement from each question:
1. Self-Discipline
2. Focus
3. Patience
4. Self-Awareness

Let me offer you a comparative example of someone who’s not process-oriented vs someone who is. Take a look at this Critical Reasoning Inference question: (here’s the link to the live question: ▶ CR INFERENCE SERIES: Question 1) Securities Industry Regulator). Inference questions ask you to select the ONLY option that has to be 100% logically true from the information given in the prompt (and the opposite for Inference EXCEPT questions). Tempting incorrect options usually sound very reasonable, but "reasonable" doesn’t cut it. We need the option that HAS TO BE true.

Securities Industry Regulator: Brokerage “Buy” ratings are suffering from a credibility gap. There is a far greater proportion of “Buy” ratings than “Sell” ratings. In fact, 80% of all major financial institution’s ratings are “Buy” ratings. Given that inflated volume of “Buy” ratings, it’s hard to trust the quality of those ratings, and equally challenging to take them seriously. Even the simple act of reducing a financial institution’s analysis to just “Buy”, “Hold”, or “Sell” is dubious since a company’s financial outlook is typically quite complex. Accordingly, a financial institution’s investment rating is rendered almost meaningless.

If the Securities Industry Regulator’s statements are true, then which of the following must be true?


Ⓐ An investor can only profit from an investment if he or she confirms the merits of a company’s financial future.

Ⓑ A “Buy” rating does not guarantee that a given company will have a strong financial future.

Ⓒ Financial institutions should refrain from issuing “Buy” ratings.

Ⓓ The ability of a company to earn a “Buy” rating has become easier than ever before.

Ⓔ Increasingly, financial institutions are issuing meaningless investment ratings.

Let’s say that someone picked option E (it’s the #1 selected INCORRECT option). The prompt closes with: “Accordingly, a financial institution’s investment rating is rendered almost meaningless”, so option (E) seems very reasonable. However, the prompt never said, nor implied, that any rating IS MEANINGLESS. There’s a huge difference between “almost meaningless” and “meaningless”. Over the course of an entire GMAT, catching subtle distinctions such as this can make the difference between a 550 and a 700.


The Outcome Oriented, Impatient, Misery-Fest
I want you to imagine a GMAT student who’s struggling... Struggling not only with this question, but also with the entire GMAT prep process. This is someone who wants to break 700, but is stuck at 550. It seems like no matter what they do, they’re stuck. In this scenario, they’ve scored around 550 on their last 5 practice tests....

Now, picture what this student might be do during a question “review” for this Inference question. Are you picturing this student just jumping straight to the explanation to read why (E) is wrong and why the correct answer (B) is right, and then moving on to the next question? Good. That’s what people who are “stuck” do. What we just described is arguably the #1 reason why people don’t hit their potential and do not earn their target score - they’re not allowing themselves the opportunity to retire old, ineffective habits and build new, more successful ones.


Here’s Where Excellence Happens – The 90th Percentile Breakdown
So what do process oriented test-takers do differently? They ask themselves two key questions on EVERY question they miss:

1) WHY DID I miss this question? If I answered correctly, did I answer it in the best way?
2) WHAT CAN I do differently next time to avoid that same mistake?

So now, let’s compare what process-oriented test-taker would do in “reviewing” this same question. Let’s say that this test-taker also picked option (E). Here’s what this test-taker’s analysis would be:

1) WHY DID I miss this question?
I read too quickly/not carefully enough... and missed that this option said that the ratings “are meaningless” when the prompt actually said “almost meaningless”.

2) WHAT CAN I do differently next time to avoid that same mistake?
I made a silly reading mistake. A mistake that could have EASILY been avoided had I taken an extra 5-10 seconds to read just slightly more carefully. Specifically, I need to constantly remind myself that it’s OK to read at a slightly slower (but more accurate/intensive) pace because not only will that help me boost my accuracy, but I’ll also likely end up saving time since I won’t be as likely to need to re-read as often.

These are the kinds of mistakes that I usually don’t make when I do un-timed practice, but that I do make when the clock is ticking. I need to make sure I’m centered, and in control, from the start of each question.

Zoom Out: What’s the Difference in Mindset?
Could you summarize the difference between these two test-takers in a nutshell? The first student just cares about the result - the result of getting the question right, finishing the explanations, finishing the GMAT, finishing the applications. “I just want to be done. I just want a big GMAT score, and I want to move on.” This test-taker is impatient, and instead of looking inward, they look outward and essentially blame the question, or even blame the entire GMAT.

The GMAT Assassin not only understands the explanation, but the Assassin looks inward with a total focus and full immersion in the process. The Assassin has patience to squeeze maximum insight from each question instead of just jamming through a quiz set, and then jamming through the next quiz, and then jamming through the next quiz, aimlessly burning through questions.

The Assassin test-taker has a sense of self-awareness to inspect what technical mistakes were made, what caused that mistake and what can be done differently to avert that mistake next time.


Conclusion
Ultimately, big GMAT score gains come from investing in the process of self-evaluating, getting excited about opportunity to improve and finding value in the entire prep-process.

The Decision You Make As a GMAT Student
If you want to get into a great Business School, then you need a big GMAT score. The reality is that you ARE going to need to prep. The best GMAT test-takers make the decision to welcome the GMAT prep process for this brief window of time and embrace it. By deciding to make a personal investment into the process itself, and even enjoying it, you’ll not only improve faster, but ironically, you’ll also earn a much better outcome.

It’s time for you to be the next assassin.