When I was 6 and participated in an Easter Egg hunt, I didn’t bring a bag. Seeing the massive field of plastic eggs with candies inside them, their rainbow colors, was too alluring, and when the bell sounded, I would run onto the field, taking up an egg, then dropping it, going in circles and trying to grab as many as possible with my bare hands. In the end, after 15 minutes of bouncing around like a rabbit, I ended up with two eggs, holding not only no prizes, but no candy. I bawled.

The next year, I came prepared. I now had a large basket, wider than me. I swore I would get as many eggs as possible, though I’d declared the same last year. I also made a strategy. Rather than dash aimlessly at the field, I would pick a patch and snake my way through it. When the bell sounded, I dashed out, throwing eggs in my basket, and midway, with the basket almost full, it became too heavy to carry. I clutched the basket handle with both hands as it lurched from side to side. Some eggs had slips of paper inside; going through all the eggs gave me “2nd Place” and “3rd Place”. This yielded a giant chocolate bunny and basket with goodies.

The field didn’t change. But my strategy and my preparation did.

MIT’s ecosystem is oft-compared to drinking out of a firehose—you want a nice sip; it blasts you with a torrent of water. With so many goodies, MIT offers a unique challenge. No longer does one worry about taking home a few Easter eggs, but how to plunder the whole patch. The wealth of resources leads not to appreciation of the vastness, but desperation. And if I was not careful to plan out my own path and stand solid in the grass, I would be swept away by the egg field, taking maybe just one or two for myself, doing ironically worse than if there had not been so many classes, clubs, and events.

If we map the Easter Egg Principle to MIT, we gain a strategy for approaching it—the one I have used, which I follow sometimes brilliantly, sometimes not at all. Rather than allowing appealing dormspammed events¹ to overwhelm me in desperation, I would first recall my principles and mission at MIT, then see if the event fit well with my temperament or desires. In other words, the internal dictates the external, not the other way around².

The dimension of depth also allows us to hack the question of optimality. On one end, I could stick to my schedule and attend nothing new; on the other, I could let fun events dictate my life. The sweet spot is in the middle. But there is a hack to this spectrum. With a more solid core—advancement in my goals, depth of study or interaction, solid purpose—I can actually obtain more per event. In other words, by knowing myself and my goals better, I can get more meaning or fun from the events I intentionally attend and build deeper connections. The same applies to lecturers, classes, and symposia.

My MIT experience has been slightly different from the Easter egg hunts. The bringing a large basket to pick up more eggs is correct, but a better analogy is that my presence enlarges the eggs near me when I pick them up. What I make of MIT’s resources depends on how I interact with them, and how I interact with them depends on whether I’ve taken the time to solidify myself.

Footnotes

¹ “dormspam” is our nickname for advertisements sent through email to all dorm residents of MIT.

² See "Dichotomy of Self" for more details.