The college essay shouldn’t be wasted on college.

Besides persuading college admissions officers, it can serve as an act of self-discovery.

As the saying goes, youth is wasted on the young. Nonetheless, you and I can relive its joys and trials. For one thing, you could retake the SAT. Substacker Liza Blue did it at 58. (“Don’t forget to bring your bifocals.”)

But I suggest an even richer form of torture: Write a college admissions essay. For actual high school students struggling to meet the November deadline, I created a video that offers help. Why should you and I do it? Because I believe it’s one of the best writing exercises anyone could do, at any age.

The main trick to writing a college essay is to make a bored admissions officer fall in love. She’s not just looking for the straight-A athlete who launched a nonprofit to comfort lonely puppies; that stuff belongs in the transcript. The essay should supply something else: evidence that the person can learn and grow. Isn’t that what college is supposed to be for (other than providing an expensive ticket to socioeconomic standing)?

The best way to prove this noble evolvability? I suggest an “epiphanic” approach. Craft a tale in which you find yourself challenged by the very thing you’re proudest of. As an example, I use my son George. A top student, captain of his ski team, and Eagle Scout for crying out loud, he chose to write about his headache. That’s because his type-A character, his high-octane self-motivation, was making his headache chronic. To overcome it, he had to learn to “try not to try.”

George is now a history teacher and dean at a high school in Dallas. Twenty years after writing that essay, he remembers it as a key exercise—not just in writing but in self-discovery. That’s exactly why you and I should consider writing a college essay ourselves. It’s an act of rediscovery.

Below is a first draft of a “college” essay that I wrote on this very early Sunday morning, before the coffee has entirely kicked in. Is it terrible? Well, I like to tell students that the key to writing is to write bad first drafts and become good editors. Writing is rewriting. My book Thank You for Arguing went through six tortuous drafts. When my editor a Random House saw the first version, his first words were: “This is terrible.” I’ll always be grateful for his brutal honesty.

On to the essay…

My life changed when my mother asked if I remembered Bozo the Clown. Earlier that day I had received the results from a management exam that measured my potential at a professional organization outside Washington, D.C. The results were not good; they pegged me as an extreme introvert. In fact, I remember the examiner telling my boss that, instead of managing anyone it would be best if I sat alone in an office behind a typewriter. (Today I’m sitting alone in a cabin behind a laptop. Plus ça change…)

The test’s conclusions seemed entirely inaccurate and unfair. I had had friends in high school...and in college! Delightful, nerdy friends, and not in excess. Just enough friends. A couple at a time. And, sure, after every party or social meeting I would go to bed early, exhausted. Social occasions are tiring. But that hardly made me the Unabomber.

Being the professional I was, my first instinct was to seek expert advice: I called my mother. Instead of giving me the support one would expect from the dear woman, though, she said: “They have you pegged to a T!”

“What?”

Hearing the anguish in my voice, Mom spoke more soothingly. “Do you remember Bozo the Clown in nursery school?”

I did. Bozo was an inflatable figure, weighted on the bottom. When you punched it, it sprang right back up, a paragon of forgiveness and optimism. It sat alone in a room with a padded floor, in a Quaker school outside Philadelphia. I first met Bozo after hitting the kid next to me during Story Time. The teacher had told us all to sit “Indian style” on the floor, with our legs folded into each other. Being born with the flexibility of a Tin Man, I was incapable even then of sitting like…what Indians were they talking about, anyway? I dealt with my frustration by socking my nearest neighbor, and immediately got banished to the Bozo the Clown room.

I loved it.

The teacher reported to my mother later that day that when she came to collect me from that time-out room, she found me asleep on the floor with my arms around Bozo. Next day I hit another kid in hopes of spending more time with the clown, only to get a lecture in pacifism.

“You were a talkative kid,” Mom said. “We couldn’t get you to shut up. But that didn’t make you social.”

“But I am social,” I said, and heard myself beginning to whine.

This is the point where the scales fell from my eyes. All my life I had believed that the words I had loved and mastered were a means of connecting to other people. I hadn’t been a great student in school, preferring instead to hang out at the town library. I would pull down books at random and read them: Lyndon Johnson’s memoirs. Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. A biography of George Washington Carver. Wuthering Heights. At the Back of the North Wind. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Robert Frost’s collected poetry. The biology of the tsetse fly, the deadly transmitter of sleeping sickness. My vocabulary expanded beyond my ability to pronounce the words. I remember coming home one day and informing my parents that a scientist named Copper Nickus had discovered that the Earth revolved around the sun.

“Copper Knickers?” my dad said. (He had a Brooklyn accent.) Both parents laughed.

But I was undaunted. Words connected me to everything and everybody, and I was happy to share my expanding knowledge. The other kids called me Professor Heinie, and I considered it a badge of honor.

I was 26 years old when my mother brought up Bozo the Clown. It suddenly occurred to me that my love of words wasn’t exactly connecting me to other people. Words were my punching bag, a means of happy isolation.

Fortunately, my boss ignored the test results and promoted me, and I spent the next few decades managing people in various publishing jobs. All along, though, I wondered whether I could learn about words in a way that would truly connect.

Then one day it came to me, in the form of a pair of books bound in red leather. I was standing—alone—in the deepest stacks of the Dartmouth College library. Being bored with the job I’d stayed in too long, I had been taking increasingly long lunch “hours,” resuming my childhood habit of pulling down books at random. That day I found myself in a section where the shelves were covered with cobwebs. Many of the overhead fluorescent bulbs had burned out. The books still had the old-fashioned cards in them revealing that none of them had been checked out in half a century. One of the red covers stood out at eye level. I pulled it out and opened it and found the signature of John Quincy Adams. The book was one of two volumes, a set of lectures he had given as Harvard’s first Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. In the first lecture he told a group of first-year students to “catch from the relics of ancient oratory those unresisted powers, which mould the mind of man to the will of the speaker, and yield the guidance of the nation to the dominion of the voice.”

That was it. Words themselves don’t connect us to each other; it’s the powers, the “unresisted powers,” that lay within those words. I spent the next years reading rhetoric on my own and bothering rhetoricians around the world.

Eventually, my wife urged me to quit my job. I had been miserably managing way too many people, and she told me to write a book on rhetoric. So I did that.

And the connections keep growing.