Author Judith Warner was at first "sick at heart" to read about those high-achieving girls whose high achievements still weren't enough to get them into their first-choice colleges. And then she realized: "It's probably the best thing that could have happened to them." In her TimesSelecty burst of awesome today, Warner breaks it all down.

A lot of success early in life can be a real liability — if you buy into it. Brass rings keep getting suspended higher and higher as you grow older. And when you grab them, they have a way of turning into dust in your hands. Psychologists ... have all kinds of words for this, but the women I know seem to experience it as living life with a gun pointed to their heads. Every day brings a new minefield of incipient failure: the too-tight pants, the peeling wallpaper, the unbrilliant career.

So true, and also so guilt-assuaging: we were feeling kind of shitty about calling out Esther Mobley's college essay's slowness. But now we know that we've maybe helped her to avoid the dangerous liability of early success.

Looking Beyond The Brass Ring [NYT]