Life Can Change In A Moment

Gabrielle Glancy has been an entrepreneur since the age of four when she sold stickballs for ten
cents less than cost back to the boys who had hit them onto her grandfather’s roof in Sea Gate,
Coney Island, where she grew up.
Just before founding New Vision Learning, at the height of the dot com boom, Ms. Glancy
invented Facebook (before there was a such a thing) and called it Townsquare.com. The
founder of Ebay, whose daughter she had helped get into Williams, told her it was a brilliant

Show Notes

• [2:00] Today's guest is Gabrielle Glancy, a College Admissions Guru. She took a course in graduate school talk by Grace Paley, a famous short story writer who wrote the book called Enormous changes at the last minute. Grace had four miscarriages, and when she was 47 after her last miscarriage, she decided to adopt a child from Guatemala. When she's taking care of the child, she thought she has a sleep deprivation due to constantly feeling to pass out.
• [5:00] Grace is a pre-med English major. Her passion is writing, but she has a writer's block.
•  When she goes to a neurologist due to her illness, it didn't help her, and she went to an alternative functional medicine doctor named Chris Kresser and told her to check her poop. It turns out she had a raging parasite from Guatemala.
• [8:45] It took her two years to recover from internal parasites while taking care of an infant and working. Before she got sick, Grace was an AP and English teacher for mostly very smart students, she loves teaching, but the salary was not enough.
• [12:39] When she was on a stationary bike, she saw people around her becoming quite successful, she loves teaching, but the salary is not enough at that time Grace decided that she can't go on like that. She started reading because she realizes that she has a block that stops her from being successful.
• [15:14] In three months, Grace overcame the block, and she went from $35000 a year to $35000 a month or more. When Grace overcame the block, all the steps to become successful are crystal clear to her.
• [18:00] Marco, a child adopted by Grace from Guatemala, drive her to earn more for their survival needs.
• Grace never married and a single parent, so she hired a nanny for Marco right at the beginning, and it's expensive and realizes that she needs more money to support her son. She is always happy with her work, but it wasn't enough to support them.
• [22:00] Grace admitted that she was a lesbian, but when she's on Israel because of her job, she met a man named Cottee that broke her friend's heart. They become very close, and after six weeks, Grace accepted Cottee and eventually got pregnant.
• [26:30] She got a problem telling her friend that she was pregnant. Cottee asked her to marry him, and Grace said that she will think about it and want to be with a woman. Grace was 38 years old when she got her first miscarriage.
• [30:42] Grace felt devastated because she wants to have the baby even though she doesn't marry him. Grace wanted to be a mother and got four IVF and went to Romania to get eggs.
• [33:30] Grace got postpartum every year, and after the fourth one, she wants to kill herself. The fourth miscarriage of Grace was dangerous because it was ectopic, and she realized that it's enough. She took a loan from her house to adopt a child. Grace let go to give birth because of life and death experience, and she spends $175,000 to get pregnant.
• [36:27] Grace felt amazing for being a mother, she felt that once she had him, he is worth all the baby that she lost because he is the baby she needed to have. She remembers calling her mother that she wants to end it all that she will not get pregnant. The third time when she got pregnant with triplets and felt really hard because of miscarriage.
• [38:36] When she brought home baby Marco from Guatemala, she didn't know what to do, one time when she and her partner went to an art show, they forgot the baby home. Grace enjoyed being a mother. Marco was two and a half years when Grace started her recovery, and she has a lot of debt.
• [41:20] The block that Grace was feeling was like a dam that has flowing water. She helps people to break those blocks. It's like you want something but something stopping you. Grace thinks that she got the blocks from not surpassing her father in some way.
• [44:01] Grace said that the most important thing is in place, which is there's no blocking my way, and nothing is going to stop me. Grace makes a visual representation of the block and moving out of the way, then what needed to happen next revealed itself. 
• [45:46] When Grace removed her block, the first thing she did was to quit her day job. Grace didn't ask herself a question where she will get money after quitting her job. It was like she was driven to do this thing.
• [48:10] The three things to do to get into college was to do really well at school, figure out what you want, where you want to go, and the golden key to college admission is the essay because that's where they meet you, that's where they shake your hands. Grace leads the students to write without preconceived notions of what the essay is going to look like, what they're supposed to write about.
• [51:00] The book "Unstuck" is about removing the block. Grace said being on admission was the most boring job on her life, she got to reject 28000 essays of students, she said when you are writing an essay you got to write first think later. Grace asked her students to write five moments of their life in a worry-free zone and rearrange the sentences.
• [54:00] Grace has a student that fight her the whole time and convince him to write a free write
• For his essay, the kid writes about the potential lifeguard watching a video about the pool accident, and they arrange it together to make an essay. The lesson was so beautiful; he said: "you can't save everyone from drowning." 
• [58:30] Grace ask them what five significant moments that change their life; they free write it and stitch it together to make the essay.

idea, but that to generate revenue, she would need to sell ads. Selling ads seemed like selling
out, and so she founded New Vision Learning instead.
As a teacher, educational consultant and college counselor, for nearly thirty years, Gabrielle
Glancy has been in the business of helping students find and realize their dreams. Not only has
she helped countless students find a way to harness their strengths to overcome their
challenges — to learn how to learn — but as Director of New Vision Learning, she has helped
thousands of students — all over the Bay Area, New York City, Los Angeles, across the U.S., and
all over the world, locate and get into the colleges of their dreams. 
Over the course of her career, she has worked in admissions three separate times at three
different and highly respected colleges and universities.  She knows exactly what it takes to get
in and that helps her every day as she guides students through the college application process.
She has taught at some of the most prestigious secondary schools, colleges and universities in
the world including The University of San Francisco, New College, Lang College, The New
School for Social Research, Saint Ann’s School for Gifted and Talented in New York
City, Crystal Springs Uplands School in Hillsborough, California, The American-International
School of Israel, The American School in London, and Villanova Prep, where she helped
foreign and American students abroad (including boys from Eton and St. Paul’s in London)
prepare for the SATs and apply to college.
For the past several years, she has been Series Editor of Best College Essays 2014, 2016 and
2018. And she has authored THE book on writing college essays called The Art of the College
Essay, one of the bestselling books on the subject. Her next book, UNSTUCK, which helps
students free themselves from writer's block, will be released this September. 
Gabrielle Glancy has been awarded Teacher of the Year by the National Association for
Teachers of the ARTS, and won the European Council of Independent School’s prize for
educational writing. Her essay, “The Best You Know How to Be” was published in their journal.
She is also a widely published writer. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris
Review and The American Poetry Review. She has been featured on NPR and in USA Today.