This is right, of course, but I struggle to see how it’s useful, since there’s no way to tell what adcoms are seeking and they’re seeking a diverse class made up of all types. Even Wharton and Stern, bastions of go-getter biz culture, take plenty of introverted quant types, as I see almost every year–I knew a kid who got into Wharton with a Personal Statement about being more comfortable running regressions than running a study group (it worked, imo, because he had interesting and engaging stories about both).
The one thing I’d like to emphasize that I didn’t put in my initial post is that finding your best stories is hard. When I was doing app consulting, it was a huge part of my work with my students–I’d give them dozens of writing assignments and have lots of 1:1 meetings to try to tease the most interesting stories out of them, and they often had a hard time evaluating their stories’ “interestingness” on their own. Students I know who do it successfully without much outside help are the ones who start early and start with lots of general introspection and free writing about their life experiences. You never know where the best stories are going to come from, and they can come from anywhere.
And of course, every now and then a kid would ask, “why can’t I just make up a story?” My first response is “don’t be dishonest,” of course, but for people who aren’t swayed by (what I consider) basic ethics, I add this: “Making up great stories is even harder than relating true ones, and very few people are genuinely good at it–they’re called fiction writers, and almost none of them are teenagers. You’re probably not one.”