The REAL way to win scholarships

My readers, of which I am the only one, want to know how to win scholarships, not from a "take 10 years off your life from extracurricular-academic-sport-stress-overload" kind of way, but from a "know the real rules of the situation to optimize what matters" kind of way. So after some crunch time, we came to our conclusion: 

You need three things: Suffering, Virtue, and Quality.

Why is suffering crucial?

Empathy is also the best part of friendship, and by suffering "with" him, you become a person who wants to help him out.

By suffering, are we provoked to wish to help others not feel suffering. By forcing the reader to feel suffering remotely, we can provoke this same response (create empathy). It also causes his investment (he will remember it), makes it seem realistic (suffering is da realz), and implies to the reader that the person's virtuousness is authentic (since suffering = empathy > goodness).

If he suffers, he has the sympathy of the reader, and his accomplishments seem greater in the light of it taking more to do them, presumably. If he is virtuous in the eyes of the reader, he will be favored because, well, he will do good things. (See DT-Familiarity, this is why "Good christian" and "for my family" make functional sense, as thermometers of empathy > virtuousness). Quality is everything else, it is the reader's confidence he will not waste the money. This is why community service / academic masochism honors are important, it implies that you have the bent to do good, and to do well. (Masochism honors are useful because they indicate the strength of a person's work ethic, or something like that, and thus mean he's a real cool dude)

A scholarship giver is a ethical universalist, who wants to do the most good for society at large (See: They don't just pay their family or friends to go to school instead). He wants to award it to a person who will do the most "good" to society generally, will make the world more like how it "should" as opposed to how it "is". (Quotations referring to how people see that differently, and a successful writer will find his ambitions to change based upon this). 

Make him the rich man behind the revolutionary, the young man who will change the world, sharing in his fruits of the glorious goodness. Make him think he's helping the most people the most fully, and do so more successfully than your competitors to win. Although they can be woo-wooed into being sympathetic, everyone does that so no victory is predicated on that.

In conclusion: Virtuousness, quality, and suffering are all crucial. Suffering ignites the sympathies of the reader (suffering creates empathy, empathy creates friendship), helps virtuousness by providing a "cover story", and makes quality seem more impressive. Quality shows you won't waste the money, makes the suffering seem it has had fruit, helps you argue that you will make the best use of the money in contributing to the common good. Virtuousness is the real contest, and is won by showing that you will do the most good, and make society the most how it should be. 

The ultimate goal is to make the reader think that you are the person who will do the most real good (will actually do it times competence times amount of good times people) in the world, and thus award you. In shortest: You must be the most sympathetic, convincing, competent, and most effectual way for the scholarship to make the world a better place.

"Play by the real rules, or lose by the real rules."