Write the boring version first
Take the thing you actually want to say and write it flat. No scene, no hook, no last line that turns. Four hundred words a stranger could not tell apart from anybody else's. That draft is not the essay — it is the only reliable way to find out whether there is a subject underneath it at all.
Students resist this because the flat version looks like failure. It is the opposite. An essay that survives being written badly has something in it; one that only works with the scene and the turn was carrying nothing but the scene and the turn.
Cut to what only you know
Read the flat draft and mark every sentence a hundred other applicants could have written. Most of them go. What is left is usually three or four lines, and those lines are the essay. Everything else gets built back around them, in that order.
The reader has seven minutes
An admissions reader is on their fortieth file of the day. They are not looking for beautiful — they are looking for a person they can describe to a committee in one sentence. Write the sentence you want said about you, then check whether the essay earns it.
When to stop
The draft is finished when cutting anything else takes out something true. Not when it is polished. Polish is the last afternoon and it is worth roughly a tenth of what the fourth draft was worth.