People Who Are Obsessed with Success and Prestige

"I’ve been thinking about the difference between the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the ones you list on your résumé, the skills that you bring to the job market and that contribute to external success. The eulogy virtues are deeper. They’re the virtues that get talked about at your funeral, the ones that exist at the core of your being — whether you are kind, brave, honest or faithful; what kind of relationships you formed.

Most of us would say that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé virtues, but I confess that for long stretches of my life I’ve spent more time thinking about the latter than the former. Our education system is certainly oriented around the résumé virtues more than the eulogy ones. Public conversation is, too — the self-help tips in magazines, the nonfiction bestsellers. Most of us have clearer strategies for how to achieve career success than we do for how to develop a profound character."

Maybe we'd all do better to be focused on those 'eulogy virtues' rather than obsessing over our external success. For me at least, it's a constant battle to hold back the pull of the weasel trying to measure myself against external validation.

> Got an awesome internship at an interesting company? Well, it wasn’t FAANG, so who cares? Got a FAANG internship? Well it wasn’t one of the good FAANGs, so if you really think about it, you really didn’t accomplish anything. Got into a “Good FAANG”? Well, the other intern works on his own startup idea when he goes home. Why aren’t you working on your startup idea? Do you even have a startup idea? Are you even trying?

It's absolutely not limited to new engineers. Take a look at the replies to the "Levels.fyi Annual Report" here on HN.

> You can't move to the US/SF/NYC? Good luck eeking out a living. You didn't get an offer from a FAANG? Well, you don't really belong in the bay area then. You got a FAANG offer but you didn't negotiate 400k+ total comp? Good luck ever getting a raise. You made it to the top of your salary band? Well, they'll never move you up, better plan your exit now.

The tech rat race mentality is very real and very pervasive.

> If it wasn’t that, maybe it was also because I am gay. My mother was never really happy about this

Ah, the absolute pinnacle of neurosis parenting. That's a solid one-two punch to the child's psyche, which gives them a drive to please while at the same time ensuring it can never be met. Well done; you ensured your child would work hard forever by guaranteeing that no matter how hard they work they won't actually be happy, because they can never meet your standard for approval.

Marcus Aurelius

"19. You may be unconquerable, if you enter into no combat in which it is not in your own control to conquer. When, therefore, you see anyone eminent in honors, or power, or in high esteem on any other account, take heed not to be hurried away with the appearance, and to pronounce him happy; for, if the essence of good consists in things in our own control, there will be no room for envy or emulation. But, for your part, don't wish to be a general, or a senator, or a consul, but to be free; and the only way to this is a contempt of things not in our own control."

Epictetus

What amuses me to no end is when I see a rich guy who wants to keep being in the news. As if to say "see, I actually deserve all this wealth". I've seen several of these people over the years. Somehow the media keep calling them to comment on all manner of things unrelated to their field of expertise. One guy I've seen has articles about how he's a great art lover. Then one about how his wife worked so hard to help him. Then commentary on how startups work. Then he buys a sports team. And another. And another. Everythings he does has to be in the news. Another guy is a little bit wiser about it, but also sticks his comments in where he really isn't an expert (economics, politics). Sprinkle in a bit of bragging about expensive wines and restuarants, and it just looks like an old child doing the "look at me" routine.

I really don't get it. I suppose that external validation is a huge factor for some people, something similar to substance addiction. People can't see it, but they are swapping dignity for attention.

And it hurts my career. I don't have twitter followers who fall over themselves to offer me a job the very second I enter the job market. I can't shame a company or other big entity for behaving badly. I have very little leverage for many important career-improving opportunities because I lack the social clout to take advantage of them.

You NEED to attain some status and influence if you want the best control over your destiny. I'm trying to do this now, but it's hard because it doesn't come naturally.

But suppose that those who remembered you were immortal and your memory undying. What good would it do you? And I don't just mean when you're dead, but in your own lifetime. What use is praise, except to make your lifestyle a little more comfortable?"

- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

I got over my obsession with emulating others' success when I realized that a lot of supposedly successful people were successful primarily because they were also lucky. Once you accept that a big factor in whether you'll end up "successful" is just chance, it becomes easier to accept that it may not be entirely under your control and so there's no reason to obsess about it.

PG's advice, which in some ways is a restatement of the Bhagvad Gita's best-known verse, really speaks to me. Just focus on doing the best you can on the things that actually interest you. The rest will follow, and if it doesn't, that's okay. At least you'll have had fun doing your thing.

I think the author got it wrong here. He mixes the words "successful" with "fame". By learning a skill like making pasta from scratch, you can make yourself and other people happy. And if you go deep into the field, you can even make money on it, if that's important to you :)

I started baking pizza and obsessed at making the perfect tomato sauce, the perfect dough, the perfect crust. Basically, the perfect pizza. I do know that perfect does not exist, but I got to a point where I make a pretty damn good pizza. I like my pizza better than most pizzi I can get in a restaurant. My next step is to build my own wood-fired outdoor oven, so I can reach the temperatures I need to get the pizza even better.

Being able to make this amazing pizza makes me so happy. It makes people around me happy. And I learn my friends and family how to make proper pizza. I smile and laugh and dance when I make pizza.

This is true success in my opinion.

And after I learned the baking skills, success kind of started snowballing in other areas as well.

Why are famous people successful? They do what makes them happy :) Why am I starting to be successful? I do what makes me happy :) How can you start to be successful? Do what makes you happy :)

If you think going down a certain path for happiness might seem a little crazy, that's a good sign.

I stared at this for a long time in complete disbelief thinking "But it's so delicious!" And I guess, if you do it for friends or acquaintances it will give you prestige, you will be the prestigious person who makes totally awesome pasta. Although personally I would rank doing something nice for people above the prestige you might get from it, so I guess the article is not for me.

> In Paul Graham’s essay on, How to Do what You Love* he warns us about the prestige trap: (...) you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you’re going to be good at it; you have to like making up elaborate lies*

PG's contempt for anything literary pervades in many of his essays, which may reveal some kind of unhealthy obsession, esp. for someone who brands himself a "writer".

But this quote shows a deep misunderstanding of what literature is. Literature is about the TRUTH. It may be the only way to gain an actual comprehension of human nature.

A novel can be viewed as an experiment: put characters in a controlled setting of your design, and then see what happens. This is the best tool we have for this.

Also, Dave, given the subject matter i did sneak in a little chuckle that you were the one posting this to HN. I’m glad you did though, interesting view into the headspace.

And wearing grey t-shirts won't make you Zuckerberg [0]. You don't become a 0.00000001%er by mimicking the most meaningless aspect of their life.

Seems to me that this is particularly affecting people who aren't satisfied with themselves / rarely reflect on themselves and get caught in the rat race without ever pausing to look around. You can always be more successful, earn more money buy more gadgets, have a nicer car, more awards, it's an endless quest, but if you're empty inside these things won't help you.

[0] https://careers.workopolis.com/advice/the-reason-mark-zucker...

> Unfortunately, after a year of purposely trying, I was still not becoming Elon Musk nor any other “successful” person. Despite reading everyday, meditating, getting up early, taking cold showers, and many more things.

There’s a ridiculous amount of bro science in Silicon Valley tech. And this stuff doesn’t matter at all. All that matters is product-market fit.

There’s a very good short story by Alastair Reynolds called Understanding Space and Time. The protagonist is the last human alive. He finds his purpose in understanding the universe. Even once he completes this goal, he must go on living his life.

It may sound trite, but I tell people to put themselves in that position. What would you spend your time doing if you were the last human alive? Now obviously you don’t do that verbatim, but I think it should be an influential datapoint on your choice of career path.

The best news is that if you’re a half decent technical mind with a half decent network, the odds of you ever starving are quite low (not including dependents. That’s a different story). As a result, you have ample opportunity to carve out whatever corner of the universe you want for yourself :)

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/science-choice/20150...

If you are a satisficer, getting a better brand name company/school/accelerator etc will help you in the long run.

If you are a maximizer, you may be unhappy for all the reasons stated in the article and in the comments.

But we shouldn't confuse the benefits of a brand with the impossible standards.

I grew up an only child in as single parent household where I was taught that it's better to quietly build a stable secure foundation for your life, rather than to put yourself "out there" and hope for the best. My mothers attitude was that it is better to have a boring stable job that provides enough for you and your family than to be rich or famous. For example she implored me to study for a fall-back manual trade in case the computing degree thing didn't work out.

Recently, I decided to go self-employed and do my own thing in my own time. This was driven by the fact that having worked for a few startups I couldn't deal with the success at all costs approach of some of the founders and managers. For example being forced to push out new features before they are ready, knowing that the technical debt is mounting and that it will come back to bite me one day. Trying to explain why stuff like this was a bad idea would be met with a response implying I didn't care for the company and didn't value success. I also got frequently reprimanded for refusing to do overtime on a regular basis, preferring instead to be with my family. Plus all this was usually coupled with some horrific "Fake it till you make it" promotional activities that we'd get roped in to.

One of the founders went out and got himself a Porsche 911 and put an email around the office showing it off and telling us if we worked hard to make the company a success we too could afford a similar car. Lord knows how he paid for it as the company was losing €3million a year at that point.

All the while I would be acutely aware of the fact that the founders had already churned through four or five failed startups. They were trying out ideas in the hope that one was succeed and make them rich and famous. If another failed they wouldn't care for the people being let go as they would just move on to their next idea.

Having ambitions is good, but I think we as a society are pressured in to setting those ambitions far too high. I am worried by the rising suicide rates in many places, are we pressuring people to chase unattainable life goals until they crack? I think that is part of it.

It’s a bit like LinkedIn. Lots of people are on LinkedIn trying to impress people but the people they’re trying to impress aren’t on (or barely use) LinkedIn.

This one struck me as a bit odd. I don't see a problem with being motivated by whether you are creating value for other people.

"Should I learn to make pasta from scratch?"

That's fine if someone wants to do that, but I hold higher admiration for people who have some drive to make the world better, even in fairly small ways, rather than spending all their time on something so trivial.

And yeah, trying to earn my admiration isn't what you should probably be doing. But doing something that is admirable? That's a good thing. To me, anyway.

Humans compare with their reference group. As your status increases you'll step out of your old group and into a new one. And then the cycle starts again. Your peers are again ahead! You've traded your group of 'job seeking undergrads' for 'ladder climbing professionals'.

I'm not sure if it's possible to have control over this automatic comparing, but the cure is not to keep climbing. It's to hack your mind to set your reference group to people that have lower status, aka: be gratefull for what you have, and think about the ways in which you are furtunate that others are not.

The need for recognition in some way or another is hardwired into us, and I don't believe it's intrinsically bad - we are a communal animal and we want to provide value for our community, our brains want success and prestige as a way to motivate us to do that - like feeling hungry motivates us to nourish ourselves. It's a basic need to feel useful, and prestige is the metric our primitive brains use to measure that usefulness, hence office drones find happiness as little league coaches.

Like any force, it can be both good or bad, and it turns bad when your ONLY concern is success and prestige, leading you to optimize external appearances and get some of that sweet sweet second hand prestige. But when combined with something you enjoy doing, and that can provide real value to the world, this desire can be truly world changing, and I think it's a vast oversimplification (being HN I can say it's over-fitting to a one-dimensional metric) to say that the Jobs, Musks, Gates and other folks weren't motivated to some degree by it.

Side note: I remember flying out of LA a few years back and seeing FIVE gaunt bald men dressed in black turtle necks and blue jeans. Either there was a call for a Steve Jobs biopic and nobody took off their costumes, or LA is the the poster child for over-optimizing external appearances.

The thought process goes like this: 'person on tv is getting love and attention; I want love and attention; I'm going to mindlessly try and copy everything about them, down to what underwear brand they wear'.

This is how advertising works.

That's usually the feminine version. The masculine version goes 'I'm going to win at all costs'.

Here is how an intelligent person thinks: 'This society is a disaster, I am going to learn to distance myself and pursue my calling, while doing my best to provide a safe environment for myself and my loved ones'.

Notice how there is a calling, there is coming to terms with harsh realities of mob mentality and there is an attempt at creating a mini eco-system of love for a small number of people.

Idiots' calling is 'other people need to like me!' or 'I need to be better/higher up the dominance hierarchy than others!'. They need mobs because they think they can get a mob to like them and not turn on them afterwards, or they derive their self worth from comparing themselves to the mob by being 'better' than them or even worse - they need the mob to use it to achieve their psychotic visions of a better world (every war general)! They don't create ecosystems because they are fine with living in pig shit, as long as other pigs tell him/her how great he/she is or they get to 'win' (Gary Vee is a prime example of this lately).

Just my thoughts on it at this point in my life of course :)

Status and prestige are more powerful multipliers than anything else. Even outside of business. You can be the best 'x' in the world, but winning the Olympic gold will multiply your earnings by probably an order of magnitude or more.

There’s a book I read, can’t remember name but basically it said instead of chasing recognition, we should chase knowing. Recognition was lots of random strangers liking some surface thing about you. For example I like band X - if I saw them in public I’d want to say “hey I love your music!”. Or conversely, I think band X sucks, and I want to say that. It’s a shallow opinion held by many.

Knowing is respect by people who have the authority to actually evaluate your talents. In this case, it would be experienced musicians. What do they think of the band’s music? These people actually have the relevant experience to evaluate your work. If a group like that admires your work, it’s a deeper, more satisfying “like” than a bunch of random people. Yet we are typically wired to chase the approval of the masses.

These things can be hard, I certainly don’t do them all the time, but it’s helpful direction if you can relate to this article.

I have this problem. I’m frequently distracted from doing what I want to do by ideas for things that I want to have done (and wouldn’t enjoy actually doing day-to-day).

The search for prestige is about the only reason to switch paths and start working on any of these ideas, but it’s hard to ignore.

I think there's also an element of insecurity and lack of identity among those kids. They've been measured and held to high standards all their lives, and they have close and clear references of success. Maybe their parents, grand-parents, or other family members.

They get pushed to ace their school works, they get pushed to do stuff that pads their school applications and resumes. This seems to be even worse when your parents come from cultures where there are a handful few of "correct" careers to choose between.

These kids sacrifice a lot, so the obsession with clear-cut goals could be some rationalization or their sacrifices and lack of identity.

But then again, we're all driven by different things. Some set their mind at 17 to be retired by 30, and will do whatever it takes to accelerate that process.

Others may not need money at all (due to things like inheritance), but want to fit in with their peers - so chasing prestige becomes just another case of keeping up with the Joneses...if nothing else for the bragging rights.

With that said, in my later years I've realized that chasing prestige (for my own part) was nothing more than vanity, and a need for external validation.

But it turned out that I did not have passion for the things that were prestigious, and I felt miserable pouring all my focus and energy into something I did not care for.

In the end, I took a stand with myself, and figured out that it's better to be happy and create something I love, and create value for others (as well as myself) - and if success comes with it, then that's a bonus.

Not having a cloud of professional / career anxiety hanging over me is great.

My own subjective belief about male subjects around this matter - success and fame - , is circeling around father-issues and the lack of gratitude and applause from him.

I have worked with so many 9f these kinds, and IT is full of them. Most of these people are boring, exactly because their goals lean towards being someone or something. Ego-centric and primadonna individuals who will run you over, if they can be successful.

Decency is lost and forgotten virtue in too many people. But in the end, they will realize that being a success will not make you happy and What a waste of time.

Also, What is it you want to be known for? A frame work? An app?

Give me a break. Your grandkids will have forgotten you by the time they have their own kids.

I don't have a lot of money, but I am so successful you can't measure it.

You can also read the book I mentioned in a previous comment. In the opened my eyes to the lifetraps that have been affecting me the most and how they're playing out.

I wish you success with overcoming this!

My suggestion to the author would be to move their motivations out of the picture long enough to frame it. The biggest difference between successful people and others is action, not motivation.

Computers are the new gold rush. It seems like most people today got into this field just looking to strike it rich.

If you are single and invite your date over and make them pasta from scratch I guarantee it will work. Seriously.

I don't know how old you are but life is a competition. At the very fundamental level, all species are competing with each other for survival. Your mother was not mislead, she knows that in order to survive in this jungle, you need to be competitive. And given how shallow the world is, these titles and awards matters, so you should get them.

Yay for me.

The thesis of the movie is apparently that that Donald Crowhurst (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Crowhurst) was driven insane by the anxieties of late-stage capitalism. I'd rather have those than the anxieties of late-stage Communism, but I can see where they were coming from.

This is funny because I’ve been straight up told this by multiple people. It’s not neuroticism, it’s the simple fact that hierarchies exist.