I’ve had several conversations with friends who’ve been incapacitated by the burdensome bullshit obligation to Have A Meaningful Life / Be Remembered / Do Important Work.
It strikes me as socially inherited bloatware that causes tedious lag, which ironically prevents you from being awesome. When people say things like “just be yourself”, I think often what they mean is “be less laggy” – ie, uninstall the bloatware.
I’m not saying that it’s bad to want to do important work — it’s just kind of tragic if your persistent anxiety about how you need to do important work… is keeping you from doing the very work that you think you want to do.
Of course, if you’re cool with all of this, that’s up to you too. Installing more bloatware in the form of “Visa told me I shouldn’t stress about doing important work” on top of “I should do important work” only introduces more lag. The point is to uninstall the bloatware.
Wonderfully, it seems to me that lots of people who end up Doing Important Work often got there by being playful and curious. Richard Feynman, for example, got his Nobel prize from piddling around with spinning plates. And the point isn’t to get the Nobel prize, the point is to enjoy the piddling.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak similarly didn’t start out trying to make a world-changing tech company. They started out doing what they thought was fun and interesting, which included hacking telephone infrastructure to make phone calls.
A common tell for the bloatware is when you see someone who seems listless, saying “I need to do this…”, or they use phrases like “the world doesn’t need…” — nobody really knows what the world needs! The world itself doesn’t quite know either, often until on hindsight! Don’t allow your lack of imagination + limited understanding of reality box you into a little psychic prison.
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I’ve revisited dozens of Paul Graham’s essays hundreds of times over the years, and over time I find that the #1 thing I urgently insist that people read is this section on Prestige, from How To Do What You Love [2006]. To me, this is pg’s most important idea:
What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don’t even know?
This is easy advice to give. It’s hard to follow, especially when you’re young. Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.
That’s what leads people to try to write novels, for example. They like reading novels. They notice that people who write them win Nobel prizes. What could be more wonderful, they think, than to be a novelist? But liking the idea of being a novelist is not enough; 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.
Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you’ll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind—though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.
Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That’s the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck, they wouldn’t have had to make it prestigious.
How to do what you love, by Paul Graham
When doing a “from:visakanv prestige” search on Twitter, I notice that I’ve been quoting and referencing this essay to friends since 2004. I imagine I will continue to do it for a very long time, probably for the rest of my life.
Another post that covers this really nicely is the WaitButWhy post on choosing your own career. He talks about it in the context of interrogating your yearnings, which in my frame is about hitting “Inspect Element” and figuring out wtf is going on with all that bloatware.
You’ll trace the Why back to an original Because that someone else installed in you—I guess the only reason I actually have this value is because my mom kind of forced it on me—and you realize that you never really thought to consider whether you actually independently agree with it. You never stopped to ask yourself whether your own accumulated wisdom actually justifies the level of conviction you feel about that core belief. In a case like this, the yearning is revealed to be an imposter pretending to be an authentic yearning of yours. You pull on its face and it’s a mask that comes off, exposing the yearning’s original installer underneath.
How To Pick A Career (That Actually Fits You), by Tim Urban
It’s funny – after all of that, when you think about it, all of this can really be reduced to “Think for yourself. Like, really, really think for yourself.” But the devil is always in the details, isn’t it?
If you liked this post, you’ll like my ebook INTROSPECT, which goes into this in greater detail.