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People Who Are Obsessed with Success and Prestige
141–150 of 375 posts
Re: People Who Are Obsessed with Success and Prestige
#142> Should I learn to make pasta from scratch? No, that’s crazy. Nobody cares if you can make pasta from scratch and it’s not going to make any money.
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.
Re: People Who Are Obsessed with Success and Prestige
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wanting to be engineer #5549383 at a big company is a fools errand if you want recognition and reknowned. It's like trying to get famous working as the guy who bolts the doors onto the frame at the Belvedere assembly plant. The lion doesn't concern himself with the opinions of the mouse. All of the people cited in the article (Gates, Musk, Jobs) eschewed "prestige institutions" and worked on what they wanted to work…
Gates Musk and Jobs all came from rich families and were able to work on what they wanted to work on. The people going for prestigious institutions may actually need a job and and are optimizing for the best possible outcome.
Gates did. Not sure either Musk or Jobs had rich families. You may want to check that.
Re: People Who Are Obsessed with Success and Prestige
#144Ling Ling practices 40 hours a day
Re: People Who Are Obsessed with Success and Prestige
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've noticed something about subreddits that focus on lifestyle design and center around advice: they all start to converge on fairly narrow groupthink. /r/personalfinance is all about super frugal living and passive investing. In /r/backpacking, the general advice is to go as light as possible and spend money reducing weight. /r/cscareerquestions is about the leetcode grind and getting into FAANG. /r/malefashionadvi…
>In fact, what we think of as "smart" does not correspond to "has high natural ability." "Smart people" are people who have decided to make their identities center around being smart. They've worked hard at it. I would also argue it's the combination of smart and naturally outgoing or extroversion. Being extroverted seems to be naturally correlated to being successful or being a successful leader for most people. It…
Not sure about that, at least in my workplace some of the people considered the smartest and best engineers are very quite, almost shy.
Re: People Who Are Obsessed with Success and Prestige
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> in order to survive in this jungle, you need to competitive It's funny when people use jungle as an example to make this argument. Cooperation might be even more important than competition in an actual jungle.
Except that people are going to cooperate with those who are more competitive. So...
You state that as if it’s axiomatic; it’s not.
Re: People Who Are Obsessed with Success and Prestige
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've noticed something about subreddits that focus on lifestyle design and center around advice: they all start to converge on fairly narrow groupthink. /r/personalfinance is all about super frugal living and passive investing. In /r/backpacking, the general advice is to go as light as possible and spend money reducing weight. /r/cscareerquestions is about the leetcode grind and getting into FAANG. /r/malefashionadvi…
>In fact, what we think of as "smart" does not correspond to "has high natural ability." "Smart people" are people who have decided to make their identities center around being smart. They've worked hard at it. I would also argue it's the combination of smart and naturally outgoing or extroversion. Being extroverted seems to be naturally correlated to being successful or being a successful leader for most people. It…
It's easier to hit the ceiling of how successful you're going to be when you're working on your own. If you're someone other people want to work with/for, there are a lot more opportunities that can be taken advantage of.
Re: People Who Are Obsessed with Success and Prestige
#148> 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. But what makes these guys successful anyway? Their fame? Money? Contribution to society? And wearing grey t-shirts won't make you Zuckerberg [0]. You don't become a 0.00000001%er by mimicking the most…
Also, it's unlikely there will ever be another Musk or Zuckerberg in tech. Technology is a largely established industry and it's very unlikely that a single person is going to found and maintain control of another trillion dollar company.
Zuck-a-bees need to get in on the ground floor of the next, next big thing, which barely exists right now.
Re: People Who Are Obsessed with Success and Prestige
#149Thought-provoking article. 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, wh…
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Re: People Who Are Obsessed with Success and Prestige
#150This is one of those supposed character flaws I could have used a bit more of in my personal makeup.