Paul Graham on prestige

An interesting article on loving what you do, including this point on prestige:

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.

And, further to a conversation I had the other night:

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.

My problem, though, is that there are too many things on which I'd like to work!

Posted at 2006-01-24 11:35:50 by Richard • Link to Paul Graham on pre…
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