The Prestige Race
I know this forum and Wall Street as a whole places a large premium in prestige, and so have I (not willingly but just the way I was raised I guess) but it's really a race you cannot win. Remember how happy you were when you got into Harvard, Yale, or Princeton? Well, once you get in, you're not gonna be happy until you get into GS/MS, and then you're still not gonna be happy because you need to get into a top buyout shop like KKR or hedge fund like SAC Capital.
Then there's business school - even if youre a pre-MBA associate at KKR you're not gonna be happy until you get into HBS, and then you're not gonna be happy until you get a post-associate at KKR/SAC, and then you want to move up, and then you want to be MD/Partner.
And then you're just getting started. Think you'll be satisfied then? Partners bicker every year for bonuses, committee positions, C-level positions, etc. And then you have to worry about your kids getting into Andover and Exeter, and HYP, and the cycle starts all over again
Shit doesn't end. I'm very focused on the "prestige track" and I'm doing well on it, but I hate how shit doesn't end
And I'm happiest when I'm with friends and family, not when I'm thinking of how highly ranked my school/bank is. Personal relationships are what make you happy, not $100 million -- its weird to say that as a lecture but it's so true. Friends of mine were rich enough to buy $20k watches and were still miserable.
Congrats guys on figuring this out early. Your 20s are some of the best years of your life (though we do have folks learning to fly hang gliders at 50), but you're not really living if life is all about money and prestige.
There is no point working harder than you need to get what's REALLY important out of life. John Rockefeller was a man who gained the world but felt he lost his soul in the process. One of his last letters, he wrote, "I am a shell of a man", and explained how he was lonely, friendless, and his only comfort was his dividend checks.
Howard Hughes was one of the world's first billionaires and arguably cooler and more prestigious in the 1950s than anything today's 22-year-olds aspire to. When he died in 1976, he was alone in Guatemala, his fingernails were twelve inches long, his arms were riddled with stabs from the morphine injections he was addicted to.
That's what it takes to get to the top- and that's how it ends for folks who get there. Is that what folks REALLY want?
I'll take free time, friends, and hang gliding and a comfortable six figures, thank you very much. Someone else can go enjoy bigger salaries, and the screwed up families, sycophantic relationships, and general misery that come with doing whatever it takes to get to the top.
I think everyone does some of that to some extent. Older, wiser people have learned to do it less. Of course, everyone has a lot of work to do on getting wiser- when we're 22, we're the Oracle of Delphi, when we're 25, we turn into total fools.Life is a search for meaning and self-worth. It's a lot easier to find it when you're not obsessed with prestige.
Prestige = no matter how shit you're life is, you believe that other people think you are in a better position than XX% of the reference population.
It's validating your worth through other people's eyes and is the sort of thinking that helps some people cry themselves to sleep.
Interestingly, it's much more correlated with the perception of earning capacity than it is with actual material well-being. It has very low correlation to emotional well-being, if not an inverse relation.
See also: Status anxiety, teen popularity contests, narcissism, psychopaths, materialism, status insecurity, trophy wives, dick size contests, circle jerks, crying on the inside