"As a soon to be 40-year-old man, I don’t give a rat’s ass about prestige anymore!"
OK, great. I'm 39, I'm right there with you. But is this advice useful or actionable for people in their 20s?
OK, great. I'm 39, I'm right there with you. But is this advice useful or actionable for people in their 20s?
If everyone thinks it's valuable, then there's insane competition, and you're unlikely to get meaningfully ahead (unless you're simply smarter and work harder than everyone else).
PG wrote several paragraphs about prestige here which still ring true to me:
http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html
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.
(Corrolary: it was best to join YC when it wasn't prestigious, e.g. when Reddit or Dropbox did. Now that it's prestigious, it's probably less valuable. Although it could still be valuable compared to the alternatives.)
Customers don't give you money because you joined a good accelerator, so in that sense the "reverence" is useless. It's also a double-edged sword, because you'll attract people who are looking to ride your coattails, as opposed to doing useful work.
Apparently this phenomenon is common enough that PG has a word for it: "playing house". People join YC and play house rather than start companies.
If you are in your 20's the take away might be to focus on keeping your costs low and maximizing savings to reach that point of financial independence earlier.
Absolutely. There are countless people struggling to get into the media in LA or NYC who could walk into a good job at an advertising firm in Cleveland or Tulsa. If you're considering founding a startup, you're probably better off organically growing a B2B product aimed at a relatively obscure market sector than going for the B2C unicorn. If you're looking to buy a house, you can find some real bargains that have ugly exteriors or are in unfashionable suburbs. Vacations in well-known resorts tend to be overpriced and overrated.
http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html
This is easy advice to give. It's hard to follow, especially when you're young.