endgame
over the past year or so it's become very important to me to place myself on a high trajectory as early as possible. in my mind, the things i do right now will have an outsize effect on the rest of my career and life, because small things that I change right now will put me on entirely different career paths, and if you run the monte carlo with these slightly tweaked initial conditions i'm sure that there would be a statistically meaningful difference in long term outcomes, in terms of wealth, happiness, etc.
what are my motivations here?
one aspect is definitely prestige. i've realized that one thing that really annoys me a lot is people who misrepresent themselves in terms of competence/knowledge, and as a result it's important for me to actually perform well so that i can prove to myself that i am not in that class. so to me, getting a job offer is almost like having an objective third party verify that you're not a larper. i also think that the people you surround yourself with drastically shape the kind of person that you become, so i really want to break into the spaces where smart, humble people work collaboratively, and escape the noise and chatter of people who are obsessed with building their personal brand and making sure you know how much they know and do. i want desperately to get a foothold in those elite circles, because I think that it will only become harder and harder after graduation - the trajectories will diverge.
another is that I don't really want to work for the rest of my life. i have always liked the idea of retiring as early as I can, because what really makes me feel alive and imprint memories in my brain are skiing, performing music, traveling, hiking, etc. I want to do as much of that as I possibly can, because I already know I probably won't be doing as much of my hobbies as I would like to while I'm still working full time. i also think having a kid is probably the most meaningful thing I will leave behind in this world, and i'd like to spend as much time with my kids as possible. I doubt that whatever i'm working on in my career will matter to me nearly as much as what kind of new humans i bring to life.
the result of this is that i've become very stressed and often wring my hands over opportunities that I receive but then slip through my fingers. i am pretty good at receiving interviews from top tier companies, but then don't make it through the interview process. it always really eats me up to then hear people describe certain opportunities as insane and unreachable and know that I was so close, but it's unfortunately just binary. you either got it or you didn't, so a very small difference can decide both whether you get that external validation of competency versus feeling like you might as well not have applied at all, and which trajectory your life takes. i know that this is not the best framework to look at things, but it's just the way that my brain is stuck thinking for now. i think that a more productive way to view it is that everything happens for a reason, and then looking back on my journey a decade or so from now, i may realize that all of the failures and "just barely made it but not quite" moments will have built toward something, or given me lessons that I needed to have.
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