Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like. 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.

The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it — even if they had to work at another job to make a living. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?

"Always produce" is a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on, toward things you actually like — the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.

Money is dangerous when combined with prestige, as in corporate law or medicine. A comparatively safe and prosperous career with some automatic baseline prestige is dangerously tempting to someone young who hasn't thought much about what they really like. Tip: avoid any field whose practitioners say they're "just trying to make a living."

Don't decide too soon. A friend who is a successful doctor complains constantly about her job — she was ambitious enough in high school to overcome every obstacle along the way, including not liking it. Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.

The best test of work worth doing is one Gino Lee taught me: to try to do things that would make your friends say wow. Worry about the opinion of your friends, not the rest of the world — prestige is just the opinion of people whose judgment you have no reason to respect.

On choosing an audience for your work

Constraints give your life shape. Remove them and most people have no idea what to do — look at what happens to those who win lotteries or inherit money. The happiest people are not those who have financial security, but those who like what they do.

If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school.