Theory: The desire for prestige is why we: 1) spend an outrageous sum of money on education, 2) kill ourselves at jobs we don’t like, 3) put up with colleagues and bosses we despise, 4) never pursue our dreams, and 5) eventually fill our hearts with regret. If we can figure out how to rid ourselves of the desire for prestige, we will become much happier in the process!
About a year and a half ago when I was attending Finovate, a financial innovation conference, I met a fintech entrepreneur named John. He told me his revolutionary idea was to simplify the documentation gathering process for people looking to refinance or get a new mortgage. As anybody who’s ever taken out a mortgage can attest, it’s a real pain in the ass.
I was intrigued since I’ve done about 10 refinances on four properties since 2003 and planned to refinance one last time when I met him. But when John showed me his product, it still required the user to upload all of the docs the bank wanted onto his website. Further, there are always additional document requests from the bank to upload on his platform after that. What’s the point?
Creating an unnecessary barrier between consumer and lender didn’t seem like a good business idea. At least John was trying to solve a problem. I thanked him for his time and wished him well.
Then just last month I ran into John at another fintech conference. I tend to go once a quarter with a free media pass. Otherwise, I’d go less often because these tickets cost anywhere from $300 – $2,000 each! Running conferences during the internet boom is akin to being a landlord. It’s one of the best ways to profit.
I asked John how his product was doing, and he said that he’s looking to hire a CEO with more product experience. One guy slipped away thanks to an offer from Google, but another guy was close to joining.
Fantastic! I told him. In order to get someone with CEO-level experience to quit his/her job to join his startup must mean his product is doing pretty well. But when I talked to him further, he said he was still looking to launch his MVP, or minimum viable product.
Huh? If an entrepreneur hasn’t launched his MVP, there are no customers or revenue. All an entrepreneur has is an idea. So after 1.5 years, John basically spent $10,000+ attending financial conferences, collected no revenue, and hasn’t even launched a working website. Totally illogical, right?
Wrong.
John mentioned that he was bored back home in Seattle with his wife and daughter. Same old stuff, every single day. Ever since he left the mortgage industry after it imploded in 2010, he’s felt lost. He decided to attend business school part-time, and from there he discovered his passion for fintech.
When I asked him whether he felt that flying down to San Francisco to attend conferences for 2-3 days at a time was costly, he mentioned, “not at all!”
“I feel so alive coming to all these conferences. I get to pass out my business card that says ‘Founder & CEO’! Before, I was just one of many mortgage officers trying to make a buck. Now, I get to meet so many aspiring entrepreneurs looking to do something new with their lives. They treat me as an equal. It’s wonderful!”
He went on, “Also, I’ve been able to meet plenty of interesting women. I always tell them I’m looking to hire a VP of Marketing or whatever role they are currently doing to keep their interest. As soon as I tell them this, their eyes light up as I’m suddenly the man of their dreams! I’ve been seeing this one woman for over a year now in the Bay Area. Even though she lives 45 minutes south of San Francisco, she always makes time to drive up and have dinner and drinks with me. I don’t know how long I can keep stringing her along about the VP of Marketing role, but she likes the attention and the idea of potentially working for me, so why not enjoy it while it lasts?”
It’s always about a girl isn’t it? Revenue, product, helping others with their financial problems be damned. On the one hand, it’s bad of John to string this woman along for so long as a married man. On the other hand, she’s an adult who makes her own decisions. Sadly, I have a feeling John is heading towards some difficult times both financially and personally as this fintech startup is his only gig.
The Unhealthy Desire For Prestige
Do you remember the kid in high school who was pretty goofy looking and tried a little too hard to fit in? I think that’s John. Now that John has the prestige of being the CEO of his own startup, he’s loving every minute of it. It doesn’t matter whether his startup ever becomes a success or not. Having attractive women give him attention is the best sort of validation a man could ever have.
I venture to guess we’ve all desired prestige at some point in our lives. As a kid, I enjoyed the prestige of owning a pair of Air Jordans and Armani jeans. As a college graduate in my 20s, I enjoyed the prestige of working in finance before the 2008 financial crisis hit. After that, working in finance felt like an embarrassment, even if you had nothing to do with people not paying their mortgages.
As a soon to be 40-year-old man, I don’t give a rat’s ass about prestige anymore! In fact, I don’t think I’ve cared about prestige since 2010, right about the time when I was seriously contemplating doing something else with my life. If I cared about prestige, I wouldn’t have driven an old car named Moose for 10 years. If I cared about prestige, I wouldn’t have left my job to make little money as a blogger. If I cared about prestige, I wouldn’t have rented out my house in the expensive north side of San Francisco to live in a much cheaper part of town that nobody has ever heard of.
There is zero prestige in being a personal finance blogger, but I love being one 95% of the time. It’s only about 5% of the time I get annoyed due to some callous remarks from strangers with no intellectual backing. I’m sure most people have no idea how lucrative being your own independent publisher can be either, which is just fine by me. Every day is a joy to come up with new topics to write about or solidify new business ventures based on the brand I’ve built online.
I’ve got very little power either. Let’s give it a try. All readers who’ve been reading Financial Samurai since January 1, 2014 please send me at least $100 via Paypal to my e-mail address at the end of my About page. It takes a lot of work writing these posts and responding to comments! Are you not at least entertained? Alas, I don’t expect anybody to follow through because we live in the world of free.
How To Let Go
1) Find your purpose. Is working at Facebook really that prestigious if your role is to try and bring in more advertisers for fake news feeds? Is working at McKinsey really that prestigious if your role is to provide reasons for why your client should fire more people? Is working at Uber that prestigious if your mission is to figure out how to manipulate drivers with ridiculous requirements in order to keep them driving before your fleet of driverless cars take over? Is working at Goldman Sachs really that prestigious if your main goal is to analyze how to make more money for a billionaire who continues to hoard his wealth when there are hungry people in his hometown?
Come on guys. There’s NOTHING really prestigious about any of these companies, only the fact that you get to make a lot more money than most people. If you can get in, great. Make and save as much money as possible so you can get out and do something more meaningful as soon as possible. If you love your job then fantastic. But if you don’t, it’s not worth staying.
Our purpose often gets lost because we’re tied up doing what society tells us we should do. The best places to work are those that have a mission driven purpose to help solve real problems: hunger, child abuse, homelessness, disease, mental illness, financial calamities, domestic violence, poverty, etc. Having our “best and brightest” join firms to design new picture filters for selfies is ridiculous!
Note: I recognize these companies have some great positives as well e.g. connecting the world, lowering the cost of transportation for folks who can’t afford to live close to work, providing capital for small businesses, etc.
Related: Overcoming The “One More Year Syndrome” To Do Something New
2) Create something of your own. If the hardest part about life is getting into a prestigious university or company, then the path of least resistance is to coast thereafter. When you coast, you rely on the prestige of the institution to justify your self worth. Over time, you’ll be filled with self-doubt whether your accomplishments are your own or because of your company. Why do you think some people never leave? They’re afraid that without their company, they aren’t anything! To counteract this self-doubt, you must produce something original. Do it while you’re working so you can iterate without incredible pressure.
Before I press publish, I wonder how each article I’ve written will be received. Sometimes I’m scared to publish, but I publish anyway because I know that if I don’t, I’ll never grow. You will find extreme satisfaction putting new things out to the world. The satisfaction of building something from the ground up is more satisfying than anything you could ever accomplish under the umbrella of another.
Take some risks and create something on your own, no matter how small. You’ll feel embarrassed or hurt in the beginning. But it just gets better over time. Nobody can ever take away something you’ve created.
3) Practice gratitude. It’s easy to think our success is 100% due to our own merits. The reality is that anything good was created with the help of many people. There’s a weird amount of self-delusional narcissism that’s happening in Silicon Valley thanks to so many overnight successes. As a result, the majority of people who have not succeeded at the same level or time period feel an intense level of dissatisfaction, even though in relation to millions of other people, they are great successes!
Wake up every day and recognize the people who helped you get to where you are. Keep a gratitude journal. For me, I’m grateful for my father who helped give me the idea of starting a personal finance site back in 2006, my wife who’s been my CFO and COO since the beginning, and my mother who is always supportive in whatever I’ve wanted to pursue. And of course, I’m grateful to every reader who shares some insightful comment and shares my work around the web. Thank you!
Reading a note of thanks is more valuable than any prestige I could ever want.
Related: Life After Financial Independence
Who Are You Trying To Impress?
For John, he might be trying to impress his wife, his daughter and other random women to prove he can reinvent himself after the mortgage industry collapsed. For me, I’m mainly trying to impress myself for not quitting for as long as possible. Each day I get up, I ask myself whether I want to grind or relax. Inevitably, I decide to grind for at least a couple hours even when the ocean beckons.
At the end of your life, nobody is going to care about your prestige and power. All they’ll care about is whether you were a kind enough person who touched their lives and wanted to help other people. I strongly believe that if you can figure out how to let go of your desire for prestige, money, power, fame, and all that other silly stuff, life will get better because you’ll stop caring so much about what other people think and start focusing on what matters most to you.
If You’re Trying To Move On
If you’re trying to break free from the rat race, I recommend you negotiate a severance instead of quit. If you negotiate a severance like I did back in 2012, you not only get a severance check, but potentially subsidized healthcare, deferred compensation, and worker training.
When you get laid off, you’re also eligible for up to roughly 27 weeks of unemployment benefits. Having a financial runway is huge during your transition period.
Conversely, if you quit your job you get nothing. Check out the book How To Engineer Your Layoff: Make A Small Fortune By Saying Goodbye.
It’s the only book that teaches you how to negotiate a severance. In addition, it was recently updated and expanded thanks to tremendous reader feedback and successful case studies.
Build Your Own Website
If you truly believe in yourself, then you should start your own website and build your brand online. Don’t let Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter get rich off you. Get rich off yourself! There’s nothing more rewarding that making your own money from nothing.
I started Financial Samurai in 2009, and three years later, I was able to leave my banking job because this site was making enough money. Now, this site earns way more than I ever made as an Executive Director with much less work and much more fun.
Here’s my step-by-step guide for starting your own website today.
Regards,
Sam, Chairman, Founder & CEO of Financial Samurai Writer
Love that your newsletters reference old posts. Some (many?) of us haven’t been readers for many years and missed these “classics” the first time around.
You are an amazing person. Thank you for writing this. Lots of prayers for you.
I really appreciated your article! I am currently a university student who is upset about my desire for prestige. It’s detrimental in that it makes me feel that at any time I’m not the best of the best, that I’m not good enough. I’m really happy my Google Search led me to your article. Reading it has helped me redirect some of my automatic thoughts.
Glad to hear. It’s natural to want to make a lot of money and get a prestigious job after college. It’s the desire to prove that your time and money spent was well worth it.
Just do the best that you can with what you got. I never stop searching for a job that provides meaning.
There is sometimes a valid reason for people to chase prestige, because practically speaking, having prestige sometimes opens more doors.
For examples, I went to a top 3 engineering school, a very prestigious place. What that allowed me to do is get a first job that others couldn’t get as easily. That’s because during interviews, the interviewer gave me a lot more “benefit of the doubt” and was more forgiving of mistakes. Also, my wife is great person who is amazing and not at all a gold digger, but after we’ve been married for some years she told me that knowing where I went to school added just a little extra motivation to get to know me when we first met. Sometimes, just that little bit of extra motivation or extra benefit of the doubt from others makes all the difference.
When a person doesn’t necessarily have visible, socially appropriate real successes yet behind them (for example, when they’re young), chasing prestigious allows them to experience just a little more opportunities, which then gives them better choices, including the choice to not chase prestige anymore. It’s like compound interest, a little easier each time compounded over time is a big deal. Now that I’m older and married for many choices, I’m much more family focused, focused on earning an adequate but not necessarily outrageous income, and achieving more purpose over prestige.
The overall point is, it may well be worth it to chase prestige when you’re young, and then transition later after you’ve achieved it. In fact, this is what Sam did. After all, Sam went to work in a prestigious role first (finance) and got rewarded very well for that, and then only later after he got married and started thinking about raising children that he switched.
Great post overall! I work at a consulting firm considered less prestigious than the McKinseys and Bains of the world. So I needed this very much. :)
One comment on the second exhibit (of anti-depressant use per 1K people): While I understand the point you are trying to make here, I think there are many factors that contribute to anti-depressant use – like the social perception of using it. Places like Korea rank low not because depression is less prevalent there but because there is a huge social stigma against admitting to any form of mental sickness.
This post makes me think of Max Weber’s (19th and early 20th century German Philosopher) “Wealth Power and Presitige.” These three things being the things people chase after and need/want in society.
I lot of life is burned trying to get any or all of these elusive things.
Great advice, especially the part about practicing gratitude. I believe the ‘best attitude is gratitude’ and acknowledging and being truly grateful for all of life’s blessings, somehow brings more things to be grateful for! Thank you for your posts.
Thanks a lot for this post Samurai. My past self can identify with John in the way of seeking extrinsic value from great positions of power. Other than the fact all the managers I worked under in the past did the same,influencing me; I found joy in feeling “high and mighty”. I am now an aspiring master plumber in the big apple. Nothing pretty to the eye about that. But the dream is real, the pay is real and the fact that I can accomplish this dream before 30 will be more real. (I am 25). This post assured me switching paths and committing to what feels right for me is the correct way to go. Thanks Samurai.
Hi Sam, great article as always! I work in finance.. been through many ups and dows. It’s stressful.. I’m 34 and working my butt off. I could give 2 shits about prestige – I don’t even own a watch and I drive an Acura. I’ve been saving 50% of what I earn since I was 23. You know the upside in finance – in a couple years I could easily be making 1 mil / year .. in fact I could earn that now at GS or a hedge fund but I like the company I work for (truly). What I can’t figure out is – why don’t I just work for 5 – 7 more years and then relax and hopefully never have to worry about money anymore. I can have enough in college savings for kids, the house I’ve always wanted, passive income through stocks/bonds/real estate and a charitable endowment. So why not just grind out for 5-7 years? You advocate freedom and starting your own business… while I would love that and contemplated it.. isn’t it easier to go the employment route? Curious to hear your thoughts..
If u can make big bucks for the next 5-7 years and not burn out, go for it!
I was burnt out by 35, but wanted to last until 40. If I didn’t have an alternative (this site), I would have kept on going.
I truly enjoy reading your postings and most of all sharing them. Thank you.
Hi Sam
A thoroughly reflective post. Welldone!
Relativity is to blame for alot of the quest for prestige or status. Human beings typically make decisions by comparing themselves to others or to something else.
It takes alot of self awareness to truly understand what one wants and why it matters. Sadly, many never quite get to realise this or get to this level of emotional intelligence.
It’s also this self awareness, which is necessary as one pursues all sorts of personal freedoms in life.
Couldn’t agree more! I’ve tried to instill in my daughter that she should never compare herself to other people.
The only person you should be comparing yourself to is who you were yesterday…and are you a better person today?
Sam, great article..thanks for sharing.
But the problem is, for many of us, wise advice like this, which contradicts ..no infact, rebukes popular belief, is either received too late, OR, people believe in still following,after whetting it out themselves…hope many of the readers would not make that mistake.
I facepalm when people waste lot of money on wedding instead of invested in bitcoins – they would had a lot more money now. Yeah, their friends would call them “losers” for not having expensive wedding, but in few years they would be winners.
But of course likes in instagram is the most important thing for most people these days.
An eye opener! Thanks for the thoughts of yours.
Hey Sam,
Great post, I just reread it and should probably continue to read it periodically. I’m a big fan of the site and usually don’t comment – however I have an important question for you on the topic of prestige:
When does a full time MBA program make sense vs part time programs vs not at all (and spending that extra time / money in starting a business or doing more at your current job, etc.)? Would you get the part time Haas MBA all over again, knowing what you know now? I feel like prestige is a big part of the MBA decision whether people like to admit it or not. How large a part did the desire for prestige play in decision?
Thank you for the consideration!
I’d absolutely do it again. Berkeley is a top 10 school and can’t be having 80% plus of your tuition paid for.
It’s just way too expensive to go full-time for two years, pay all the tuition, is all that income, and lose two years of your life. I would go to full-time MBA program if I was already rich man had something lined up and I needed a big brea it’s just way too expensive to go full-time for two years, pay all the tuition, is all that income, and lose two years of your life. I would go to full-time MBA program if I was already rich man had something lined up and I needed a big vacation.
Time is too precious. Only go if you know for sure after you graduate you plan to work for decades to come.
Thank you very much for the quick reply. IF, at the same point in your career (I’m in a very similar position as you were), what would you pick if you had the options to:
1. Attend Harvard, Stanford, or Wharton at the full cost of tuition
2. Attend a ranked 10-15 school on a full tuition scholarship
3. Attend a lesser ranked regional MBA part time program at 80-100% scholarship (UCLA, Ross, UT)
4. Wait a few more years, and attend Wharton’s executive MBA program in the bay area (scholarship unknown)
I’m having a hard time understanding the benefits of a part time program if you’re already working in finance and don’t need the MBA to promote. but I have that unhealthy desire for prestige (non-target undergrad chip in my shoulder).
No idea about your situation Kevin. Go for the prestige and let me know how it goes! It sounds like you really want the prestige. Worst case is that you just have to end up working 2-4 years longer.
We regularly rejected MBAs from Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton btw.
I appreciate the advice, and thanks Sam! I’ll let you know how it all goes.
Thought I’d chime in. I work at a large Megacorp in the Midwest. Went back part-time to get my MBA at a Top 30 program in the city I live in – solid program but not top tier at all. My company paid all of the tuition through a reimbursement program. I had some co-workers pay additional to go to part time programs in Chicago and North Carolina. I’ve also observed our full time MBA hire program. The honest reality – there is no difference in future career paths going part-time or full time in my opinion. The people who went to “more prestigious” part-time programs are in no different position than me. Those who went full time at top schools got their foot in the door, but that’s it, don’t make more and have years to pay back their debt. Also, they may have unrealistic expectations of their career to justify going back full time and spending so much money.
I agree. I got the impression from two of my friends who went full-time to a great MBA program having relatively high expectations of their own career trajectory. We’ll see where they end up in a few years.
I was just discussing this with my dentist friend yesterday. We have both been working in “prestigious” health fields and while we love our work, sometimes the stress isn’t worth it. And while we are helping people, sometimes it doesn’t seem like it with our current healthcare system. It’s important not to tie your entire self worth to your work. There are so many other things to be passionate about like family, religion, community service etc.
If we’re not put on this Earth to be good people and help each other, then what’s the point?
Excellent article Sam !!!
Its sad to see people living for false prestige all around. Every new shiny automobile, every new home, new 85inch 3D LED …is a living example of the same.
I run my own small company now and I sometimes forget that people find it prestigious. I see that I am working FT elsewhere while I build up my client base and knowledge base and working myself hard. My company is a passion project that helps people and will hopefully pay me a decent enough salary to marry my girlfriend. When I meet new people, they only see Business Owner and assume that I’m rich and fancy or that I desire to be. Nope. In my FT gig, I see the consultants and middle-managers giving up their lives for a company that will chew them up and I have no desire to join them. I want to do good for the world and have time for my friends and chosen family. Luxury goods and tricking women into spending time with me under false pretenses is not a desirable outcome.