Long-term vs short-term career choices

Every decision I’ve made in terms of work has been to follow what I’m interested in over choosing something with brand value or a significant paycheck. At my first startup, we were a bunch of nobodies that didn’t make a salary for quite some time just to get the company off the ground. Looking back, that was probably one of the most formative experiences I could’ve had at that time in my life. When I narrate this story to other people, I realize most of my peers’ experiences coming out of college were nothing like mine.

The conclusion I’ve come to is that to have outsized long-term success, chasing things like brand or income are usually going to lead you to hitting local maxima (or as the young folks would say, you’re going to “peak” much sooner). For some people, they peak super early, in fact, their most notable accomplishments might be in high school or college, and they go downhill from there.

To win long-term, one path is to pursue opportunities where you learn as much as possible, and usually this correlates with following your interests. Or at the very least, finding a way to make the opportunities you do have as interesting to you as possible. If I really worked at it, I’m sure I could’ve been a good engineer at a big tech company, but I didn’t have the slightest interest in preparing for technical interviews and doing work that didn’t feel meaningful to me.