“Cocaine is a hell of a drug”- Rick James
Recently I have started to observe peoples reasoning behind pursuing whatever it is they are choosing to pursue career wise. From what I have gotten from most that in some way they are chasing attention. We all like attention (although I would prefer recognition vs attention).
I think when the sole focus of whatever you choose to do is hoping that a lot of people will have their eyeballs on you for it then you will lose steam pretty quickly. I think most people like to assume that attention = influence and/or power or independence but that is not always the case. The people who are pulling the strings and influencing the world are people that you may have not even heard of. For example, the technologies that we use day in and day out are funded by venture capitalists at their discretion and the average person who is not deep into tech could not name a firm that plays a huge role in shaping the world around us. The key reason we have Google as a go to search engine today is because Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers invested in them at the earlier stages of the company.
When it comes to founding companies people look at Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as who they aspire to be like and I feel like most times its less the actual impact that they have had on technology and the world but more so the attention that they get for being the face of these transformative companies such as Facebook, Apple and Microsoft. For every Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates there is an Eduardo Saverin, Steve Wozniak and Paul Allen that played as an important role as the faces of the company at making these companies into what they are today.
Do not let the lure of attention be the driving force behind what you are choosing to pursue. I sometimes struggle with that when it comes to choosing what problems I want to help reduce in the future because inherently trying to solve certain problems will get more attention than others and that is okay. You have to measure yourself by an inner scorecard as Warren Buffett would put it vs an outer one.
Before thinking about how you want to go about being known, think about what you want to be known for.
Everybody wants to be Jobs nobody wants to be Woz.
