Pursue what your environment at is good at. For example, if you attend a university with an exceptional computer science program, study computer science. If you work at a technology company, try to be a software engineer that is working on their core technology and if you’re working at a bank, be a banker. With regard to a career specifically, this can be achieved using these two heuristics:

• If you know the job you want, aim to work at places that really care about that job. Be a software engineer at a technology company, not a bank.
• If you know the companyprestige maxxing you want to work at, apply to the job(s) that encapsulate their core business.

There are software engineers at banks and there are finance teams at technology companies. There are humanities majors at exceptional engineering schools and vice versa. I see value in all of this. In my experience, however, the quality of resources, mentorship, and talent working within the department that a university most excels in or within the core value proposition that business is built around tends to be the highest.

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One referral is worth a hundred applications. This truth, of course, scales in importance as you get more senior and have actually worked in corporate settings with the people that are referring you. But even at my junior summer internship, the recruiters would reach out to the existing interns to assess candidates from our schools. If you can, try to get someone who can speak to your abilitya TA, an older peer that’s in a club with you, a friend who already has the job you’re gunning for to recommend you to a recruiter.

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Have mentors and be a mentor. When you are young (i.e., in your first couple years of college), make friends with older students. You need nothing more than to want to learn from them, almost everyone enjoys feeling respected and admired. When you get older, pass this mentorship forward. Be generous in sending younger students advice and opportunities. Having been on both sides of this — I have had very generous mentors and I have mentored really incredible people — I can attest that both sides of this equation have shaped my values and changed my life.

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Remember what moves you. I think one good heuristic for this is to index on what you enjoyed when you were in middle and high school. In my experience, the college environment can have a really dramatic impact on your perception of prestige, ambition, and your worldviewand much of this is actually good! I think college made me incredibly ambitious. I felt that this was strongest for me around my sophomore and junior years.

I was a pretty intrinsically motivated middle and high schooler, but I also did a lot of things because I had momentum. When I got to college, caught up in the whirlwind of new friends and new classes, I divorced many of my high school interests, electing to instead strive towards the (largely career-focused) subjects and clubs that I felt my university had deemed prestigious.

Now, however, I find that much of what I enjoy is grounded in these pursuits of my younger self. I played a lot of piano as a kid, I love it still. I read and wrote and drew a lot as a kid, I love reading and writing and the creation of beautiful things even now.

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Take note of widely held beliefs by your peers that you disagree with. A really strong intuition about something that no one else around you seems to possess is usually the first thing that gets squashed by the influence from others. Have enough conviction in yourself and your knowledge of yourself to not let this happen. The best way to get swallowed by the masses is to stop thinking for yourself.

Also, this question about a contrarian viewpoint is one that I have been asked when being interviewed by great companies. It’s a good answer to have at the ready.

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Your highest slope of learning vs time will come from doing things that are slightly too difficult for you. By slightly too difficult, I mean that in spite of devoting maximal time, effort, and brainpower into that thinga class, a job, a project, you are ultimately remain a little bit below average at it.

The only time in your life when it is acceptable to pursue something that is slightly too difficult, at least in my limited experience, is in school. To that end, I would highly endorse taking classes that you don’t believe you’re likely to be good at. This will make you much smarter than the alternative — you will feel your brain stretching and straining to meet this overextension of your capabilities.

The caveat to this is that being below average is not very fun, nor is it very sustainable. Nevertheless, I think in school, when there are relatively no consequences to being bad at something (unlike at a job, where you will get fired), it is much more useful to test your upper bound than to keep coasting at your median. There is an exponential payoff to a couple of quarters/semesters of hard classes or difficult research, a payoff which persists long after the period of being kind of bad at that thing ends.

This truth — that I have learned the most during the periods when I was uncomfortable — has generalized to spheres of my life beyond my academics and career as well. They’re called growing painsre: moving somewhere new, failing to achieve something you really wanted to achieve, breakups for a reason, I suppose.

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The best way to be likeable is to ask someone about themself. Everybody loves talking about themselves. Also, you already know the story of your own life. You’re far more likely to learn something hearing someone else’s.

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Once in a while, you should do incredibly inconvenient things for a very select number of people that you love a lot, simply because you love them a lot. In my experience, many of the things we aim for in lifea prestigious job, a lot of money, even a romantic partner can have unexpected downsides. I have found that having a couple really good friends is not one of those things.