Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind — though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.

Don't decide too soon. Kids who know early what they want to do seem impressive, as if they got the answer to some math question before the other kids. They have an answer, certainly, but odds are it's wrong.

Although doing great work takes less discipline than people think — because the way to do great work is to find something you like so much that you don't have to force yourself to do it — finding work you love does usually require discipline. Some people are lucky enough to know what they want to do when they're 12, and just glide along as if they... See more

To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool.

Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you'll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you're in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you're practically... See more

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.

In the design of lives, as in the design of most other things, you get better results if you use flexible media.

When you're young, you're given the impression that you'll get enough information to make each choice before you need to make it. But this is certainly not so with work.

The trick of maximizing the parts of your job that you like can get you from architecture to product design, but not, probably, to music. If you make money doing one thing and then work on another, you have more freedom of choice.