Hm, that does make sense. I see what you're saying. Thanks for the advice.
I think I'll try to blaze my own trail. Though it seems kind of hard. There's lots of external pressure. Mainly having to do with college. Then again, focusing on what other people have done is sort of a way of putting pressure on myself so steering clear of that will help.
Being a teenager is weird.
"What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn't worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgement you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don't even know? [4]
This is easy advice to give. It's hard to follow, especially when you're young. [5] Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like.
That's what leads people to try to write novels, for example. They like reading novels. They notice that people who write them win Nobel prizes. What could be more wonderful, they think, than to be a novelist? But liking the idea of being a novelist is not enough; you have to like the actual work of novel-writing if you're going to be good at it; you have to like making up elaborate lies.
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.
Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.
Similarly, if you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other. Your opinions about what's admirable are always going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one."
Let me suggest that a lot of the pressures you feel in high school probably have little to do with "real life." It's amusing to think back to all the things I (and authority figures around me) worried about when I was in high school, because it's all long since irrelevant to me now. I can't really comment on college pressures because I didn't go to college until I was over 30, so I don't know what it's like to be a real college student.
My own experience suggests this: If you've learned to work hard when necessary to meet your own internal standards, and make sure you keep pushing those standards up, you'll probably wake up one day to find you're way more competent than most people in at least one area. That can be really fun (and sometimes lucrative), even if at the same time you're self-aware enough to know you're not a world-class expert that somebody would find interesting enough for an article.
