The prestige trap is real.
You've always grown up to be a high achiever- it starts with grades in school, then your university and eventually your career.
It gets ingrained in you that 'what success looks like' is people having a high perception of what you're doing. This article will talk about how letting this thought fester in your decision making can have a significant, lasting impact on the trajectory of your life and is a silent killer of dreams.
But, it's important to clarify something. People often mistake this as meaning that you shouldn't work at prestigious institutions or 'status shop', however, I argue that there is nothing wrong with working at such companies as long as you are acutely aware of the illusion that can follow and how hard leaving can be.
That was my case.
I started my career in consulting because I truly didn't know what I wanted to do and it kept my options quite open. It allowed me to explore fun, creative work in my free time on the weekends to see what actually gave me energy. But, hands down, the hardest part of joining the firm was leaving.
But why was leaving so hard? Surely firms and companies are eager to hire ex-McKinsey consultants? Well, yes- but also no.
When you've spent your whole life being a high-acheiver and ended up in a place like McKinsey, you become very picky as to where you'll go next. There are really only a handful of VC / PE firms or companies you'd even target and that would make a 'fitting' exit. What this means is that when roles at these firms open up, you have hundreds of identical looking McKinsey analysts applying for the same roles- which, as you can imagine, makes it extremely competitive and hard for those firms to differentiate between candidates.
I remember realising this quite early on overhearing some tenured analysts finding it incredibly hard to exit into another 'tier 1' role after being at the firm for 3 years. I then knew the importance of building a differentiator- not because I wanted to be different for the sake of it, but because I knew consulting wasn't a long-term play. I wanted to set myself up for success in whatever came next.
So I spent an incredible amount of time and energy outside of work building things on the side and creating things from scratch. Side projects, startups, you name it.
This push to explore things outside of consulting landed me some interviews in Growth Equity and startups only a year after joining consulting. Then the prestige trap kicked in. I knew I didn't want to stay at McKinsey long-term, I knew I didn't really want to go invest yet and the startup seemed really cool. But I still felt so lost.
This was really strange, because if anyone spoke to me or analysed me without having met me, the obvious decision would have been to join the startup- but the illusion of prestige kicked in, and for some weird reason, I really cared what people would say or think about my exit from such a prestigious place. I let the perception of others play a factor in my decision.
Luckily, I trusted my gut and ended up making one of the best decisions of my life which was to join the startup.
But it always reminds me of the Steve Jobs Stanford speech about removing self-imposed shackles and chasing curiosity- how when he dropped out of university, he voluntarily went to lectures he actually found interesting (like calligraphy) and how much that benefited him later without him caring or knowing that it would ever matter.
But, removing those self-imposed shackles is really, really hard.
There are 3 exercises I use to help me figure out what truly energises me:
Take a decision you have to make, look at someone who made that decision plus are 5 years your senior. Ask yourself, "would I be happy if I was that person in 5 years' time?"
In front of you is a real example of who you could be if you keep down this path. If it doesn't excite you, you probably already know that long-term, you should be doing something else. Start making that differentiator real from today.
For this one, you need to get a bit creative. Again, imagine you've just made a tough decision and now fast forward 5 years. Picture yourself, and say out loud, "Yes, I chose to do X".
What this exercise does is it tries to reveal what your gut reaction is to a decision. If you feel more comfortable with verbalising one option, then that is probably the one you should pick.
An alternative to this method is the random wheel picker and see your raw reaction to the result of a spin.
If you've ever felt this then you already know what I'm talking about. The only way to describe this feeling is through an anecdote.
There are two distinct times in my life I remember feeling pure adrenaline and urgency that forbade me from sleeping.
The first was when I was building Butterfly- the social media app my friends and I made during university. I was utterly in love with the process of working on something that was mine, and that I deeply cared about. I didn't sleep until my work looked beautiful and actually worked. This was a clear sign that I was energised.
The second moment was when I used Cursor and Lovable for the time. I discovered these tools during an Entrepreneurs First hackathon in December 2024- safe to say I didn't sleep until 6am due to the sheer awe I was in at the alien-like powers that came out of nowhere- for the first time in a long time I felt like a child again, like the possibilities were endless.
It was obvious to me after using these 3 heuristics that working at a startup is where I would be my happiest.
The first question I got asked when I joined incident.io is what I'd do next. This makes me laugh.
Since the dawn of time, man has always asked, "what next?" And as much as I am a planner and goal-setter, I really do believe it's completely okay to not know what is next.
If you follow the heuristics in section 2, you really can't go too wrong. You'll be doing work you love, with people you admire and even in the downside case where everything goes wrong, you'll be happy that you gave it a shot.
My final line of reflection is to always chase people, not prestige. People will carry you to where you actually want to be, prestige will take you where you think you want to be.
P.S. I am trying to get back into writing, especially without AI- it's a challenging skill to develop. Shoutout to a colleague who wrote this in our "Using AI" onboarding docs at incident.io
"Clear and concise writing is really important here - whether that's a Slack message to the team or a scoping document in Notion. Oxide have a great "how to use AI" policy which is very aligned with how we work and is worth reading in full.
In particular:
It is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it
If you're expecting someone to read your writing, make sure it's with your own voice, and you've put effort into making it clear."