Here's an interesting section:
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.
I have a PhD in Philosophy, something that I love, and I've seen young people who've seen my degrees and thought they wanted them, too. When I tell them that it took me 22 years of sweat, debt, and poverty to finally achieve it, they pull back. I was never in it for the degree, but then I never wasted a course that didn't count toward a degree either. I've seen many people try to write the next great novel only to find that their effort was awful or they really had no clue what it involved.
