You know the first thing people often ask me when they’re catching up or meeting me for the first time is “What school do you go to?” or if they assume I already graduated or am interning “What do you for a living?”. Let’s go over the first question.

When I hear “What school do you go to?”, it’s not a question I can really lie about. If I try to avoid answering the question I look more like a prick that doesn’t want to give information to those that are “unworthy.” Though that’s not even something I would go for. I’m proud to say I go to the University of Chicago. Having this stamp gives me an edge over the average person, whether this is reasonable or not is another question. But, realizing I have this pedigree now ingrained in my history, I’ve also learned the tax that comes with this pedigree.

People expect big achievements from someone that’s going to a school such as mine. For some people they think making a school like this is satisfactory and an high achievement, which I don’t doubt it is. However, what they fail to realize is this is in a way accepting mediocracy at a higher level. I’ve recently finished Pachinko by Min Jin Lee and a a part of the book that I thought summarized this point perfectly.

“Good question, young Jedi. The tax for being mediocre comes from you and everyone else knowing that you are mediocre. It’s a heavier tax than you’d think.”

It’s also really important to take the context of this quote into account. The speaker is not talking to some random kid with some small aspirations or some average middle class citizen. This quote is directed an a prestigious investment banker who graduated from Columbia in finance. The book is a work of fiction, but what this quote expressed isn’t some false scenario, but one that commonly affects many people. While I do not condone mediocracy, I’ll try to explain the difficulty of continuing to push for success.

What I learned is success is a really complicated topic, that most often is tied to money in the eyes of the public. It is by no means any different for a lot of people that go to a T5 school in fact. A lot of peers continue to believe this, especially considering many of my friends are also investment bankers. A lot of them believe in the sacrifice of their time and livelihood for money and prestige. They often pride themselves on having a job that has higher peaks than other jobs, that they have infinite opportunities after they decide to be done with banking.

I’ve always wondered why these people wanted to be friends with me specifically, since my style has never been to care for these kinds of notions of success. But the answer to that was quite simple, I can empathize with their circumstance. I know why they think like this and understand what they are going through. When trying to keep pushing for success it’s not so easy to define it yourself, so by following what the capitalist world sees as success, it makes this definition easy to understand. But this leads heavily into the idea of pedigree and how to succeed in this manner. In fact, it could be seen as toxic how far people go for this. In order to be ahead of another person, if you don’t recognize them as deserving to be ahead, people are willing to go out of their way to cut you in your career. I’ve heard stories of people calling other people’s firms to get them fired, bosses clowning on their employees by not giving them real bonuses after all the work they’ve put in, etc.

I’ve been working really hard to avoid accepting this as my terms of success. I’ve always hated to idea of slaving hours on end just to do well for someone else’s dreams. What would be even sadder for me is to not even have dreams to strive for. However, people don’t tend to make this easy. This type of thinking is often seen as naive and foolish. My parents, in fact, think I just lack enough experience to have good judgement to decide this for myself. This ties into the next question of “what do you do for a living?”, a question that fills me with dread. It’s sad that often the public tends to value how big someone is by what they do. A lot of my friends like to flex saying “I work in M&A” or “I’m working at Accenture Ventures” or “I’m working at Google as a dev.” While I don’t see anything wrong with putting value behind this, I know I don’t personally care too much about this. But, in a way this can be seen as complacency, a concious decision to be mediocre. However, this is where I provide a counterpoint.

In this world that runs so heavily around capitalism, there’s one thing that reigns even this basic view of pedigree: money. If you make more than the president of Goldman Sachs, you are still validated in this society. This is where I’m going into the next episode in my life… deciding how to make as much money as possible with some goals in mind; using the least amount of time as possible, without getting a full-time salary job, and without unreasonable, free handouts.