I would also like to push back a bit with a thought that is half-formed and something that I may not even believe , so take it for what it's worth. But sometimes I feel that external validation is actually not all that bad of a thing to seek. The fact is that all of the "accomplishments" in my life - going to Columbia, getting that internship, getting that job, etc. - have brought me happiness, both in the short term and the long term. The immediate elation of being validated by getting into Columbia was surely there, but I also think that being at Columbia has also satisfied me in a way that other schools wouldn't. If I were at a lesser school that had less pressure, less competition and less competition, I think it would be much more likely that I would be wondering what I was doing there. Would I really want to be putting in this effort when what I'm doing is not impressive and is not going to lead to anything? What would I think about my life?

I thought about this a lot when I was deciding whether or not to do the writing competition for law review. Doing law review seemed rather miserable (so many citations!), but I thought I would want to do a clerkship after school and that this was a necessary step and (more importantly for the content of this essay) I would regret it if I didn't try. I think I (like many of you) am someone who feeds off challenging myself and derives a lot of happiness from meeting those challenges. Maybe "meeting those challenges" simply overlaps with external validation, in part because it's difficult to meet challenges without external metrics of some sort.

This all needs to more fully developed and actually makes me feel a bit queasy reading it, but I don't think it's untruthful.

-- JaredMiller - 07 Jul 2012

Or maybe the problem with this way of thinking is that once you do end up failing to meet that challenge, you have nothing to fall back on but your own happiness. Perhaps the right (but difficult) move is to stop chasing the challenges and try to seek what substantive things really make you happy. This seems to be what Josh has done.

-- JaredMiller - 07 Jul 2012