Status Games Rule Everything Around Me.
Everyone's chasing something.
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I’ve been asked, a few times now, about what benefits I derived from getting my MBA at Columbia, considering that I have thus far pursued a non-traditional post-MBA career. For some career paths, such as investment banking or management consulting, an MBA from a top school is practically a requirement to get your foot in the door if you didn’t work for one of those firms immediately out of undergrad, and the benefit is obvious: access to a lucrative, prestigious career path with excellent exit opportunities.
For me, at least from an outsider’s perspective, the value prop was less obvious. I joined Robinhood in February to help build a media subsidiary, I write a weekly blog, and I’m working on a book. All of these are interesting pursuits in their own rights, but they’re not exactly things that you need an MBA to do. That being said, business school still provided me an invaluable, though less tangible, benefit: status.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, status is one’s “position or rank in relation to others.” Here’s an example of what that “status” has looked like for me:
As part of my day job, I write about financial markets. While business school has improved my understanding of the drivers of company valuations (thank you, Michael Mauboussin), I would say that ~95% of my knowledge regarding financial markets in general, as well as my ability to write about financial markets, has stemmed from my own writing and research, not my business school curriculum. But having an MBA from a good business school adds a layer of credibility to my work that I wouldn’t otherwise have, and new readers assign more weight to my opinions than they otherwise would.
Why?
Because status is as much about the perception of ability as it is about ability itself, and business school increases that perception. Top business schools have fairly rigorous admissions standards, and those same business schools tend to produce graduates with successful career outcomes. If folks know you graduated from one of those programs, they mentally group you with the type of person that graduated from one of those schools. “The type of person that would graduate from Columbia typically knows a lot about finance, therefore this writer who went to CBS probably knows a lot about finance.”
Another example of status that I’ve noticed is how people respond to the news that I’m writing a book, depending on how I frame it. If I say, “I’m writing a book,” I usually receive an “Oh, that’s cool” look before the conversation drifts to another topic. If I say, “I signed a book deal,” or, even more specifically, “I signed a book deal with Penguin,” people perk up and start asking all sorts of questions about the book idea, the pitch process, and how I’m allocating my time. It’s fascinating, really. I’m the same quality writer that I was two months ago, but others’ perception of my writing has shifted due to the additional external validation.
That’s the power of status.
Status leads people to assume something about us that we might otherwise have had to prove, making us “innocent until proven guilty” rather than “guilty until proven innocent.” It’s a pattern-matching mechanism that allows us to quickly filter and process information in a world defined by incomplete knowledge.
When I was a few years younger, I underestimated the value of status, thinking that we should be judged on our merit alone. What my younger self didn’t realize was that we live in a time-constrained world where don’t have the capacity to evaluate everyone on merit alone, and status is our way of expediting that evaluation process. Status doesn’t replace merit, it just lowers the threshold needed to prove one’s merit to others.
Status takes many forms. Your alma mater signals status. So does the company you work for, as well as the career path you’ve chosen. Harvard is higher status than Boston College. Goldman Sachs is higher status than Northwestern Mutual. A doctor is higher status than an electrician.
Status is also subjective, not objective. Its value comes from its audience.
What I consider “high status,” you might consider irrelevant. Some folks view “journalist for the New York Times” as high status. Others think that journalism as a career path is low status. The same could be said for lobbyists, musicians, software engineers, college dropouts-turned startup founders, or high-ranking executives at large companies. The same activity could also be “low status” or “high status” depending on one’s level of success. For example, “writing” might be viewed as a low-to-medium status activity, unless you become a New York Times’ best-selling author, at which point it becomes “high-status.” Dropping out of college is typically low-status, unless, of course, you drop out of Stanford to found a startup.
While status is subjective, status games are unavoidable. We are constantly evaluating others’ status, others are constantly evaluating ours, and we ourselves are always chasing some form of “status,” regardless of whether we’re conscious of the chase. Even claiming that you aren’t concerned with status is a form of status. Frankly, “not being concerned with status” is probably one of the highest forms of status.
And let’s not kid ourselves, most of us care a lot about status, to the point that we’ll sacrifice money for it. Earlier this week, my friend Rob Henderson wrote an excellent piece on the relationship between money and status, in which he included this excerpt from a paper led by UC Berkeley psychologist Cameron Anderson:
The motivation for status also appears to lead people to prefer roles that will afford them higher status. In a survey of 1,500 office workers, seven out of 10 said they would forego a raise for a higher status job title. For example, file clerks preferred receiving the title ‘data storage specialists’ over receiving a raise. Why was the title preferred over money? The majority of those surveyed believed that other people judged them based on their job title.
70% of surveyed office workers would prefer an improved job title to a pay raise because we crave the approval of others, and status, not money, is the only currency that can be exchanged for this approval.
This desire for approval, however, makes status dangerous, because we can fall in a trap of chasing status for status’s sake, with little regard for the kind of status that we actually desire. And unlike money, status is domain-specific.
If you make $1,000,000, It doesn’t matter if you are a lawyer, doctor, plumber, sports bettor, or carpenter, you can spend that $1,000,000 however you want. You can buy the same home, car, or lavish vacation, regardless of your occupation. The same can’t be said for status, however. Sure, if you’re at the very top of your game, status transcends domains (Stephen Spielberg and Lebron James would be well-respected by hedge fund managers and poets alike, for example), but for most of us, status is domain-specific and non-transferable. It’s only as valuable as those who respect it.
If you chase status for status’s sake, but you don’t take the time to identify and critique what type of status it is that you want, you could spend decades investing your time and energy accumulating a social currency that you wouldn’t have wanted in the first place. Status buys respect from a particular audience. If you aren’t satisfied by your audience, sorry! There aren’t any refunds. At least the guy who got rich doing a job he hated can revenge-purchase a boat.
We spend a lot of time thinking about our career income trajectories, but what about our status trajectories? Considering that most people would gladly sacrifice money for status, isn’t that even more important? This raises an important question: How do you identify the right status?
I think the best way is to evaluate the status of folks 10 years ahead of you. Who respects them? Do you respect them? Do they seem to be satisfied with their standing in life, both personally and professionally? What was the opportunity cost associated with acquiring that status? Would those tradeoffs be worth it to you? If you don’t like the way that picture looks, it might be time to consider a different path.
Beyond identifying status games that you want to win, it’s important to pursue games which tilt the odds in your favor.
Hyper-competitive status games, for example, which are common in exclusive career paths pursued by top university graduates, are seductive but dangerous. While they offer a guaranteed level of prestige, the path forward becomes increasingly challenging as the competition intensifies and opportunities for advancement diminish. If you choose to pursue the same status game as thousands of other high-caliber individuals, you are practically guaranteeing that, at some point, you’ll lose out to someone else. And because you chose this hyper-competitive status game, you’ll compare yourself to everyone else in this specific game, leading to frustration when your advancement inevitably comes to a halt.
But if you identify unique status games that play to your strengths, or if you create a niche off-ramp from a competitive status game, you can build a formidable moat around your status. The status games worth pursuing are those that push you to be prolific while complementing your interests and abilities.
Status games rule everything around us, so the question you should be asking isn’t “How do I opt out?” It’s “Which status game should I be pursuing?”
- Jack
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Jack's Picks
Reminder: I’m going to start publishing occasional Q&A columns for readers monthly-ish. If you have a question about, well, anything really, reply to this email or leave a comment on this post below! I’ll compile some of these over the next few weeks for a longer post.
Interesting read from Byrne Hobart exploring the idea that once something becomes mainstream, the magic that made it special is probably gone.
Fun blog from Tim Ferriss (circa 2014) about what it was like to learn to write under John McPhee.
Good detailed piece in the Wall Street Journal on the data usage associated with AI datacenters.
Hi Jack, great article and astute observations. I suppose that the corollary of status is that it is only meaningful when outsiders can appreciate it. In other words, external validation. In my view, chasing status is a red herring or fool's errand. When we rely on external validation for our own happiness, it is fickle and transient. What we really want when we chase status is that we think that status will help us achieve those things that will make us happy! But we are misguided; happiness comes from inner peace and contentment, often these are the very things that we sacrifice to achieve that status.
Love thinking about this topic. Years ago, spouse was involved in a research project about younger generations being more motivated by their perception of the status associated with the title as opposed to raises. For the longest time, I thought, “how stupid. Call me the associate toilet scrubber if you give me a raise.” The more I thought about it, and some of the new patterns associating with careers (changing place of work more often, likelihood of receiving a larger pay bump when you move companies, etc etc) I wondered if the younger generations are actually playing the long game. Does forgoing the raise in lieu of a perceived high status title increase likelihood of higher pay when you make your next career jump? Anyways, I view this whole thing as a necessary evil to career progression and find myself judging the concept often. As I get older, I try to release the judgment associated with this part of “the game,” and made a decision that the only way to win the game is not to play. We’ll see if that is the right choice in the long term, but for now I am satisfied. Winning isn’t fun when it all feels fake and purposeless. Nothing new under the sun!