It's rare to see such honest self-reflection on a sensitive topic like this. The need for recognition in some way or another is hardwired into us, and I don't

It's rare to see such honest self-reflection on a sensitive topic like this. The need for recognition in some way or another is hardwired into us, and I don't believe it's intrinsically bad - we are a communal animal and we want to provide value for our community, our brains want success and prestige as a way to motivate us to do that - like feeling hungry motivates us to nourish ourselves. It's a basic need to feel useful, and prestige is the metric our primitive brains use to measure that usefulness, hence office drones find happiness as little league coaches. Like any force, it can be both good or bad, and it turns bad when your ONLY concern is success and prestige, leading you to optimize external appearances and get some of that sweet sweet second hand prestige. But when combined with something you enjoy doing, and that can provide real value to the world, this desire can be truly world changing, and I think it's a vast oversimplification (being HN I can say it's over-fitting to a one-dimensional metric) to say that the Jobs, Musks, Gates and other folks weren't motivated to some degree by it. Side note: I remember flying out of LA a few years back and seeing FIVE gaunt bald men dressed in black turtle necks and blue jeans. Either there was a call for a Steve Jobs biopic and nobody took off their costumes, or LA is the the poster child for over-optimizing external appearances.