It’s a natural instinct to seek prestige. Given the choice, we’d all prefer to be regarded highly rather than lowly. But prestige in and of itself is not a worthwhile goal, and seeking it outright will often lead you down exactly the wrong path.
If you look around the world—and this goes doubly in creative circles—whatever is currently the most prestigious is often that which is losing the most money, and is slated to soon disappear into irrelevance.
If you want remain on the lookout for what is likely to be prestigious tomorrow, it is probably best to keep your eyes open for whatever is considered gauche and unseemly profitable today.
By now, this seems to be something of a pattern: Newspapers, once home to the garish yellow journalism of Hearst and Pulitzer in the late 19th century, gained an air of respectability in the the mid-20th. They held on to this prestige, for a time, until they all started going down the tubes in the early 21st.
Thanks to the endowment he left to Columbia University, Joseph Pulitzer is now better known for the prestigious award named after him than he is for the sensationalism and scandal that he pushed throughout much of his career. And newspapers, now seen in hindsight, still retain some of that sanctified kind of prestige we so often reserve for the dead.
It’s also worth remembering that The Beatles, back in 1964, were regarded about as highly as ‘N Sync was four decades later. Speaking of which, Justin Timberlake seems to be on his way to becoming a prestigious name himself, right alongside Ben Affleck, Mark Wahlberg and Leonardo DiCaprio. At the time they appeared, who would have guessed?
Even television has grown out of its undignified infancy to surpass both film and fiction in becoming what is often considered the most prestigious and highbrow art form in America today. Meanwhile, Western Classical Music has very nearly died of a terrible case of excess prestige. And when was the last time you remember anyone taking modern art, on the whole, very seriously at all?
Ultimately, seeking prestige for its own sake is unlikely to get you much of anywhere. Instead, keep good principles, and seek ever more satisfying challenges. You might find that kind of thing somewhere that’s currently “prestigious”, and you might find it elsewhere.
But if you keep that up for a good couple of decades, you may be surprised to find out just how much prestige you’ve earned, quite accidentally, in the end.