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You may find some answers in pg's essay How To Do What You Love http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html

> Also, if you're willing to suffer through difficult higher education, imagine the pains you'll endure in relationships to make that work also :)

This reminds me of a quote from Paul Grahams' "How to do What you Love" (http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html): "If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school."

Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative is a great book on similar themes. (The sequel Show Your Work! is also good) Also Creating a Life Worth Living had a huge impact on me - it's full of interviews with creative types of all kinds, and talks about how many different ways/styles of structuring your time and life there are, and how to find one that works for you.

When I was a jazz musician in my early 20s, I did a lot of negative self-talk on gigs. "Oh, that was awful! Oh yuk, Argghh that sux. Nooo...Terrible" etc. It made me sound terrible. Self-torture. Then I read a book Effortless Mastery, from which I learnt Never criticize yourself on gigs. The time for that is when you practise. And since then I never do that. I just enjoy myself and play. It really changed my life. And also learning about loving yourself - realizing that it's all too easy to be careful about treating other people well, always being kind, while being extremely mean to yourself. Louise Hay's How to Love Yourself is the book on that subject, I think.

After reading your "Fuck Glory" link, I recalled something I'd read about prestige:

> "You shouldn't worry about prestige.... It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious."

The irony, of course, is that none other than Paul Graham wrote that in How to Do What You Love: http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html

Almost all of Paul Graham's essays. Especially

How to Make Wealth - http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html
How to Do What You Love - http://paulgraham.com/love.html
Inequality and Risk - http://paulgraham.com/inequality.html

and Paul Buchheit's

My startup path - http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.in/2007/03/my-startup-path.html
(I have actually printed a hard copy of this and have it my wallet. This is what finally convinced me to join a startup.)