Patrick Collison’s advice for people in their 20s: “Work at a place with high standards”

There's an interesting book, Apprentice to Genius, that follows. It's three or four. It's three generations of scientists, someone who mentored somebody else, who in turn mentored another scientist. And they were all extremely successful. And the book is this description of what they all did, but also this kind of reflection on about what is it that was transferred, for example. One thing it describes is, well, one of the most important and subtle questions in science is problem selection. Just how do you choose what to work on? No one tells you what to do. And you do have to answer this question multiple times. And of course, you need to choose something that's sufficiently important and hard that it would be important if you succeeded, but also not so intractable that you can't actually make any progress. And so the book describes how this is part of what the mentees describe that they learn from their mentors. Another thing they talk about is just learning about high standards and what high standards actually are. When I talk to people in other domains, this is so frequently the thing that I hear from them that when they worked with X person or at Y organization or in Z environment or whatever, that they learned what great actually is, and that just permanently changed their sense for what their own standard for their work ought to be. So maybe one version of what people in their 20s should do is get some idea as to domains you're interested in or care about, but then figure out, where can you learn the highest standards, where are the highest standards embodied, and where can you go and experience that firsthand?