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Here's a thread about doing things for yourself vs doing things the world thinks you should do. As I've got older, I've noticed that the more time I spend on the things that make sense to me, the more stable and fulfilled I am.
If you do things for yourself, then you'll keep doing them forever. If you do things because the world says they're what success comes from, then you'll continually assess your skill at them against some goal&benchmark you don't believe in.
You can convince yourself to do things that the world wants you to do rather than what you want to do, but at some point you'll break mental composure and you'll see the joke, which will diminish the quality of your work. You'll also be unhappy.
The personal challenges of my life have been about trying to spend more time doing the things that feel true to me, and less time doing things that I don't believe in. This has also generally correlated to my happiness and the vibrancy of my inner mental world.
This approach has drawbacks - it doesn't optimize for typical success, or developing fungible skills. But it does create purpose - if you work on stuff for yourself, you're putting yourself on the line, and not an imagery archetype of a successful person. Real stakes.
So I think it's a good trade - you're going to lose out on some of the success tchotchkes of contemporary life, but you're going to gain in your own idiosyncratic approach to things.
If you want to make a real difference in the world, I I think you need to be idiosyncratic about what you do, which means you need to be willing to be weird yourself. Meaningful success mostly correlates to people who show up, day after day, doing something very weird.
