Big Sis Briefing: Prestige Is a Currency With a Short Shelf Life

Let’s start with the word itself because I think it tells us everything.

✨ Prestige ✨

The word we use to describe the shiniest things in the legal profession: the firm names, the client lists, the titles that make people at dinner parties say oh, wow. The thing we chase, sometimes for years, as proof that we’ve made it.

I recently learnt what “prestige” actually means in its original French: deceit. Imposture. Illusion.

The French borrowed it from the Latin praestigium, meaning delusion. Before that, from praestigiae: a juggler’s tricks. The literal Latin root, praestringere, means to blind, to dazzle and to bind tight.

The word wasn’t even considered positive until about 1913. For centuries before that, it was derogatory. To call something prestigious was to call it a trick, a performance or aomething designed to make you look the wrong way.

I’m not saying this to be dramatic. I’m saying it because the language already knew what many of us take a decade or two in our careers to figure out.

Prestige is, by its own etymology, something that dazzles you so effectively that you can’t see clearly.

I say this as someone who was thoroughly, willingly and enthusiastically dazzled.

My own juggler’s trick

I can tell you the exact feeling.

It’s the moment when someone asks where you work and you say the name, a particular firm, a particular company and you watch their face change. Something registers. Oh. That one. In the half-second that follows, you feel it: a flush of something warm. A kind of yes. A quiet, intoxicating sense of I am impressive.

I’ve felt that flush more than once.

I’ve felt it attached to firm names that meant something in the rooms I wanted to be in. I’ve felt it when I could say I was APAC Head of Legal at a US tech company: the kind of title that, in certain circles, opens conversational doors before you’ve said anything else of substance.

I won’t pretend I didn’t love it because I absolutely flipping did.

But here’s where I need to be honest with you and with myself. Some (all?) of my career decisions were made based on that feeling. Based on what the name would do in the room. Based on what it would add to the bio, the LinkedIn profile and the answer to the inevitable cocktail party question.

I chose some things because of what they would signal to people who valued the same status symbols that I did. Which, for a long while, I absolutely did. We were all reading from the same map, nodding at the same landmarks and measuring ourselves against the same invisible ruler.

I essentially dressed my career the way I dressed myself: in labels. In recognisable markers of a certain kind of success. How much of who we are is the person underneath and how much is the label we’ve stitched across the front?

I say this with the full self-awareness that I, a woman who has thought deeply about this, continue to make fashion choices partly because a logo said I belong before I opened my mouth. We contain multitudes and the cognitive dissonance is, I promise, not lost on me.

Being kind to the girl who needed proof

When I was first started making those prestige-chasing decisions, I was young. I was looking for clues from the world around me about who I was and what I was worth, because I didn’t yet have a strong enough internal compass to navigate it by myself.

There’s a difference between a strong ego and a strong sense of self. I had one and I was working on the other. A strong ego can carry you far but a strong sense of self is what tells you when far is no longer the direction you actually want to go.

This is just what early career looks like when nobody gives you the map. You pay attention to what the world is rewarding because that’s all you have to go on. The profession rewards prestige loudly and consistently, so you go after that. Of course you do. That’s not naivety so much as it is a completely rational response to the incentives in front of you.

The growth is in noticing, eventually, that the incentives were never fully yours to begin with.

When the trade actually makes sense

Before you take anything I’ve said here as an argument against prestige entirely: it’s not. That would be sanctimonious and also strategically bad advice.

Prestige, when you use it deliberately, is genuinely useful currency.

The right name on your CV still opens doors. The right previous employer still gives you credibility in rooms that won’t wait for you to prove yourself. There are conversations I’ve been part of, positions I’ve had access to, that almost certainly required a certain pedigree and by extension, privilege, to enter.

If you’re early in your career and choosing between a role at a well-regarded brand name firm and somewhere less established, the prestige option builds capital you can spend later. The brand transfers. The network opens and the CV reads differently. That’s still a reality and it’s worth factoring in. (It’s part of why I think the in-house straight from law school debate is more nuanced than most people make it.)

There’s nothing wrong with choosing prestige strategically and with clear eyes: “I want this name on my resume because it will open X door in Y years and give me access to Z opportunity”.

That’s not a trap then, that’s a plan.

Prestige-chasing for the currency and capital you can trade in later makes a hell of a lot of sense when it’s a deliberate choice. The trap is something else entirely. The trap is when the currency starts spending you

The trap is when you’ve stopped asking what does this get me and started asking what will this look like. The trap is when the external signal becomes the goal rather than a vehicle for something you actually want. The trap is when you realise you’ve been collecting the right markers without ever checking in on whether the life underneath them is one you’d actually choose.

(Read that last one again for me.)

The shine fades, gradually and it doesn’t announce itself. One Tuesday afternoon you sit in a role that looks impeccable from the outside and you feel nothing in particular about it. Not unhappy exactly. Just not full either.

That’s the moment the currency starts to feel expensive. Because what you’ve paid for it, the years, the trade-offs, the quiet override of things you needed that didn’t fit the picture, starts to come into focus.

The juggler’s trick, as the Latin would say, is that by the time you notice you’ve been dazzled, you’ve already stopped seeing clearly.

So, what now?

I’m not asking you to blow anything up. I’m not even asking you to decide anything today.

I’m asking you to look at the prestige you’re carrying: the names, the titles, the status symbols and ask yourself one honest question. Am I holding these because they’re taking me somewhere I want to go? Or have I confused the holding of them with the destination itself?

Prestige is a currency and currencies are tools.

The question is always: what are you building with yours?

💖

Mel

If you’re in that mucky bit, still impressive on paper, quietly wondering what comes next, that’s exactly the conversation I have in my confidential Career Big Sis sessions. Not to tell you what to do but to help you hear what you already know.