The Anchors of Appreciation

Nobody outgrows wanting to be chosen. We just get better at pretending the choosing doesn't matter. Then an award lands, or a magazine calls, or a stranger in another country says your name correctly, and the whole studio stands up a little straighter for a week.

Everyone in this business says they don't care about that. Everyone in this business checks.

The polite version goes: we focus on the work, the recognition follows, we're not in it for the trophies. It's a good line. It also quietly assumes that recognition is a byproduct, something that happens to you while you're busy being serious. That's not how it works. Recognition is infrastructure. It's the thing that lets a client say your name in a room you're not in.

Think about what an anchor actually does. It doesn't move the boat. It stops the boat from moving when you'd rather it didn't. A press mention, a jury seat, a piece in a magazine your mother has heard of: none of that makes the work better. What it does is hold your position when the wind picks up. When a procurement officer has four agencies on a sheet and no way to tell them apart, the anchor is what keeps you from drifting into the pile.

The anchor isn't the prize. It's being seen holding it.

The reason we're squeamish about it is that we've confused two different things. Wanting to be good and wanting to be seen as good are not the same desire, and we've decided the second one is embarrassing. So we build entire brands on the first and then quietly, badly, do the second anyway. Badly, because we won't admit we're doing it.

Here is what admitting it looks like in practice. You decide which rooms you want to be named in. You find out who does the naming. You give them something worth saying. That's it. That's the whole mechanic, and it's been the mechanic since someone first carved a name into a wall in Paramaribo or anywhere else people wanted to be remembered.

What makes it feel dirty is doing it without the work underneath. An anchor with no boat is just a lump of iron on a seabed. But a boat with no anchor is at the mercy of whoever is paying for wind that season.

So: keep the work honest, and stop being shy about the other part. The validation isn't a weakness in the system. It is the system. The only real question is whether you're going to be deliberate about it or let it happen to you at random, in rooms you didn't choose, in words you didn't write.