I Have Never Won An Award

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BONUS LESSON

◆ Recognition is a separate skill from contribution. The people collecting trophies are usually the people who entered.

◆ If you wait for a committee to confirm your value, you have handed your confidence to strangers with a scoring sheet.

◆ The only award nobody can rescind is the one you give yourself, and you should give it out loud.

I have never been on a list.

Never 40 under 40. Never 30 under 30, obviously. Never a juror. Never a judge. Never nominated, never shortlisted, never featured, never celebrated, never hyped.

Decades in media and entertainment and there is nothing on my shelf.

For a long time that bothered me more than I let on. Every year the announcements go up. You see people you know get the badge, the interview, the little gold logo in their bio. Some quiet part of you does the math and wonders what a jury saw in them that nobody ever saw in you.

Then I paid attention to how the lists actually get made.

Here is the part nobody says out loud at the gala.

Most awards are entered, not discovered. Someone fills out a form. Someone writes the case study. Someone pays the entry fee, and at the big shows that fee is not small. Agencies carry submission budgets. Companies employ comms people whose literal job is packaging the work into a story a jury will reward.

The award does not come find you while you are doing great work. Somebody has to go get it for you.

I am not saying winners did not earn it. Most of them did excellent work. I am saying the excellent work is the price of entry, not the reason they won. They won because the work got submitted, positioned, timed and sold. That is a real skill. It is also a completely different skill than the one you use on a Tuesday to actually build the thing.

I was never good at that skill. I was busy doing the Tuesday.

Here is what I have instead of a trophy case.

Out of Phone. A global product servicing some of the biggest brands in the world. It exists because we built it.

TikTok Radio and the TikTok Podcast Network. Audio businesses that are on their way to becoming a repeatable model, the kind of thing you can license and run again somewhere else. Built those too.

Deals I negotiated that put shows in front of millions of people who never once thought about who signed the paper. People I hired who now run things bigger than the role I gave them.

And the one I am proudest of, which is not a product at all. I work at one of the largest tech companies in the world and I do not have a college degree. No famous dropout story attached. Nobody waived the requirement for me. I just worked, kept showing up in rooms I had no paperwork to be in, and made myself impossible to remove.

Not one line of that was voted on. All of it is real.

That is the trade most of us make without ever noticing we made it. We optimize for the work and quietly assume the recognition will arrive on its own schedule. It does not. Nobody is coming with a clipboard to audit your contribution. If you need someone else to tell you that you mattered, you can wait a very long time and get bitter while you wait.

Last year I had "meant for greatness" tattooed on my forearm.

Fifty years old. Not twenty two and full of hope. Fifty, with most of the record already written and not a single nomination in it.

People assume a tattoo like that is a prediction. It is not. I am not announcing what is coming. I was settling an argument I had been having with myself for years.

I put it on my forearm because that is where I have to see it. Not my back, not my shoulder. The arm I type with, shake hands with, point at whiteboards with. It lands in my eyeline a hundred times a day and it says the same thing every time. You already are. Stop waiting for the confirmation email.

I chose ink because ink does not care what the industry thinks. It does not expire in a news cycle. No committee can hand it to somebody else next year.

We are trained to believe self praise is arrogance. It is not. Arrogance is claiming what you did not do. Knowing exactly what you did do and saying it plainly is just accuracy.

So do the uncomfortable thing and write it down. The deals. The saves. The person you talked off the ledge at eleven at night. The project everyone has forgotten you rescued. The year you held the entire thing together and got a "thanks team" email for it.

That list is your award. It is more accurate than any jury, because you were in the room for every single line of it.

If a nomination shows up one day, take it. Enjoy the dinner. But know what you are worth before anyone hands you anything, because the version of you that needs a trophy to feel real is going to need a new one every year.

I know what I am worth. I know what I contributed. Truly knowing that is everything.

Most of us will never be on the list. Most of us were meant for greatness anyway.

Reply with one word.

◆ RECEIPTS if you have done work you are proud of that nobody ever handed you a trophy for.

◆ TROPHY if you have won something and it mattered less than you expected it to.

Dan Page
50 Years, 50 Lessons
newsletter.therealdanpage.com