How much of the royal wine do you really need?

Prestige and honor can indeed boost the personal morale and encourage us to work better. Yet at times, it can cause one to gather feelings of entitlement, superiority and inflated positivity all to unintentionally corrupt your mind into thinking you are perfect.

Early appreciation can be detrimental if not well modulated

When we set out to climb the mountain a constant dose of encouragement does help move forward. But when the media and news reporters come with helicopters to live record your tremendous achievements, you immediately gain a sense of accomplishment and tend to decrease productivity level.

So why does this matter? Who is to blame here? And how can we improve? Let us take a closer look at this thought process.

With a goal set to conquer, we all emerge and march forward to make the best of the opportunities that come by. It takes commitment, hard work and perseverance to ensure the task is met eventually. Yet despite all this, there is bound to be an individual within the network who comes forward and claps excessively. Now, you have two choices:

1. Say thank you and continue towards your long term goal
2. Grin and always dream about the temporary achievement

The friend only wanted to appreciate your dedication. But depending on how you perceive it, the future of your work remains at stake. And if you think this is trivial, let me say this: It is the minute details such as these that go below the radar while assessing performance.

We tend to hyper optimize our time and fine tune our actions to perform better, but little thought is given about the mindset with which we get work done. Is it a learners mind eager to explore and discover? Or is it the mind of a pseudo — happy soul who believes in already reaching the pinnacle? Your perspective changes everything.

Also, as you tend to perform well, people start recognizing your value and position in society and tend to treat you differently in contrast to previous few years. This gradual transition may seem evident eventually but perfectly blends in to seamlessly make us more complacent and passive when we loose sight of the drive.

These minor queues play quintessential role in challenging our attitude towards instant gratification rather than long term results. Several models of functionalities then to provide short term checkpoints in the hope of creating encouragement loops for the individual but when poorly designed can result in false sense of growth as they seek the rewards more than the experience gained from the work. Several leaders fall for this trap when success starts falling in and they relax a bit instead of preparing for the next move to take.

Reward yourself but remember to draw the line

So when you find yourself getting a lot of appreciation from your network, ask yourself how much of this is sufficient to be productive encouragement rather than destructive gratification.