Does seeking recognition make us less creative?
I have recently watched Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s TED talk entitled “How craving attention makes you less creative”, where he talks about our obsession to get attention on social media. I don’t really engage in social media (though email can be considered social media I guess). But the talk prompted me to realise that I don’t really seek attention for or through my website. Although I have on rare occasion checked how many people have visited my web pages, I feel no urge to do so and I don’t really care. It does not really give me satisfaction.
What does give me satisfaction about having a website is building it by adding posts. Finishing a post feels great, because it is like an accomplishment. It is a product that often takes considerable time of thinking and writing to complete. And it gives me great satisfaction to read a post after some time and still liking what I wrote!
I think that the main reason why I don’t care so much about how much attention I am getting is because that is not my main motive for writing posts. I am writing to learn new things. Writing prompts me to think and reflect about things that I care about and learn about how to improve, how to be happier and how to be more productive and creative. Of course, I am also happy if other people read my posts. But that is not my main motivation.
Then why do many people apparently feel pressured to get attention on social media? As Joseph Gordon-Levitt points out, it is partly because promoting attention seeking behavior is inherent in the system of how social media sites work, because this is how they generate their income.
But personally I feel that the main reason why people seek attention is because they post things that they are not really passionate about. So getting attention becomes the motivation.
But attention seeking behaviour isn’t just prevalent in social media, it is prevalent in “real” life as well. And if we want to understand why we seek attention, we have to first realise that there are two types of attention or recognition that we can get.
There is the attention or recognition by the intended audience. This could be people who genuinely like what we have created or people that we are having an impact on. These could be people whom we help, motivate and inspire.
The second type of attention or recognition is by people who are not actually affected by what we have done, but who notice and recognize the impact we are making. As a result of their recognition, we may get a reputation to be someone who does great things or we may receive some prizes that are usually based on some measurement of our impact.
It turns out that the two things (recognition of the things you do and recognition of your impact) often do not go hand in hand. This is because true impact cannot be measured, it can only be felt. Of course, we can spend lots of time to make people recognize our impact by trying to publicize it. But this is wasted time. If there are people who like what we have created or who appreciate what we have done because it helped them, we have achieved all we can hope for. Seeking recognition of our impact adds nothing to that. And even if we have done things that nobody appreciates or pays attention to, it is ok if we did it because we felt passionate about it and have hopefully learned something for yourselves.
Furthermore, achieving great things usually means trying for a very long time and going through many failures. Thus, great accomplishments and achievements involve by necessity periods where nobody recognises what we are doing. Therefore, constantly seeking recognition for what we do and achieving great things are in a way incompatible with each other.
Promoting ourselves to get more attention takes time and energy away from doing what we are passionate about. I personally feel that the main reason why people seek attention is because they do things that they are not really passionate about. So getting attention becomes a substitute for intrinsic motivation for something we genuinely care about. And if we focus on the attention we might get and not on what we are trying to create, we will lose creativity and excitement to try new things.
If seeking attention is not important or could even be counter-productive, then why do I apply every year to get a teaching award. Well, there are two important reasons. Firstly, writing a teaching portfolio is immensely helpful in analysing how my teaching activities went, to realise what was good and to think about how I can improve things that did not go so well. Secondly, getting attention can be important when it opens up new opportunities for us, where we may have more autonomy and can be more creative. I am not exactly sure what I might do in the future, but being recognised for my teaching may help me at some point.
It is ok to get attention and recognition. But it should not be our main motivation. And besides, getting prizes and awards does not really motivate us to try harder, but enjoying what we do and seeing the direct fruits of our labour does.