In 1996, I graduated college and started at a small web development shop (i.con interactive). I was employee #3. Within a few months, I was leading a small team, and within a year, I had a robust team up to 20+ live projects/clients, and was inventing new web design ideas and work processes every day. There were weeks, sometimes months where I was sleeping 4 hours a night in order to get meet deadlines. And I loved it. I left i.con and went to NVision Design. I got more sleep there, but we were blazing new trails and learning new skills literally every day. After 4 years of the start up game, I went to LEGO and established a net new relationship between the company and the adult LEGO fans. My work landed on the cover of Wired Magazine. After LEGO, I started and sold a small 35 person agency.

What’s the point of the resume, you ask?

As I’ve gotten older, and as I assess what makes me happy now as an older man, I find myself wondering how to balance my desire for calm joy and the insatiable need to conquer. I don’t feel the same draw to be on the bleeding edge of technology or to build companies from scratch. But I absolutely do feel the need to be recognized for my achievements by peers that I respect. A generation ago, certainly two, men were measured by their achievements. The eons old warrior spirit lived in men and was the way that men were measured. My generation (Gen X) feels like the first one to have this warrior mentality seen as dangerous, pointless, or otherwise lacking worth. Growing up, GenX men were being retrained (and in many, many ways rightly so) to be less aggressive, more emotionally available, more focused on the journey rather than the outcome.

But male DNA still runs heavy with a desire to conquer.

I’ve been a creative basically all of my life. I was building with LEGO from early childhood, built scale models in high school, graduated college with a design degree, have had my photography published and purchased, built a house I designed, renovated two other houses, and …of course…continue to build scale models to this day.

In my adult years, my creative brain has struggled with the same question many creatives (and maybe many men generally) seem to face: “Is wanting to be recognized, celebrated for my skills, admired by non-artists, seen by other artists as an inspiration a narcissistic rabbit hole that leads nowhere good?”

I’m nearly 50 and I’m still wondering whether the act of creation should be something that simply resides inside the artist or whether a key component of creation is presenting it to an audience, showing off the accomplishments, pushing to greater heights not just for the personal satisfaction but the joy of being recognized. Should validation come solely from inside ourselves, or is it healthy to seek some level of validation from external sources?

If I’m perfectly honest, art is an equal split about the joy of creation + the joy of admiration. I work really hard to be good at my craft, not just to create. Whether interior design, photography, cooking, or scale modeling, I want to impress. I want to impress myself with the sense of achievement, of putting skills to work, to proving to myself that I can do the thing I set out to do. I want to impress those I’m presenting to. I want to impress the “art world” I’m part of with new and interesting ideas.

I create (and I create the best thing possible) because I can’t imagine living my life any other way. Some men have looked to the stars or the west or to the oceans and said “I am going there because that’s what’s next”. I feel the same about my desire to create. I’m going to make art whether anyone sees it or not. I see it. I know how well I did.

But I also want to be seen as a craftsman. I want others to admire and look up to my work, to me. I want to be the guy that other artists ask “how did you do that??” I want to create new techniques and be forever known as the one who created that. It feels good to be good at your craft. So why does it feel so awful to me (and many other creatives I’ve heard from over the years) to admit that I want these things? Why does it feel gross to say “having recognition helps me believe that I’m doing good work, and I love feeling like I’m doing good work”? Hell, why does it feel super gross to simply own the statement “recognition makes me feel good and I want more of it?”

This level of recognition (validation) can certainly spin up and out of control if not kept in check. But when it’s so hard to embrace or trust your own thoughts about your creation, perhaps the audience reaction is a critical part of the creative formula? Without it, how can you understand if the thing you made is actually as bad (or good) as you think it might be? It reminds me of the movie Forrest Gump: he had to see the “Stop Forrest” sign to know now to just keep running until he collapsed.

But even more than that, achievement feels like a ticket into the community. The key that unlocks the door into the secret society that wants you to be part of it. It tells you “you’re not a poser, you really belong”. I love being around other photographers, hearing them talk about shoots they’ve done, lighting challenges they’ve had and how they’ve overcome them, and how they turned a paper sketch into a stunning image. I love being around scale modelers as they describe how they created their latest diorama or painted the stunning paint on a figure.

Not having anything to add, not having something of value to give that isn’t already known to everyone makes me feel like I don’t belong there, that I’m a poser pretending to be a member of the group. I want to be part of the group. And not only that, I want to be a leader in the group. That’s when invitations start coming in… invitations to the events, to speak, to be featured on a podcast, to be write an article for a magazine. And invitations feel so much better than having to chase. Posers chase, experts get invited. The “Stop Forrest” sign is clarity. Invitations are clarity. And how better to be invited than to be genuinely good, nay great at a thing.

I have always struggled with balancing the joy part of creation with the expertise part of creation. Creatives can and often do get themselves in a weird place of never liking anything they create, only able to see the flaws, know what they struggled with, or simply hating that their vision wasn’t pulled from their brain and put directly on the canvas. As much as I like the joyful exercise of creativity, I also get trapped in emotional struggles to be perfect and to make that thing perfect. So much so that I have an impressive collection of shelf queen models because I’m afraid to take a next step that might “ruin” the project that has been so hard/successful up to that point.

But there’s still something to the natural male desire, the built in warrior mindset that conquering is the feature, not a bug. And I don’t know about you, but I’m getting really tired of feeling like my natural male inclinations are a bug in the system.