- Alex Hormozi

If there were no awards ceremonies, no recognition, no validation from anyone, would you still do this work? Would it still matter to you?

As you read this, I'll be on my flight back to London after a fantastic week in Dubai, and this has been something I’ve been reflecting on.

One of the highlights of the week was attending the Middle East PR Awards at The Atlantis, The Palm, as the guest of my close friend Jamal Al Mawed, founder of Gambit Communications.

Jamal and I worked together over a decade ago, so I’ve known for a long time that he’s a world-class talent. The team he’s built is reflective of that - full of A-players who have known nothing but success. A team that has won global recognition for its work with leading brands like Samsung, Porsche and Amazon.

His team collected 18 trophies on the night (3 golds, 6 silvers, 9 bronzes). Watching them parade across the stage, I felt genuinely proud. Jamal's built something remarkable and his team undoubtedly deserve recognition.

But by their own stratospheric standards, this didn’t feel as dominant as the previous year, when they’d secured 22 trophies and recognition as Medium Agency of the Year and Homegrown Agency of the Year, as well as Jamal personally receiving the Chairman’s Award.

Here's the trap: your brain adapts. What felt extraordinary last year becomes the new baseline (the technical term is hedonic adaptation). Suddenly 18 trophies, a remarkable achievement by any objective measure, can feel like falling short.

This isn't about awards being meaningless. It's about something more fundamental: what happens when you depend too much on external validation.

The author Oliver Burkeman asks a question that cuts through all this noise: "What would genuinely interest me to write about?"

Not what people would find most appealing. Not what might generate the best response. Not what others think he should focus on. What actually interests him.

There's a profound asymmetry here. Pursuing what others find impressive rarely leaves you feeling alive; pursuing what genuinely interests you, paradoxically, is what others often find compelling.

When your motivation is intrinsic, your brain treats the work more like a meaningful challenge than a performance for approval, and that shift changes both how long you can sustain effort and how much you grow from it.​

Think of intrinsic motivation like surfing a long, clean swell. You still get moments of exhilaration, but most of the pleasure comes from staying with the wave, constantly adjusting, reading the water, and feeling absorbed in the ride. In that flow state, key reward circuits in the striatum part of the brain are tuned so that the act of riding the wave is rewarding in its own right, not just making it back to shore with applause.​

By contrast, when you’re driven mainly by external rewards, it’s more like briefly catching a wave to get the right shot for the Gram. You still get a buzz when you catch some attention, but the experience is choppy and short-lived, and motivation drops quickly once the moment passes.

The science suggests both kinds of motivation tap the same dopamine circuitry, but intrinsic motivation is linked to a healthier pattern of dopamine signalling over the course of the work, not just brief spikes at the moment of recognition.

Regular readers will know I’m a huge admirer of the work of former child chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin, who is now one of the world’s leading performance consultants. I love the way he frames how to handle external success when it does arrive: "Smell all the roses. Then move on.”

This isn't about avoiding celebration. It's about keeping celebration transient so it doesn't calcify into ego or complacency. When you've worked hard and succeeded, absolutely savour the moment of victory. The crucial point is to recognise that the beauty of those ‘roses’ lies in their transience: the feeling of success is already drifting away as you enjoy it.

From there, the move is:

This framing protects you against both extremes - never celebrating wins or small victories because you’re lost in the grind is a huge mistake and that way lies burnout. But obsessing over the win can lead to issues around ego, stagnation and losing that critical explorer mindset.

For Waitzkin, wins and losses are both raw material for refinement rather than endpoints.

So for sure, appreciate the recognition when it comes. Take the time to feel that beautiful shared connection with your team, as you’ve earned it. But then return to the work itself, because that's where genuine fulfilment lives.

This isn't about rejecting external validation or pretending awards don't matter. They do matter, but only as a byproduct. As confirmation that your work resonated. As a moment to celebrate with the people who contributed.

But they can't be the objective. Because if you're working for the award, you've already lost something essential.

So here's the most important question to ask yourself: “What would I do if no one was watching?”

Neuroscience confirms what practitioners have known intuitively: people motivated by genuine interest are more persistent, more creative, and ultimately more successful. Not because they're pursuing success, but because they're pursuing something that sustains them independent of external outcomes.

Artist Dipa Halder speaks beautifully about the exhaustion “that comes from constantly shape-shifting to fit what you think people want. I call it type 2 burnout. You’re not overworked, you’re just working against your own grain.”

So how do you build intrinsic motivation and drown out the external noise?

Start by getting clear on your own standards. Not what the hustlers on social media say. Not what wins awards. Those are false gods. What are your standards for what constitutes great work?

What does it look like when you're genuinely proud of what you've created? What are the non-negotiables? What would you refuse to compromise even if no one else would notice?

Then hold yourself accountable to those standards, regardless of external response.

Those of us committed to doing great work know what it looks like, know what it takes, and know in our heart of hearts whether we’ve done everything we can to achieve it. 

One of the many reasons I love what I do is that every day feels like an opportunity to learn and grow. 

I’m currently working with an amazing man called Kevin O’Connor. Kevin is an ex-Special Forces Team Leader who by any measure has achieved things that 99.9% of people never will.

But one of the many reasons I respect him so much is he holds himself to his own standards. During one of our sessions he opened up about how he failed in his first attempt at Special Forces Selection. He went into the tests carrying a back injury, so had the perfect excuse for that failure, but he didn’t allow that false narrative to take root.

Kevin knew in his heart of hearts that the back injury wasn’t the real reason, it was that he hadn’t prepared properly and wasn’t in the right mindset - as someone who had become a ‘rising star’, he’d let ego get in the way, he’d listened to those people telling him he’d fly through selection and he’d got complacent. 

We all tell ourselves stories and blaming it on his back would have been the easiest thing to do in the world. However, instead Kevin chose to embrace that failure as a brutal lesson, one that he still refers to now as “humbling and humiliating”. 

Whenever he is tempted to take a shortcut in life or drop his own standards for a quick win, Kevin chooses instead to remind himself of that lesson and he chooses the hard path. The right path. 

If you get external praise, wonderful. If your work wins recognition, appreciate it. But neither outcome truly determines whether you did great work. That's determined by your standards and your commitment to meeting them.

This shift in orientation is liberating. You stop second-guessing every decision based on how others might respond. You reclaim that energy for the actual work - for bringing full attention and capability to creating something great.

The fulfilment you feel when you know you've done your best? That's critical data that isn’t dependent on anyone else's opinion. That's intrinsic. That's sustainable.

That's what will carry you through inevitable moments when external validation doesn't come, when the awards go to someone else, when the recognition you hoped for doesn't materialise.

Because you'll know, truly know, that the quality of your work isn't determined by those outcomes.

As James Clear says: “Every action you take is a vote for the person you wish to become.”

So… stop. Deeply inhale the beautiful smell of those roses. Keep moving. 

1. The importance of social connection when it comes to health and longevity is critically overlooked, so I’d urge you to listen to this podcast on how to live a good life, based on the longest ever study of happiness. I love the concept of ‘social fitness’ and I’ll be diving deeper into this soon!

2. Confession: I’d never come across the Harada Method before. It’s a way of converting a massive dream into a system. 64 concrete micro-actions. Mapped, visualized, and then executed. As author and investor Sahil Bloom states: “The real magic is that once you see it on paper, the path becomes clear. The actions become measurable. The process becomes methodical.” I’m going to try it this week. I think you should as well.

3. And finally, tying in perfectly with this week’s theme, a powerful 48 seconds from the MIT Monk on why leaders should collect trust, not credit.