Something happens when you become an elder rock & roller and you're still functioning. People start to give you awards and recognize achievements. It's the life achievement period of your career.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
You spend most of your life working and trying to hone your craft, working on your chops, working on your writing, and you don't really think about accolades. Then you get a bit older and they start coming your way. It's a nice pat on the back.
Awards can give you a tremendous amount of encouragement to keep getting better, no matter how young or old you are.
Do awards change careers? Well, I haven't heard of many stories where that's the case. It's a fun excuse to meet colleagues and celebrate people who've done well that year in certain people's eyes, and it's nothing more than that.
Naturally it is nice to be widely known for worthwhile achievements, but it forces you to do many things which you don't like to do and these things take up time you want for other things.
Fame is like the dessert that comes with your achievements - it's not an achievement in itself, but sometimes it can overpower the work.
You get to a certain age and you just want to prove that you can still rock - that you've still got it.
It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.
Accolades and lists may tell us about accomplishments, but life is meant to be experienced, not just accomplished. It's like the difference between reading books for the sake of reading and reading books just to get a good grade.
You learn from the things that happen in your career. You get up and down. You never give up. All the things that happened in my career, thank God it happened early rather than late in my career.
The accolades usually come when you're dead or too old to get a job.