🏆 Time to Put the Trophies Away
“You must love the thing you want to change.”
—Carl Jung1
The day the trophies arrived in the mail was more exciting than the day I won.
They were packed in two rectangular boxes with a black sateen lining and a butter-yellow cloth tucked nearby to keep them glistening—one silver and one gold, for winning two w3 podcasting awards in 2022.
It was a bit of a sucker move to buy them at all, because these awards companies run a racket that goes something like this:
Charge entrants hundreds of dollars to apply for each category they enter; for example, the Webby’s are $500 per submission.
In some cases, nominees are then asked to rally their communities for votes, and those voters must register for a free account, thereby building the awards company’s email lists for them.
Once they have collected enough
email addresssesvotes, the companies hand out as many participation trophies as possible (gold, silver, bronze, nominated, honored, etc.) to as many entrants as possible, so thatWinners can then purchase hundreds of dollars of merch from the awards shop in the form of printed certificates, framed certificates, and trophies.
Despite knowing this was all a racket, social proof (in biz-speak) didn’t seem like the worst idea if I was going all-in on podcasting. Take me seriously! the awards would shout from my bio.*
*Sure, sure: go ahead and insert joke about being an elder Millennial who got too many participation trophies growing up.2
In 2022, I spent nearly $3,000 submitting the Free Time podcast for at least two categories each across various awards like Skylark, Signal, w3, iHeart, and Webby.
When I found out I won the w3 awards (wait—did everyone win?! don’t tell me 🙉) I forked over a whopping $600 to purchase two engraved trophies.
It meant something to hold them in my hands, to have a tangible reminder of what I was trying to build. I placed them carefully beneath the TV in our living room, grateful for Michael’s grace in letting this new clutter sit directly in view every day.
I wanted to see them when I was unwinding after work as a reminder of what I was doing, some small visual cue that it was working, that I was an Award-Winning Podcaster! now. They offered encouragement to stay the course, to keep publishing.
It reminded me of the time I photoshopped a fake SELF magazine cover featuring—me!—running on the beach. I laminated it and taped it to my bathroom mirror in 2008, the year I committed to running my first and only marathon.3 Cheesy as it was, that visual did work; I crossed the finish line on something that previously seemed impossible, even if it was slower than most could walk.
Do what you love and the money will follow!4 First the awards, then the money? If I looked at my podcasting dream in physical form every day, might that help me succeed at it financially?
Maybe I should have placed them on piles of money instead, because I never did surpass the award-winning part in order to sustain the shows, at least not without my speaking career to subsidize production costs as it once did.
