Most fields reward the visible rather than the excellent

Recognition tracks attention, availability and timing far more closely than quality.

The unpleasant fact about most fields is that the mechanisms distributing money and attention are not measuring the thing practitioners spend their lives on. They measure what is legible from outside: visibility, output, being present when an opportunity appears, being easy to work with, being findable. Those are real qualities and they can be worked on, but they are not the same as being good at the work, and they can be acquired without it. Anyone who has spent time in a craft can name people at both ends of that mismatch.

This has practical consequences for how a person plans a life around a skill. Expecting quality to be noticed on its own tends to end in a quiet bitterness that damages both the person and the work. Treating visibility as a separate discipline, to be handled deliberately and in proportion, is more workable. So is accepting that a large share of the best work in most fields is done by people nobody outside a small circle can name, and that this has always been true.

The corollary is that recognition is a poor instrument for steering practice. If it is the measure, the sensible strategy is to do whatever is currently rewarded, which is rarely the slow, invisible improvement that constitutes the middle. People who sustain that improvement over long periods almost always have a standard that is internal or that comes from a small number of peers whose judgement they trust. Otherwise the feedback loop points somewhere else, and they follow it.