Do You Want to Be Great? Or Popular?
It’s usually a choice, so choose wisely
Bill Belichick didn’t make the Hall of Fame on the first ballot.
Six Super Bowl rings as a head coach. Eight total. The greatest dynasty in modern football history. And a group of voters decided he should wait another year before being enshrined amongst the game's elites. He isn't the first person to suffer this fate due to some combination of controversy (cheating scandal), public persona (shall we say, prickly), and challenging traditional power structures (i.e. the media).
You know who else didn’t make it on the first ballot? Babe Ruth.
Babe. Freaking. Ruth.
The guy who fundamentally changed baseball. Who hit more home runs than entire teams. Who is literally the measuring stick we use when we say someone is “the Babe Ruth of” whatever field they’re in.
And yet, some voters looked at his resume and thought, “Nah, not yet.”
The Problem With Gatekeepers
How can this be? It's simple: the people voting aren’t evaluating excellence. They're voting with their emotion and ego. They’re settling scores. They’re letting personal slights, grudges, biases, and feelings dictate their judgment of objective achievement.
Did Belichick rub people the wrong way? Sure. He was cold with the media. Dismissive. Didn’t play the game of making reporters feel important.
Was Ruth abrasive? Absolutely. He was loud, brash, lived hard, and didn’t care much about decorum.
But none of that has anything to do with what they accomplished.
Excellence and popularity are not the same thing. They’re not even correlated. And the moment you start confusing the two, you lose your ability to recognize what actually matters.
Ego Dressed Up As Standards
The voters will tell you they have standards. That they’re maintaining "the integrity of the Hall". That there are “other factors” to consider beyond the numbers.
BS.
What they have is ego. They want to matter. They want to feel like their vote means something beyond checking a box next to an obvious choice. They feel the need to put their own cute little stamp on history. So they withhold. They make people wait. They create drama where there shouldn’t be any.
It’s not about the candidate. Or the sport. Or "integrity". It’s about the voter wanting to feel powerful.
And this isn’t just a sports thing. It’s everywhere. Awards committees. Hiring panels. Promotion boards. Anywhere gatekeepers get to decide who gets in and who doesn’t, you’ll find people who let their feelings about a person (and themself) override the evidence of their work.
The Only Vote That Matters
Excellence doesn’t need validation from people who weren’t in the arena. The Theodore Roosevelt quote on the subject hangs on my wall:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood...”
Teddy--brash, abrasive--and excellent in his own right, understood the difference between the quarterback who sweats on Sunday and the one who sits in the armchair on Monday.
Belichick’s rings don’t get smaller because some writers took an extra year to vote for him. Ruth’s home runs don’t disappear because voters wanted to make a point.
The work speaks. The results speak. Everything else is noise.
If you’re doing excellent work and people don’t like you for it—if they make you wait, if they withhold recognition, if they find reasons to diminish what you’ve done—that’s data. But it’s not data about your work. It’s data about them.
Their egos. Their insecurities. Their need to feel relevant in the face of someone who actually did something remarkable.
What This Means For You
Stop optimizing for the voters.
I’m not saying be a jerk. I’m not saying burn bridges or alienate everyone around you. For goodness sake, be a good person. But I am saying this: if you have to choose between doing excellent work and being liked by the people keeping score, choose the work.
Because the gatekeepers will always find a reason to make you wait. They’ll always find something to nitpick. They’ll always find a way to inject their feelings into what should be an objective evaluation.
And if you spend your time trying to manage their emotions instead of doing the work, you’ll end up with neither excellence nor recognition.
Do the work. Let it speak. And understand that people who need to diminish excellence to feel important were never qualified to judge it in the first place.
Excellence doesn't make you likeable. Or popular. Or a leader. Or even a good person. But excellence, in most arenas, is objective. You either do, or you don't. You are, or you aren't. Injecting human bias into that "evaluation" only cheapens it for the institution itself.