Participation Trophies

Hey honeys and hustlers,

When I say “participation trophy,” I do not mean a cheap plastic stand-in for real skill. I mean a deliberate, private way of telling yourself, "I showed up." I mean a ritual that shows effort is worthy of celebration, even when the outcome is still pending or not the one you hoped for. A participation trophy is not the prize at the end. It is the fuel you pack for the middle. Most of us learned to treat rewards like punctuation. You only get the gold star after the sentence is complete. You only celebrate once the deal closes, the product or business launch is deemed successful, the numbers prove it, and everyone on the internet agrees it “counts.” And then we act surprised when motivation evaporates during the longest part of any meaningful goal: the part where you are practicing, experimenting, failing, and trying again.

I used to have a system that made this easy. Every time I hit a milestone in my business, I would buy a 500ml bottle of single-barrel sour beer. It was specific. It was special. It created a tiny ceremony around progress. It also had an edge of scarcity and story. Not just “a drink,” but that bottle. And when I stopped drinking, I lost more than alcohol. I lost a reliable way to signal to my nervous system that the work was worth continuing. So I had to ask a question I think many people avoid because it sounds too soft: what do you do when the old reward stops working, but the need for encouragement does not?

A win-only reward system sounds disciplined, but it quietly teaches you something brutal: that your effort has no value unless it produces a result on a specific timeline. That’s fine if you only have goals that behave like vending machines. Insert effort, immediately receive outcome.

But most creative work, business building, healing, skill development, and life-changing goals do not work like that. They are closer to gardening. You do a lot of the same actions for a long time before you see anything measurable. You water. You wait. You fight off pests you did not invite. You learn what the soil needs. You pluck weeds. You watch 237 YouTube videos on gardening while you wait some more.

If you wait to reward yourself until the harvest, you are essentially asking yourself to live without encouragement for an entire season. And when you do that long enough, you do not become tougher. You become tired. When people quit “too early,” it is not always because they lack ambition. It is often because they have no feedback loop that honors the process. Their brain keeps asking, “Why are we doing this?” and hears silence.

We talk about resilience as if it were a personality trait. Something you either have or you do not. But resilience is also a logistics problem. It is a systems problem. It is a how do I keep going on the days when nothing is working problem. Here is a truth that has become clearer to me the longer I build things: attempts are not the warm-up to the work. Attempts are the work.

If your reward system only recognizes what you cannot control, you will feel powerless even while you are doing the most courageous part. Attempting.

I think the reason “participation trophies” became an insult is because we associate them with external validation. Someone giving you something you did not earn. But self-awarded participation trophies are different. They are not a lie. They are a record. They say:

Over time, that evidence becomes self-trust. And self-trust is one of the most valuable assets you can build. You can lose a client. You can miss a goal. You can have a bad quarter. But if you still trust yourself to respond with care and persistence, you are not starting over from zero.

Buying that bottle of beer worked for a while because it was a clear transaction: milestone equals treat. Without alcohol, I had to find rewards that were still sensory and still meaningful. Something my body could feel. Something that made my day brighter. And I realized I also needed a new definition of milestone. Sometimes the milestone is not revenue. This is for you and for me. Sometimes the milestone is:

I wanted (and needed) trophies for the attempts, not just the outcomes. It’s not about the price tag of the proverbial participation trophy. It’s about what treating yourself for the attempts signals: I am paying attention to my own effort, because my effort is worth it.

If you are not sure what counts as a trophy, start by listing things that reliably change your mood (hopefully without creating a hangover, but I’m not here to judge). Physical, sensory, and environmental wins are especially effective:

Giving yourself participation trophies is not about pretending everything is amazing. It is about refusing to treat your humanity like a flaw. There will always be a part of you that wants certainty before it commits. But certainty is not available upfront. Most of the time, you commit first, then the proof arrives later. A participation trophy is a way of bridging that gap. It keeps you in motion while the results catch up. You are building a relationship with your future self where persistence is met with care, not neglect. Because the truth is, you do not need a crowd to clap for you to deserve encouragement. And if you are going to do hard things for a long time, you will need a way to celebrate the attempts.

That is life. That is the point. That is how you keep going.

So keep going. I’m rooting for you.