Spotlight Award Quotes

Anyone who is in Christ is strategically positioned to win the most coveted award in this business called life. He doesn't want you playing itty-bitty roles. He wants bright lights in your dressing room, and the spotlight trained on you as you take the center stage.

He’s not going to applaud us for becoming famous during our lifetimes; He’s going to ask us how we used our spotlight to bring Him glory. He’s not going to ask us how many trophies and awards we received; He’s going to ask us how we used our gifts to build the body of Christ.

Don't be afraid to step into the spotlight! Your time to shine will be determined by you!

Yet being in the spotlight is also dangerous because a child's success may be construed by a narcissistic mother as competition. In self-defense, a son or daughter may insist that any achievement is a fluke, and any award is undeserved or is really a tribute to their mother. They suppress their own healthy narcissism to please a mother . . they believe any success is a mistake and at any moment they will be "found out" and identified as a fake or a fraud. The mind-set is, "I am succeeding because I can fake excellence, but inside I am not really worthy or not really able." Such self-effacement is common in people who are pressured to excel and also primed to assure others . . . that they are subservient and inferior.

The awareness that we are focusing on a particular stimulus along with other people leads our brains to endow that stimulus with special significance, tagging it as especially important. We then allocate more mental bandwidth to that material, processing it more deeply; in scientists’ terms, we award it “cognitive prioritization.” In a world of too much information, we use shared attention to help us figure out what to focus on, then direct our mental resources toward the object that the spotlight of shared attention has illuminated. As a result of these (mostly automatic) processes, we learn things better when we attend to them with other people. We remember things better when we attend to them with other people. And we’re more likely to act upon information that has been attended to along with other people.

To understand what’s plausible and possible beyond the visible horizon—to broaden your definition of x—you must seek out and get to know the “unusual suspects,” the people who aren’t yet winning awards for their work or being featured in “40-Under-40” business lists. More often, they’re stirring up controversy for their radical new ideas. Or they’re silently working away, far away from the public spotlight. They are, however, vitally important, and their ideas are all-too-often ignored or discounted.

2020 Kops-Fetherling Book Award Winner spotlight: Gold Award: Fiction: Historical goes to Gimpy by John Wilde