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The hype machine never ends.

Whether it’s Saquon Barkley or Shohei Ohtani, we have a propensity to anoint current phenoms as once-in-a-lifetime talents before they’ve even completed a season in their respective professional sport.

If you want to be called great, you have to perform at very high levels over long periods of time.

I’ve owned my grindership. I’m not particularly super talented at anything. Like a lot of people I do a lot of things pretty well. To be clear, I said, “pretty well,” and not great.

We do have a need to pass the torch from current greats, as it were, to younger-generation talents. What irks me about it though, is our wanting to do it before any of the rookies have really come into their own in the professional game or sense.

Sometimes injuries cut short the careers of talents like Bo Jackson.

He was undeniably out of this world in two sports—baseball and football, in a relatively small sample size before hip injuries cut short his professional sporting life.

But, while injuries can keep athletes from realizing their full potential, they can still be considered an all-time great if they’ve had at least some career to speak of in the pros.

Gale Sayers is a Pro Football Hall of Famer. His career spanned but from 1965 to 1971. His accomplishments during this period, however, more than justified his selection into the Hall.

There is no Worker Bee Hall of Fame.

Workers–whether they’re office, construction, trades, government or working from home–perform tirelessly day in and day out. They’re professionals.

Sadly, there is no hall of fame awaiting them at the end of their working lives.

No enshrinement into the Worker Bee Hall of Fame.

This is mostly because the Worker Bee Hall of Fame doesn’t actually exist.

Imagine being anointed one of the greatest ever on your first day on the job as a data entry clerk.

That’d be ridiculous.

And unlike professional sports, it just doesn’t happen in the working world.

This is why no matter how hyped someone is coming into a position—sporting or otherwise, they still must prove themselves over time to be worthy of the accolades.

Late bloomers often bloom lately on their own.

What I mean by this is that by the time someone like you or I becomes great, there isn’t anyone around that notices that can help get you selected for the Worker Bee Hall of Fame.

They can’t even get you a raise most times, so no way can you expect heady words such as, “He could type for 14 hours at a clip without taking so much as a pee break.”

While impressive, it won’t get you a sniff at a promotion.

So, where does one find their own purpose if they have no shot at the mythical Worker Bee Hall of Fame?

I suppose we just have to have faith, or at the least, be happy in the knowledge that we have done good, and at times exceptional work, over long periods of time. That has to count for something. We helped make production numbers and increased companies’ bottom lines by working through exhaustion and beyond.

The way I’ve always dealt with it is to try and help the rest of my team perform better.

That, along with doing great work over the long haul, is the mark of multi-generational greatness.

I’m personally still swinging for the fences but I just don’t care as much anymore. We’re hidden, disconnected by virtue of our unrecognized, longstanding performance and the fact we’re not the latest thing to come along that’s proven absolutely zilch. I wish it weren’t true, but that’s the world we live in. —Anonymous