When You Stop Needing Applause

Act from love rather than self-interest. Serve without needing to be seen.

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Take this reflection into the silence, and I'll see you next time.

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Transcript

The memo arrived at the Oval Office on a warm morning in June 1945. President Truman read it, then set it down with amazement.

"Miss Virginia Hall feels very strongly that she should not receive any publicity or any announcement as to her award. She states she is still operational and most anxious to get busy. Any publicity would preclude her going on any operation."

The woman declining his personal invitation had just become the only civilian woman of the war to receive the Distinguished Service Cross. She had organized resistance networks across Nazi-occupied France. Coordinated sabotage operations that crippled German supply lines. Saved countless lives while the Gestapo hunted her with wanted posters calling her "the most dangerous of all Allied spies."

Now she was rejecting a White House ceremony.

Later, when pressed by a resistance colleague about her refusal of recognition, her response was: "I don't want people to talk about what I did. Everything I did was for love of France, my second country."

This is the voice of what Yogi Ramacharaka called the Master Workman. Someone who acts without attachment to results, who works for the sake of the work itself.

"The Yogi does not work for reward," Yogi Ramacharaka wrote. "She works because it is her nature—because it is her duty. She does not pick and choose—she does what comes to her hand to do, without being disturbed as to results, or as to what people may say."

Diane, as the French resistance called her, embodied this principle perfectly. Under constant surveillance by one of history's most brutal regimes, she remained calm, effective, detached from both fear of capture and desire for glory. She had transcended the ego's desperate need for recognition. She was ambivalent about honors.

She sought only to continue her mission. She preferred the work to the worship. She acted from love rather than self-interest. She served without needing to be seen. She found fulfillment in the doing, not the receiving.

Virginia Hall had discovered that the moment you stop needing applause is the moment you become truly applause-worthy.