David used to be what he calls “an invisible,” when he worked for a number

of years as a magazine fact-checker. “If you read a great article, you

never think to yourself, ‘Wow that was fact-checked beautifully,’” David

said. “I had this job where the better I did my job, the more I

disappeared. It was only if I made a mistake that people noticed me at all.

It was such an unusual experience.”

He sought to investigate what other professions and professionals share the

same inverse relationship between work and recognition, and found something

interesting: there were a lot of them, across every field and industry.

These were people who were highly skilled, had developed strong reputations

in their field, but who were not motivated by public recognition, nor did

the public ever really consider their work at all. Consider the structural

engineer to the architect, the sound engineer to lead singer of a band, the

production team on a movie set, hair and makeup people for TV shows.