The Quest For Fame

Written By: Timothy Fish Published: 10/2/2007

Tricia Goyer says that she is famous now. Not to take anything away from her, but her comments made me start thinking about the concept of fame and our perception of fame. Fame is a simple concept. If many people know you then you are famous, but if you are like me and people still ask who you are after you have been introduced to them ten times then you are most definitely not famous.

Things get interesting when we start thinking about our perception of fame. Take the guy in the video on this page. Is he famous? (The man, not the dog.) I suppose the answer is yes, since he has made it on national television on several occasions. That is more than I can say for myself. He is a performer in Branson, so there are many people who have seen him perform. What does that have to do with our perception of fame? Perhaps nothing for many people, but this guy is also married to my first cousin. That sort of puts things in perspective. I could see this guy at a family gathering and think nothing of it while someone else might see him somewhere and tell people, “I saw that guy with the talking dog.”

It is a different type of fame, but I have gone to some large meetings. A preacher gets up to pray and afterward he has fifty people come tell him what a great job he did. Then after the meeting is over, he will go back to his small church of forty people and they will not be any more impressed with him than they were the Sunday before. There is a perception of fame that is associated with people getting up in front of large groups of people, but that fame does not always extend past that group of people.

People will sometimes cozy up to the people they feel are some degree of fame, whether it is on a large scale or it is on a small scale. What they fail to see is that the people they see as famous are quite ordinary, just like Tricia Goyer whose son told her that her name was listed on the top of a magazine.

The quest for fame can be a terrible thing. No amount of fame will make a person see himself as truly famous. He will either be humble and fail to see why people dolt over him, or he will be obsessed with becoming even more famous. Those who seek fame will never gain what they seek, even if everyone in the whole world knows their name. The quest for fame will never end, but the humble will be happy, even in obscurity.