“All you want is to be the center of attention”
Correct. So do you. The interesting question is what for.
Society hands everybody a deck of pre-loaded scoldings, and this one gets deployed like a diagnosis. Well. Yes. Correct. I do want attention. So do you: a newborn's entire business model is attention, and your brain still runs social rejection through some of the same circuitry as physical pain. I had the machine fact-check that sentence. It holds.
You know the bell-curve meme. Three positions on one hill.
The kid on the left slope wants the spotlight, openly, embarrassingly, reaching for it. Everyone agrees to find this cringe, mostly because he is being honest in public.
The enlightened middle sits on the peak and wants no attention at all. This is a lie with better posture. I lived there for years. It is the most crowded spot on the hill, because it lets you keep wanting the thing while getting social credit for not wanting it.
The far side of the curve wants attention again, with one enormous caveat: what for. Once your validation is handled in-house, attention stops being food and becomes reach. The test is simple. If it all went away tomorrow, you'd be okay. You'd rebuild, because the engine was never the applause.
Marketing's first question is how do you get noticed, and I have been living inside that question since childhood. That is the obsession a client actually hires. Not a guy who wants to be looked at. A guy who studied, from every seat on that hill, exactly what makes people look.