@Kang_Kong3 Oh indeed:
There is a lesson here for anyone who runs an organisation, but perhaps not a comfortable one. Employee-of-the-month schemes, tiered loyalty cards, sales leaderboards, the entire apparatus of gamified workplace motivation – they all run on the same psychological fuel that kept Luftwaffe aces climbing into their cockpits. Status rewards are potent, but they depreciate. Hand them out too freely and they become wallpaper. Be stingy, and nobody thinks they are in the running. The trick is to keep medals rare but within reach for top performers, and to keep inventing new distinctions. In this way, the best performers never quite reach the summit. Whether you should want to is another question altogether. The German air force extracted thousands of extra kills from a few pounds of iron and ribbon. It also sent young men to their deaths, chasing glory, driven to ruin by the glittering success of men who once shared their mess table. Ecclesiastes, one suspects, would not have been surprised.