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A straightforward principle here:
Simply put, don’t do good things in order to garner praise from others. Do them because they’re good things.
A corollary principle, if you really must think about extrinsic pay-offs:
Our Father in Heaven is watching. You won’t miss out on a reward.
But it’s a reward for which you must have trust, or faith, because it won’t necessarily come immediately. There won’t be an instant pay-off, in the form of admiration from the opposite sex, wealth, fame, pats on the back, and/or gratifying public praise. For those who do their good deeds in order to receive such immediate gratification, they’ll be done when they get it. The score will be settled. Nothing more will be owed to them. They’ll have their reward.
I suppose, as a parallel, that you could think of acting in a move and demanding your pay-off now. So you take your $1000 check instead of the 1% of gross ticket receipts that was first offered you for the part that you played in that odd soon-to-be released film called Star Wars.
Among the marks of maturity, I suppose, is the capacity to delay gratification in order to do better in the long term. A young child, if he doesn’t get his candy right now, thinks it’s the end of the world. Even a slightly older child, offered an ice cream now or, alternatively, unlimited ice cream in perpetuity if she’ll just wait for ten minutes, will very likely choose the immediate single scoop. Mature people, by contrast, know that a lengthy period of vocational training, or of law or medical school, or of investing rather than consuming, will pay off handsomely in the long term.
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