Encouragement

Sasha Chapin has a post about encouraging others linked by Rob Henderson.  It in turn links to other articles that are valuable.  This is of course the great difficulty of reading blogs and substacks,* that the people whose writing you like will recommend and link to others who you find you also like, and the morning is shot. Chapin doesn't give the same advice I would, but I think it valuable (and maybe better).

This doesn’t have to take the form of coaching or intense feedback sessions, although if you have a relationship with someone such that you can give them detailed feedback, that can be a real gift. Often, the best way to do it is to issue a very specific compliment. People love specific compliments. Something like, say, “I really love how naturalistic and easygoing your writing is. You’re really great at capturing mundane emotions—you make common human experiences come alive in a way that’s unusual.” One thing worth remembering, here, is that people never receive feedback on their work. Even people with a seemingly large number of friends, colleagues, Twitter followers, etcetera, might be receiving a paucity of feedback, and might be totally in the dark about what they’re doing unusually well.

I commented there that Lord of the Rings would not have been completed - would not have been completed, ever - had CS Lewis not harassed Tolkien about it, particularly in the last two years before it went out to the publisher. Tollers spoke movingly about his friend's contribution in this in later years. 

I did a lot of encouraging at work, in ways as various as I could come up with. I heartily dislike the generic "You guys are doing great work" sort of compliment from people who have only the vaguest idea what is up.  It would be irritating to get some little appreciation package from the head of the social work department with a couple of Hershey's kisses**, some gold stars, and an identical peppy but bland note to all of us. This is because I knew that some of my coworkers absolutely sucked at this job but no one would man up to fire them, and they got one too. But something specific? Someone noticing what was the real deal?  Pure gold. I could go a long time even on very little of that fuel.

Example: a supervisor in the late 80s found me quite irritating, and I knew both her (unattractive and illegal) personal reasons for this and her work-related (mostly unjustified but understandable) reasons for this. I would say the quiet part out loud, and there came a time when our branch of the department was going to get stuck with something just because no one else wanted it. I kept asking her at meetings to push this back upwards and even offered to help, and in the meantime, gave a couple of very solid reasons why this was a bad idea for us. Eventually, it came to us anyway, and she had to sign off on it.  A year later she came to me and said "David, you are the only person in the department who isn't complaining about this.  You are just doing it and moving on. After how strongly you opposed this, with the others not making much noise about it, I expected the opposite." I explained what my theory of authority - a good evangelical biblical approach from the 80s - was to be bold in advice and criticism, but then defer to authority once the decision had been made. "I'd heard you say something like that a few times, but I didn't think you really meant it. Everyone else does the opposite. And I really understand what you are doing at meetings now much better." There wasn't a lot of direct compliment in all that, but the implied compliment and the understanding of what I was doing were clear.

I have always done this in my personal life as well, looking for opportunities to encourage. I am well up on the Gaussian distribution on this trait.

And yet I actually don't do it half as well or a tenth as often as I should.  Which is rather an indictment of how poorly we all do. I'm the smartest kid in the dumb row.  Not good enough.

*Brad DeLong ""A substack is just a blog with a bigger tip jar."

**I ate 'em anyway, of course.