by Serguey Shinder
For most of my working life I braced against criticism and relaxed into praise, which felt like the natural and obvious thing to do. Criticism was the threat. Praise was the reward. I scrutinized every hard word for whether it was fair and swallowed every kind one whole, and it did not occur to me for years that I had the danger exactly backwards.
The realization crept up slowly. I noticed that some of the praise I had received had steered me worse than any criticism ever had. People had admired things about my work that were, honestly, my weaknesses dressed up as style. They liked that I was fast, and their liking it made me faster and more careless. They liked that I was clever, and their liking it made me reach for cleverness when plainness would have served everyone better. The praise had been a hand on the small of my back, pushing me further in directions I should have questioned.
Criticism, for all that it stung, at least made me stop and look. Praise did the opposite. It confirmed. It told me to do more of whatever I had just done, and I rarely paused to ask whether the thing being praised was actually the thing worth doing. A compliment is an instruction to repeat, and I had been following those instructions without ever reading them, simply because they felt good to receive.
What made this hard to see was that the praise was sincere. Nobody was flattering me falsely. They genuinely liked what they liked. But sincerity is not the same as wisdom, and the things people enjoy about your work are not always the things that are good in it. Sometimes they enjoy exactly the habit that is quietly limiting you, because that habit is visible and impressive and easy to admire, while your real strengths are plain and go unremarked.
So I have tried to invert my old reflexes. When I am praised now, I ask what, specifically, is being rewarded, and whether I actually want to become more of that. Sometimes the answer is yes and I take it gladly. But often the praise is aimed at the flashy part rather than the true part, and to follow it would be to grow in the wrong direction with a smile on my face.
I still find criticism harder to hear. That has not changed and probably will not. But I have stopped treating praise as the safe thing, the part of feedback I can accept without thinking. Praise shapes you more quietly and more powerfully than criticism, precisely because you do not defend against it. The words that felt best to hear were sometimes the ones that led me furthest from where I should have gone.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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