Hey friends 👋
This weekend I played another round of train roulette, jumping on a train to somewhere out in the country. This week we ended up in Geelong, making it my first visit to the Furphy hometown.
While there we checked out the art gallery, and this week I wanted to share one of the pieces that I was intrigued by:
Literally just a post-it note of a simple shopping list. I like it because it's so simple - there is nothing special about it, yet that is what makes it special (in my eyes at least).
I've been reflecting a lot lately on how the small things really are the big things. Joy and curiosity can be found in basically anything when I'm willing to find it.
For this artist, they picked up a crumpled up shopping list at the supermarket and decided they would recreate that. Something small and benign was in fact the seed of something much greater.
That's enough art snobbery - if you think the post-it note is dumb then fair play 😎
Brock
Poll of the Week
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This Week's Thought
I recently came across two quotes which made me reflect on my relationship to receiving praise at work.
We all love a bit of praise - it's human nature to want to be recognised and appreciated for what we contribute. Sometimes when I finish something and don't get any verbal recognition for it, my reaction is a kind of mild frustration.
The small things, like getting some kudos for a job well done.
They're small moments, but frustrating nonetheless. I've been thinking about how my reactions don't make sense, for two reasons.
Praise doesn't impact the work
The former Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote these words more than 2,000 years ago:
“
Everything in any way beautiful has its beauty of itself, inherent and self-sufficient: praise is no part of it. Does an emerald lose its quality if it is not praised?
— Marcus Aurelius
Essentially what he's saying is that if you've done something great, it's irrelevant whether you get praised or not - it doesn't change the fact that you've done something great.
If I work hard on something and don't get the praise for it, it doesn't take away the fact that I've done a good piece of work that I can feel good about, and the fact that I've gained the useful experience of having done that work (meaning I can now do it easier in the future).
The praise is separate to the work itself. The emerald retains its beauty.
A lack of praise is the greatest applause
Over 150 years ago, American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote this:
“
You would compliment a coxcomb doing a good act, but you would not praise an angel. The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world, is the highest applause.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
To save you a google (I needed one), a coxcomb is someone who is vain and conceited.
What Emerson is saying here is that a lack of praise can actually be the greatest form of praise.
Imagine you walk into the office tomorrow and your boss says to you "great job getting in here on time today", but it's without a hint of sarcasm - they are genuinely just praising you for coming in on time.
You'd almost certainly have a negative reaction to that because it would feel like they must have the bar so low for you if they're going to praise you for achieving the bare minimum.
When you start out, you will most likely receive praise for a higher percentage of tasks than what you will as you gain more experience. But this isn't because people take you for granted, it's because as you prove your competence, the bar increases - people expect more from you.
And that's not in a disparaging way, but in a respectful way - eventually the slide decks you create won't get the praise they once did, but it's because, as Emerson said, you producing those high quality decks will be seen as "the most natural thing in the world", and continuing to praise them would almost be condescending, just like praising you for making it to work on time.
TL;DR
Praise is overrated.
What I'm reading
I just finished Zero To One by Peter Thiel, and it was alright but I probably had expectations too high. Worth checking out if you're into entrepreneurship and startups (Peter Thiel is one of the GOATs in this space), but otherwise I probably wouldn't go for it.
A few highlights though, to give you a flavour:
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Conventional beliefs only ever come to appear arbitrary and wrong in retrospect; whenever one collapses, we call the old belief a bubble.
“
Paradoxically, then, network effects businesses must start with especially small markets. Facebook started with just Harvard students—Mark Zuckerberg’s first product was designed to get all his classmates signed up, not to attract all people of Earth. This is why successful network businesses rarely get started by MBA types: the initial markets are so small that they often don’t even appear to be business opportunities at all.
“
Whenever an entrepreneur asks me to invest in his company, I ask him how much he intends to pay himself. A company does better the less it pays the CEO—that’s one of the single clearest patterns I’ve noticed from investing in hundreds of startups.
I've now picked up Invent and Wander, The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos. Let me know if you've read it or are going to pick it up!
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