Who is it for

Whose verdict am I waiting on before I’m allowed to think it was any good?

Yesterday I wrote that happiness is immediate and pride is cumulative. I want to take that further, because the line I drew sits on top of a bigger one.

Pride can come from outside just as easily as happiness can. Someone tells me the work was good and I feel proud of it. That feeling is real, and it also arrived from somewhere else — I received it rather than produced it. Which means the two words I spent yesterday separating can both be answers to the same question, and it’s the wrong question.

The better one is who the work was for.

When the answer is always somebody else, I’ve handed the judgment to people who weren’t there for the work.

That’s what I’d want my son to understand, and it’s the hardest thing to teach, because I’m the person whose approval he’s watching for. I don’t think I can make that go away, and I’m not sure I’d want to. What I can do is keep pointing at the work rather than at my reaction to it, and ask him what he thought of it before I tell him what I thought.

At work it’s the same shape. If the only evidence someone has that their work was good is what their manager said about it, the work and the verdict have come apart, and the manager usually has no idea it happened.

It’s also the thing I’d test an AI system on. A model tuned to leave you pleased is being measured by your reaction instead of by whether it was right, which is a decision somebody made about who the audience is.

Approval that comes from outside leaves when the outside does. The pride I care about is the kind I can hold on my own, on a day when nobody says anything at all.