The Thing It Landed OnChapter 5 of 145 min
The same address
Clare gave the presentation on a Thursday, and it went well, and at the end her director said something generous about it in front of eleven people, and then put it in writing to the team.
She drove home pleased. That is where a sensible account of the evening would stop.
What actually happened was that she read the message again at about eight. Then she looked at who else had been copied in. Then she noticed that one person had said nothing at all, which she had not been thinking about until she went looking, and which she then thought about until half past eleven.
By Friday morning she had moved on to the next one, and whether it would be as good.
Nothing bad happened to Clare on Thursday. That is the whole interest of it.
She was praised, accurately, by somebody whose opinion she respects, for work that deserved it. And the evening it produced was almost identical in texture to the evening after a meeting where somebody says your part could have been tighter: the re-reading, the audit of who saw, the one person whose silence is now a presence in the room.
It went to the same place. The remark in chapter two landed on being thought capable, and so did this. One pushed the spot and one lifted it, and the spot does not much care which — it has been handled either way, and it will be sore either way, and you will be aware of it all evening.
A compliment is not the opposite of criticism. It is the same instrument, at the same address, playing the other note.
The short proof
Somebody told Clare that week that she had unusually nice handwriting.
She said thank you. Nothing happened. It did not come back at eight o'clock, there was no audit of who had seen it, and she could not tell you now which day it was on.
Praise goes past you exactly as reliably as criticism does, and for exactly the same reason: there was nothing of her standing in the handwriting. Where you are not, nothing lands, whichever direction it comes from.
Why this one is worse to leave alone
Criticism announces itself. It hurts, you know it hurts, and at some point you look at it.
Praise arrives as a gift, and nobody examines a gift. So it does its work undisturbed, and the work it does is this: it tells you where to stand and then charges rent.
Clare is now the person who did the good presentation. That was a free thing on Thursday and by Friday morning it had a price, which is the next one. She did not agree to this. Nobody offered her terms. But the position is now occupied and occupied positions have to be held, and the holding is the part that costs, every time, for as long as she lives there.
This is why people who have been praised a great deal are often not at ease. The ordinary explanation is that they fear losing it, and that is true but it is the second thing. The first thing is simpler: they have more addresses than other people, and all of them can be reached.
And now the useful part
Here is the thing nobody tells you, and it is the reason this chapter exists rather than being a warning about vanity.
Praise is the cheaper instrument for finding out where you live.
When something stings, you defend. You argue about whether it was fair, whether they knew what they were talking about, what they are like generally — and all of that is noise between you and the information. It can take a week to get past it to the answer.
Praise meets no defence at all. You let it in, unexamined, delighted. So if you can catch yourself in the twenty minutes after a compliment, you get the same reading with none of the interference — and you get it while in a good mood, which is the only condition under which most people will look at this at all.
After praise: how long before you wanted the next one?
That is the measurement. Not whether you enjoyed it — enjoy it, there is nothing wrong with it. How long until the wanting started. For Clare it was about fourteen hours, and she only knows that because she happened to look.
The shorter the gap, the more of you is living at that address.
Tonight
Two minutes, and bring a good thing rather than a bad one for once.
Think of the last compliment that actually pleased you. Not one you brushed off — one that stayed for an hour or a day.
Say what it was about, in four words or fewer. That I'm reliable. That I'm funny. That I noticed. It will be short, and it will be one of the same handful of things that everything else lands on, and you may recognise it from the last chapter with a certain weariness.
Then one more: who would you have wanted to hear it? There is almost always somebody, and they are often not in the room, and sometimes they are dead. That is not a sad fact and I am not going to make it one. It is just the address, written out in full.
Arguments next — not the ones you win or lose, but the fact that you have the same four of them over and over, which turns out to be a map.