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Khuyen Bui
I write to make connections among worlds: my inner world, the worlds of others and the world of ideas. http://khuyenbui.com

16.07.10: Appreciation vs Admiration

Quotes

“If you really want to know something, don’t ask.”

  • Ed Schein in “Becoming American”, on his training as an anthropologist. I’ve been very inspired by his work and generally the practice of anthropology. As someone who values good questions, I’m also realizing its limits more and more. Not everyone will tell me the answer. Observation is always a much needed skill.

“Trial, error, error, error”

  • Buckminster Fuller. This man and Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the computer mouse, were two big thinkers of the 20th century who had enormous influences.

“Creativity is choosing curiosity over fear”

  • Elizabeth Gilbert, in her recent interview with On Being. As a side note, creativity is also curiosity about fear too. Fear is a self-protecting mechanism, so any fear we have always sheds some insights on what our “self” is.

“The collection of good problems for our learning is our curriculum”

“The secret to living well and longer is: eat half, walk double, laugh triple, and love without measure.” — Tibetan proverb.

  • Emphasis mine. Some people, including myself, sometimes try to measure love just for the fun of it.

“Tell me what you think and you will entertain me. Tell me how you feel and you will intrigue me.”

  • Matthew Kelly, in 7 Levels of Intimacy. Pretty accurate huh? Because feeling is a lot more difficult to explain, and many of us are wired to love mystery.

Appreciation vs Admiration

  • When we say we appreciate something (“I appreciate you for taking the time to help me with my homework”), we are acknowledging that we are receiving something of value. (“It’s important for me to do homework”) An appreciation is a piece of information about us . here is what matters to me.
  • When we say we admire something about someone (“I admire your thoughtfulness when you made that decision” or “I love how you arrange the table so nicely”), we creatively inhabit the world of the other so that we can feel inspired and instructed by being in that role. (“I imagine if I were in that positions, I will have to think about a lot of things before making that decision”) An admiration is more about the other, and is arguably harder to explain because it may take some work to step into the other’s shoes.
  • I personally enjoy appreciation a bit more because I love knowing about the appreciator: what she appreciates reveals a lot about her.
  • Why does this matter? Because expressing how someone is valuable to us isn’t an easy skill, and it is helpful to understand the different components within it and their respective impact so we can use them better.
  • On a related note, I’m committing myself to express better appreciation and admiration. No more vague praises from now on ;) Using this new language is like pumping oxygen into the system whereby the language of prizes and praises (“You have made all the difference. You are wonderful”) takes energy out of the system for its triteness, unspecificity and vagueness.

Other stuff

  • Random question of the week: Does introverts chat less and listen more than extroverts online?
  • Recommended article: Machine money vs Human money: a great long read from OReilly’s article on Universal Basic Income. In which he talks about Machine money vs Human money. The former will get cheaper and cheaper, but not the latter because of the “authentic” human element. Also a nice distinction between caring money vs creative money: What needs to be done to meet the human needs vs what wants to look nice.
  • “Why should you read fiction?” — an interview with Salman Rushdie

There is no standalone “fact”. Fiction makes us more aware of the context of these facts. “That truth is something imperfect, not objective, or that objectivity is very hard to arrive at. And that there is another kind of truth that human beings respond to very powerfully, which is a kind of self-truth, or emotional truth. The truth of relations between human beings, how we are with each other. The truth of what is our relationship to place, to our country, to our ideas, to our belief systems. This other kind of truth, which has to do with human truth, lived truth, that’s what you find in a novel” — Salman Rushdie

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