Articulating Doubt
Healthy Confidence and Kind Critique
Intuition sets the direction. It’s confidence. It’s action.
Doubt questions the direction. It’s critique. It’s reaction.
Sometimes it’s simple to act with confidence, sometimes it’s easy to react with grace, but doing both, consistently, takes work. The ideas below frame my own practice of both.
Healthy, Humble Confidence
Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
Desiderata by Max Ehrmann, via Joe (3 highlights)
…to deal with an uncertain future and still move forward — they advise people to have “strong opinions, which are weakly held.”
Strong Opinions, Weakly Held by Bob Sutton (1 highlight)
Kind, Effective Critique
Criticism is a privilege that you earn — it shouldn’t be your opening move in an interaction …
Some of the most effective ways in which you deal with someone’s idea are to treat them completely at face value, and with an enormous amount of respect.
Malcolm Gladwell on Criticism, Tolerance, and Changing Your Mind by Maria Popova (3 highlights)
…the general rule is that you may only criticize an idea if you also add a constructive suggestion. Hence the name plussing.
‘Plussing’ — How Pixar Transforms Critiquing into Creating by Daniel Gogek, via Dustin (7 highlights)
…while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished …
The hard thing to do is protect it, think about it, let it marinate, explore it, riff on it, and try it.
Give it Five Minutes by Jason Fried (7 highlights)
even the most well-intentioned criticism can rupture relationships and undermine self-confidence and initiative.
The Ideal Praise-to-Criticism Ratio by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman (4 highlights)
We practice the very important skill of pointing to flaws in things without criticizing people who designed or implemented them.
Trust yourself, but not too much. Doubt yourself, but not too much. Default to belief.
