role model

Once upon a time, I took weight-lifting classes. The instructor was one of those wiry people who are so narrow they become invisible when they turn sideways.

One night she and one of the few slim students were standing around talking about how awful their guts were.

Right.

I said to her "If yours is awful, what does that say about all the rest of us here?"

She got it; I never heard her say anything like that again.


This lesson applies to a million things besides weight-lifting.

I read the blogs of a lot of people who are very VERY good at what they do. I am baffled that so many of them disparage their (astonishingly wonderful) work.

Suppose I am a person who is thinking of learning to draw. Suppose I read that the maker of a fabulous drawing thinks it is entirely unworthy. Wow. Guess I might as well not bother picking up a pencil. If his work sucks, my efforts would be a waste of toilet paper, let alone any worthy paper......


The whole issue of evaluating one's own work is a knotty one. In order to improve, one must see the places that could benefit from improvement. Concentrating on the flaws, though, is the top of the slippery slope to not being able to work at all, paralyzed by the fear of failure.

Add to that that it is a burden to be a role model. Of course it is. But. My failure to acknowlege that people who look up to me will take my words and behavior to heart doesn't remove my responsibility to take my effect on "my fans" into account when I act. We may wish we did not affect those who admire us, but the plain cold fact is that we do, and we have a responsibility to handle that power as wisely as we can.

A final complication to the issue is the admonition to not brag about ourselves. Somehow our culture has embraced the notion that it is more noble to run ourselves and our work down than to admit we are happy with any of the results of our labors. I submit this makes us poor role models, and we should stop it now. No more going on about how stupid or incompetent we are. No more disparagement of our work. From now on, let's remember all those people out there who would be ecstatic if they could knit a sock in a month, nevermind in a couple of days. Let's be glad for all the lovely socks knit, rather than talking about how there should have been twice as many. (More healthy for us, I am positive, as well as making us better role models.)


I do understand that there is great value in learning about the way people who are adept at something work. What are they thinking, how are they deciding, what "went wrong" during the process, how did they change the plan to accommodate a divergence from the original idea.

My objection is to the tone of the communication rather than the work-related content.

Surely we can say "I discovered I dropped a stitch 45 rows ago. I decided to let it go; to grab that lost loop with a darning needle and some of the same yarn, make an attempt to duplicate-stitch it in, weave in the ends, and put it firmly out of my mind." Surely this communicates both that we (of course) make errors, and how we decided to recover, *better* than it would if we prefaced it with "I am so stupid" and finished up with "One more piece of crummy flaw-ridden work."??


My proposal is that the 3-to-1 rule would serve us well, in describing our own work, as well as in examining the work of others. At least three strengths mentioned, for every weakness (and the mention of weaknesses can be kind.....).

We all know that there is always something good to say, even if it is "cute buttons!" or "that color reminds me of my favorite sister!"

If our own work is that terrible, let's not put it up. If it's ok but not our best, can we say "You can see the mountains in this pic taken from an airplane. You can see the snow on top -- these mountains must be high. You can see that people have made marks everywhere on this landscape."?? As for the weakness ... "The haze makes the pic less sharp, and messes up the color, but at least you can get some idea what it looked like."


That's my plan, anyway. Hope you will join me.


Thank you for your kind attention.