September 3
The surest way to clarity is a modest opinion of yourself. Know yourself to be small, and you judge truly.
The Imitation of Christ (freely rendered)
Listening mode
The surest way to clarity is a modest opinion of yourself. Know yourself to be small, and you judge truly.
When you read feedback on your work, you are often reading two texts at once. One is about the work itself: a paragraph is too long, a number is wrong. The other is about you. It is usually louder, even though nobody wrote it.
It is tempting to think of modesty as the antidote. But if you think little of yourself, you only read the second text differently, not less. Every comment then confirms what you already feared, and praise sounds like an oversight. Even then, the work itself stays strangely out of focus. You are still preoccupied with yourself, only in a minor key.
Perhaps smallness here means not a measure but a distance. A judgement does not become more accurate because you make yourself smaller. It becomes more accurate when, for a while, there is less of you in it. That rarely works on purpose. It is more likely to happen when a question about the work absorbs you so much that you forget to check what it says about you.
Then the number is simply wrong. You correct it, and the paragraph really is too long.
