on complaining

By Konstantin Korovin

Dear reader,

I’ve canceled the office rent, the gym, that bike ride with a friend that I was supposed to take over the weekend. I’ve quit the job. In theory I know the perils of staying for too long on a job, but practice says otherwise. Switching jobs too often leads to not learning anything about taking responsibility for my work, while staying for too long invites complacency as I lull myself into a comfort zone which is then hard to get out of.

I’ve put an invite to email me to the bottom of my old blog posts and then received more emails than I received since starting it in 2011. I started another meetup group because I felt that that was missing in this town, which was confirmed by others and by great attendance at the first meetup, after which I’m writing these words to you in the last minutes of the hottest February I can remember.

Which tells me: the world is a very malleable place. It’s very surprising how little effort is necessary for a world to change for the better, if you dare to take some action. It’s easy to think that there are no options, no actions to take, nothing you can do about it. Steve Jobs (although I was not a big fan of the guy): “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it…”

But a lot of problems exist just because no one thinks it’s their responsibility to make changes. Which reminds me of the tragic murder of Kitty Genovese and how she was killed in front of so many witnesses and how they probably didn’t help her because they all thought somebody else has called the police. This also reminds me of my biggest problem with Stoicism — in its extreme forms, it leads to total abdication of responsibility towards the world and redirects the energy on self-indulgent practices of self-improvement. A world full of self-improvers would be a very sad world to live in.

It’s easy to remain passive and find flaws in everything. The complaint releases energy that could’ve been spent on making changes. It’s very easy to complain, which is just another reason to be suspicious about it. It’s also very hard not to complain, and to prove this you only need to try to survive a day without complaining. (I fail at this a lot these days as I grumble because that noisy neighbor’s dog wakes me up.)

This is similar to working on exciting projects that you’re eager to share with the world: the simple act of sharing and getting feedback too early in the process will negatively impact your energy and drive, because you have gotten the reward before the necessary work was done. If I want to be sure I’ll deliver the next side project I’ll be working on, I have to make sure I don’t share it with anyone before it’s done.

The critics don’t change the world. It’s very easy to criticize something and much harder to bring something that can be criticized to life. The harshest critics never did anything worth criticizing. That’s how they keep the delusion of grandeur going, thinking that if they made the thing that they are criticizing, that they would do a much better job. Which is why they think their criticism is worth listening to.

It’s very easy to find something to criticize, especially if the effort is not visible in the final result. One of the examples of that is any kind of design, where you don’t see all the effort that went into producing something that is intuitive. In order to really appreciate how hard it is to come with something well designed, something that’s easy to use, one needs to try designing things themselves.

Writing is another example. Only the writer sees the deleted words, sentences, paragraphs, abandoned drafts. The readers only see the final result. Which looks easy to copy in retrospect. Here’s how to appreciate the effort that goes into writing more: read something that you like and then try to rewrite it exactly as it was written from memory. You’ll find that any non-trivial sentence is hard to reproduce and that your sentence will usually be less beautiful than the one from the writer you admire.

Destroying something is much easier than building it and the negativity sneaks in through little door. You see more of what you focus on. If you focus on things that are not right, gradually the whole world will be wrong. If you focus on things that are, gradually the whole universe will be right.

To the kids, walking across the meadow for the first time is as magical as walking across the moon. To us who have seen many sunrises few things are. Hearing about the things that tourists like in Zagreb opened my eyes to what I’ve taken for granted. I’ve learned that one of these things is hearing the birds sing in the spring. Seeing the cherries in blossom. The old statues hanging from the facades of buildings in the center spreading below the clean blue sky.

Hidden behind a veil of complaint is the ugly face of defeat. Complaining releases energy that could be spent in at least an attempt to fix the thing one is complaining about. That’s why the people who complain the most are the most inert. “Two little mice fell into a bucket of cream. The first mouse quickly gave up and drowned, but the second mouse, he struggled so hard that he eventually churned that cream into butter and he walked out.” Which one of them do you think complained?

Yours,

SH