One of the most important lessons I learned
in the process of going through college,
and moving to the professional world,
and eventually transitioning to working for myself
is that in most cases feedback is a luxury.
Now, when we're in school and college
we don't realize this because school and college
are institutions that are built to give us feedback.
We get graded on almost everything we do,
and there are professors and teachers
who are paid to show us our mistakes
and to help us move forward,
but once we move into our careers
we're often given jobs that don't
come with a whole lot of regular day to day feedback.
There's usually not somebody telling us
how we did on each individual piece of work.
And there's also usually not a whole lot of appreciation
that comes from the hard work we put in.
Now, this got me thinking about my own job
because as somebody who makes YouTube videos
for a living, I get a lot of feedback on my work.
Almost every single video I make
gets a lot of comments from people telling me
they appreciate the things I make.
And I absolutely love getting that feedback.
It validates my work.
It motivates me to create more.
But it also got me thinking,
I don't work disproportionately harder than everyone else.
And my job isn't disproportionately more useful,
yet a lot of people who work really, really hard
don't get that kind of feedback.
So, why is this?
I think the answer is that it really comes
down to expectations.
For some jobs there isn't really a set expectation
or status quo out there,
so by the very virtue of doing that work,
by putting a video out there,
I'm exceeding somebody's expectations.
I have the opportunity to delight somebody
simply by virtue of creating a video.
Now if delight is one of the emotions that
can cause people to naturally wanna give feedback,
the other one is disgust or disappointment.
When something isn't working as it should,
but there's an expectation already set,
people are apt to give negative feedback.
The problem with this comes with the fact
that a lot of people have jobs
where's there's only really two possible states.
Either everything is broken,
and people are giving that negative feedback,
or it's at the status quo
where everything is as it should be,
in which case, people don't really
think about it, they ignore it.
For example, if you live in an apartment,
think about the job of running that apartment complex.
If your heater's working, if your water's running,
everything is hunky dory,
you're not thinking about your apartment manager's job.
But once your heater goes out,
or somebody breaks a bottle in the parking lot
and no one cleans it up, now you're mad,
and the only feedback your apartment manager's
gonna get is your complaint.
Another good example is the roads you drive on.
When the roads are in good condition,
you don't think about them because
you don't have to,
and now you can put your mind on wherever your're going.
The only time you do think about the roads
is when they're broken,
and then you just want the city to come fix them.
Or when there's a construction crew out fixing them,
then you just want that construction crew out of the way.
And this is the problem I see.
So much honest, hard work goes into
meeting expectations that you already have.
And when those expectations are met,
you don't notice that work.
Now from your perspective, this is fine
because it allows you to think about
everything else that's going on in your life.
But from the perspective of the person who
put that work in,
they're not getting any validation for that work they did.
So because of that, I wanna give you
a little challenge in this video.
But before I do it, I wanna dedicate this video
to the people who work so hard
at simply meeting the expectations that are already set.
For all you whose work goes into simply meeting
the status quo, thank you.
You probably don't get told this enough,
but you really make people's lives easier.
You make their day go smoother.
You keep problems to a minimum.
And you make everybody happy,
even if they don't notice the work
that went into making them happy.
And if this video resonates with you,
and you're thinking of leaving a comment
to give me some feedback,
I definitely still appreciate that feedback,
but here's my challenge.
Thank about somebody else in your life
who also could use some feedback
for the hard work they're doing.
It takes deliberate effort to notice that hard work
and to give positive feedback
because work that goes into meeting expectations
kind of fades into the background,
but I think if we can do this as a population,
we're gonna make everyone's lives better.
So that's all I have for this video.
Hopefully you enjoyed it.
And I will see you next week.
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