The Roman philosopher Seneca wrote, “If wisdom were offered me on the one condition that I should keep it shut away and not divulge it to anyone, I should reject it. There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with.” Think of your workplace as a potluck with each person having their own special recipes and dishes to be shared. In the next chapter, we’ll take that perspective and apply it to the final lesson: how you can give wise counsel to those who seek it.

But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.” - Anton Ego

If I’d been better schooled back then in the art of accompaniment, I would have

understood how important it is to honor another person’s ability to make choices. I hope I would have understood, as good accompanists do, that everybody is in their own spot, on their own pilgrimage, and your job is to meet them where they are, help them chart their own course. I wish I had followed some advice that is rapidly becoming an adage: Let others voluntarily evolve.

I like the Gottlieb-and-John story because it illuminates many of the gentle skills it takes to be truly receptive—particularly, the ability to be generous about human frailty, to be patient and let others emerge at their own pace—but it also illuminates the mental toughness that is sometimes required. The wise person is there not to be walked over but to stand up for the actual truth, to call the other person out when need be, if they are hiding from some hard reality. “Receptivity without confrontation leads to a bland neutrality that serves nobody,” the theologian Henri Nouwen wrote. “Confrontation without receptivity leads to an oppressive aggression which hurts everybody.”” (Brooks, “How to Know a

Person”, p.259)

“It’s about how to tell someone about their shortcomings in a way that offers maximal support. Let me give you a trivial, everyday example of why critiquing with care can be so effective. When I’m writing, I sometimes unconsciously know that a part of what I’m writing is not working. I have these vague vibrations that something is wrong, kind of like the vibrations you feel when you leave the house and you subtly sense you’ve left something important behind but you don’t know what. I often suppress these vibrations because I’m lazy or I want to be finished with the work. Invariably a good editor will locate the exact spot I semiconsciously knew wasn’t working. It’s only when the editor has named it for me that I fully face the fact that I need to make some changes. Critiquing with care works best when someone names something we ourselves almost but did not quite know. Critiquing with care works best when that naming happens within a context of unconditional regard, that just and loving attention that conveys unshakable respect for another person’s struggles.

It’s easy to take comfort in the fact that other people agree with us. As legendary investor Warren Buffett pointed out, though, “The fact that other people agree or disagree with you makes you neither right nor wrong. You will be right if your facts and reasoning are correct.”

The people executing established practices say they want new ideas, but they don’t want the bad ones. And because they so want to avoid the bad ones, they never deviate enough to find good ones.