A few days ago, Chris Brogan wrote a post called Take Back Your Strings. In this post, Chris writes that we really should not embrace the idea that people are disappointed in us. He suggests that people feeling disappointed is really more about them, not so much about you. I verbalized over in the comments section that I found the post kind of disconcerting. It’s been almost a week, and it’s still rolling around in my head.
What we are saying when we say we’re disappointed
After initially reading the post, I said that sometimes disappointment can be code for other things. When a person does something and you say you’re disappointed in them, you aren’t always saying, “Man, I thought you could do better.” Sometimes you’re saying, “I’m really worried that you’re doing this.” Sometimes you’re saying, “I don’t understand what you’re doing or why you’re doing it.” Sometimes you’re more let down than disappointed. Sometimes you’re actually disappointed in yourself. The English language is surprisingly limiting sometimes, so we use one word, disappointment, to express all of these things.
If you want the accolades, ya gotta take the crap
After thinking more about this post though, I think what really is rattling around in my head is the idea that we don’t have to listen when people say they are disappointed in us. It hurts when people say that, without question. You are being judged, or at least it seems that way. It’s easy to say, “Sticks and stones” and shrug it off.
In the online world, however, there seems to be a decrease in patience when it comes to anything other than agreement or fastidious support. I think that is the thought stream that Chris’s post awakened in my head. How many times have arguments begun because a person begs to differ? How many times has a failure to agree been interpreted as an attack? How many times has a concern snowballed into a virtual fistfight? I’m seeing it more and more, and it feels like a lot of people are adopting the idea that disappointment is in the eye of the beholder.
Here’s how I see it though. If you want to get the nice blog comments, the retweets, the Facebook “likes,” and the Google Plus shares, then it’s only fair that you also accept that sometimes people will disagree with you. Sometimes they may evaluate something you’ve said or done and not feel real good about it. Disappointment is the price we pay for all of the nice things we encounter day-in, day-out here in the online world. That is the risk we take every time we sign in to our various accounts. Sure, a post might get a really nice response. Then again, a post might really disappoint people on any given day. If you want the former, you can’t plug your ears to the latter.
No One is Above Reproach
In this insulated online world we live in, it’s easy to get on a path where you think you’re the cat’s meow. I mean, I have 4,000 some people (well, maybe 3,000 and 1,000 bots) following me on Twitter. I couldn’t get 2 people to follow me in fourth grade! Are you kidding? Every day people say they are happy to see me, that they enjoy my writing. The kindness I receive on a regular basis is humbling, but it could also convince me that I’m hot stuff and really know what I’m talking about. No one can tell me nothing, right?
Yeah, not so much.
We are all just people. Sure, we’re here in this reality that exists in little electronic boxes, but we all go potty, we all eat food, we all sleep (well, most of us do). We are all imperfect. We are all capable of deeply disappointing people, and sometimes we do. We’re also immensely fortunate in that we can improve someone’s day or help someone out. Sometimes we do that too.
If Failure is a Great Teacher, Disappointment is its Kissing Cousin
There is a lot of talk about how great it is to fail because nothing teaches you more faster. I view disappointment that way. If I let someone down, I want to learn that lesson right away so I never do it again. I want to learn what people expect of me. Heck, I want to learn what I expect of myself. Without disappointment, you cannot progress. It will just seem like everything you do is spot on and perfect. Nobody is that lucky. Not even LeBron James is that lucky, as he found out. When you disappoint someone, you can track progress as you prove you can do better. When you disappoint yourself, you can prove that your horizons can widen and your depth of experience can grow. I wouldn’t want to throw away that kind of opportunity. I wouldn’t want to stifle my growth by thinking I’m all done growing.
What do you think about this?
Image Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/DGBurns
View Margie Clayman's profile
“How many times has a failure to agree been interpreted as an attack? How many times has a concern snowballed into a virtual fistfight?” I have experience this as well, it is becoming more common. I wonder if being detached, sitting at a keyboard makes it easier to make these comments with no thought to the human being on the other end.
I think you’re probably right, Sarah. As Jay Baer says, everyone’s a tough guy behind a computer. Sorry to hear you’ve experienced that as well.
I’ve read that post too and it seems to me that Chris is talking more about the emotional aspect of knowing that some people may be disappointed with him. He’s a very smart guy and I might even say – a marketing genius. But from what I can understand, he’s trying to well, take back his emotional strings.
“Disappointment” is a very powerful word that can bring a person down if that person is not strong enough.
Imagine if it was between a son and his father on the father’s death bed.
“Disappointed”
The people who criticized him, may have used it to get their points across – far too strongly, in my humble opinion. But you know, I also get your point. A public figure as prominent as Chris normally wouldn’t even talk about the criticisms being lobbed against whatever he is doing. From the pictures in Chris’ Google Plus profile, I think he’s just showing that he’s human like all of us. That he’s a sensitive guy and all that. That he can connect.
Try saying you’re disappointed with a politician and you’ll even see them smile at ya. 🙂
Danny,
Thanks for a great comment!
You’re right – disappointment is a very charged word. I can’t quite put my finger on why. Maybe it’s because we all just want to please people. In that regard, I can definitely see where you and Chris are coming from. But sometimes disappointment is also offering a genuinely helpful critique, and in those cases, you want to be open to learning and growing.
This is a disappointing post Margie! 😉
Joking aside, the issue here is the disappointment people fear of hearing in the online world. Social Media, like reality TV, creates insta-celebrities complete with all the adulation that comes with celebrity. People seek it. They work on building it at all costs. And so any form of discontent from the adoring masses that Social Media has trained us to expect, is devastating.
“It’s not supposed to be this way. I’m an expert dammit – have you not seen all my retweets? My Klout score? How dare you.”
The 15 mins of fame everyone gets in social media is addictive. Criticism is buzz-kill, thus not a pill swallowed easily.
+1
That’s more along the lines of what I was thinking Sam. Thanks for wording it a lot better than I did! 🙂
Thanks for this, Margie! I used to say that the worst punishment anyone could give me was ‘being disappointed in me’ so I read both perspectives here with interest. I think the empowering message about Chris’ post is reminding us all to be careful about to whom we give emotional permission to damage us, which I wish is a lesson we were all taught in preschool! And you’re right — if you don’t let it inflate you like crazy when someone says “I love you! You’re the cat’s meow!” – then you shouldn’t let it destroy you when someone says, “Meh, I’m disappointed in this, I expected more from you.” At the end of the day, the internet has made it far too easy to do both — and in fact, worse: the most passive-aggressive among us will type things in these comment boxes they would never have the cojones to speak aloud in a room to a person’s face. I think we can all agree that THOSE are people who should not be given permission to affect our sense of self – either for the positive or the negative.
Disappointment is about misaligned expectations. People offering tangential feedback about how your performance or lack thereof measured against what they expected. It’s important to measure their feedback in proportion to their importance in your life: are they clients? family members? a colleague who you admire? a passing commenter along the internet highway?
At the end of the day, there’s one person you are most accountable to: the face in the mirror. When you disappoint HER, you’re in trouble. Beyond that … it’s all relatively unimportant. And the whole internet – indeed the world – could use an antidote to the poison of the radical self-INFLATION & self-DEFLATION based on others’ offhanded comments. Focus alternating energies on the far horizon ahead and the face in the mirror and those voices on the other ends of the strings cease to have any pull at all.
Hi Kellee,
Fabulous comment!!
I like that, misaligned expectations. I think when we *feel* disappointed, to turn it around a bit, that is what we are experiencing. We thought someone was going to do something or say something and we were disappointed.
I also like the notion of self-inflation versus self-deflation. In either case, as you say so well, we are putting our emotional fate into the hands of someone else.
Great contribution here!
I’m learning in my Buddhist stuff that neither is helpful. Praise is every bit the sticky trap as disappointment. Pleasure is every bit as troublesome as pain. I’m trying hard to learn that. I’m trying to to absorb either.
@Chris: if you haven’t read Old Path, White Clouds (Thich Nhat Hanh), I think you might really appreciate it. “What you see and hear comprises only a small part of reality. If you take it to be the whole of reality, you will end up having a distorted picture…. Humility and open-mindedness are the two conditions necessary for making progress.”
Thanks for popping by here, Chris.
I think that’s an interesting thought. As much as we don’t want to feel bad about ourselves because of what other people say or don’t say, is it fair to feel good about ourselves based on the same people? Sounds like a house of cards, huh?
This is how “I see It” http://www.twitvid.com/WFQYR
Hi Cate,
It’s funny you say that the headline made you feel weird. A few people tweeted this out and I saw my name with the headline and my heart skipped a beat. “They’re disappointed in me? Oh no!”
Kind of ironic, huh?
Thank you for taking the time to put together a video response!
This is a very interesting topic. We often taken on the praise, whether we asked for it or not. As if we’re somehow not worthy of the praise but because it makes us feel good/important it’s OK that someone gives us value. But when it comes to criticism/disappointment we push it off and maybe even discount it, especially when we didn’t ask for it.
The praise and accolades get our endorphins pumping and we feel good. It’s like a drug. But criticism and disappointment aren’t the same psychological and sociological definers that they once were. Anything negative has turned into a personal attack and so we have conditioned ourselves to fight back. We have become increasingly combative. We’ve come to expect praise for every small thing that even a ‘meh’ response might be sufficient for someone to flip you the bird and dress you down.
We’ve become people who need to get a trophy just for participating, even if we totally suck.
Hi Sara,
Yes, we do bank a lot on the accolades we get from other people, especially in this here online world. It gets to the point where it can really mess with your head. I think people have lost a lot of the nuance in offering criticism with a gentle hand, but I think too a lot of people have lost the ability to accept a legitimate concern as being, well, legitimate.
Quite the conundrum there!
Interesting. I had a boss who second guessed every single thing I ever did. Nothing was ever right, and all I heard was what a disappointment I was. Once I stopped letting him “pull my strings” as Chris mentioned, I began to feel better.
I got a freelance job blogging and editing – the pay is not great, but they love my posts and my confidence is coming back. They are impressed with my Twitter feed, and I may start handling their Twitter account and a few others.
My point is that I stopped letting boss number 1 control how I feel. That was my mistake. He would say I was “such a disappointment” and it would wound me. It wounded me only because I allowed it to.
There will be times I screw up. I will sometimes anger people. Others I like will sometimes anger me. That is normal. I expect that to be part of life. The one thing I do have control over is how I respond to hearing that I disappointed someone.
Hi Nancy,
What’s interesting about your statement though is that the fact that the people are impressed with your posts is helping you build your confidence. If you are truly taking back your own strings, that confidence should be something that emanates from your own being. That’s where I get concerned with the strings aspect. If you are really liberating yourself from strings, you need to refrain from accepting the good stuff too, or so it would seem to me.
What do you think?
That is the struggle indeed. Ideally, I want to get to a point where neither affects me. The hard part is rebuilding my shattered confidence. From there, it can only improve. It got to a point where nothing I did was right – which is just silly. I might not be perfect, but I am not nearly as bad as they would have others think.
The larger part for me of ‘taking back my strings” is not engaging with them any longer. Just doing that has helped tremendously. Now, I am on to the much harder work of just liking what I blog no matter who does (or does not) like it
My test for whether or not someone is ALLOWED to be disappointed in me is my commitment to them. Are you a client for whom I promised something and you paid something? Are you a personal relationship to whom I promised to be there for you? How much of your skin have I allowed you to have in my game? How SPECIFICALLY did I fail you in what I promised?
I can imagine for Chris that he has a LOT of folks who may feel they have skin in his game and they are owed a great deal and allowed to be disappointed in him. They are probably wrong.
Read Hugh MacLeod’s @gapingvoid book, Ignore Everybody http://gapingvoid.com/ie/ It’s a short read. In fact, you just need to read page one to understand many people use “disappointment in you” to make you stay the person with whom THEY are comfortable. (I grew up Catholic.. it’s a neat trick.. and it works really well…)
And become a Hobo.. or at least start living by the hobo code. http://www.dogwalkblog.com/the-hobo-code.html
I like that phrase. How much skin do you have in the game..Hmm.
Investing in people is something we do naturally, but the problem is that we can’t always tell who is invested in us or how much people are invested in us. In the online world this is an especially big problem, because people who may never even talk to us may feel like they’re investing in us without us realizing it.
Back in the days of say, 2008, that’s where words like transparency could really help out!
For all our talk about how social media allows for relationships…it does not. Real relationships are give and take- good times and bad, honesty and apology.
Social media is media…entertainment, edutainment, branding, marketing.
Are we friends with each other? Do we know the real anyone online? I say, ‘no,’ unless you meet outside the confines of the screen and keyboard.
And I agree with you with the uprising of perceived-from-out-here hubris that any time someone disagrees, bloggers (and I mean many bloggers, not just one) sulk and pout and put us through navel gazing posts about the lessons learned or the haters trumped. Folks, you told me that the marketing isn’t about YOU it’s about ME, remember? Or is it only about me when I gush about you? Confusing stuff.
Because we’ve come to a place where the brand is personal…and it’s a dangerous place to play if you’re not emotionally ready to compartmentalize the business/brand- you from the real-you. When people are ‘disappointed’ they’re not disappointed in you like your mom was when you were 16 and came home buzzed. They’re disappointed in your abandoning a business or brand promise.
Ultimately,this internet marketing personality stuff is getting weird on a large scale. [meaning, it isn’t just about Chris] It seems a somewhat failed experiment as our leaders are human and based a business on ‘oversharing,’ and few boundaries between the professional and personal. That will eventually catch up with you because life gets complicated and no one wants to buy that.
That’s a fantastic point, Susan. A post is in there for sure.
If you say that you are your brand then a lot is riding on how you behave. I was disappointed in how a lot of people acted during SXSW. If you are using Social Media as your brand, what are you saying to me about that brand when you tweet you can’t find your pants because you’re so trashed? I don’t need or want to know that that is how you’re behaving at a huge conference.
I would never say that Margie is equivalent to Clayman Advertising. I work for my family’s agency and I am here to learn because that is part of my job, but do I want a whole company or brand to be judged on how I act? Not really. And even then I do my best not to offend a soul.
It will be interesting to see how things continue to evolve in this regard.