Anti-fragility and Over-thinking

“You looked stressed out. How are you doing?” I asked a team member. “In my design document, I got 12 comments from the first paragraph. I’ve never had so many feedbacks in my documents. It felt like I did everything wrong…”, the team member replied. Ah, I was shocked to hear that. “Multiple Sr. engineers complemented the quality of your design doc after the review meeting actually. Those comments were meant to give you ideas, suggestions, or sometimes the commenters were just debating between themselves. None of them were towards you as a person, I can be 100% sure of that!” “Oh, I read them so many times, I thought they didn’t like me.” … How often did you run into similar situations? That harsh code review comments you received? Someone called your name in a large slack room and blamed you on something you didn’t deserve? In virtual collaboration environments we lose the casual hall way conversations, and the chance to talk about our pets in office kitchens. Most of these comments we received are offline, or given by someone over a microphone, or if we are lucky, over cameras. We lose 80% of the information by the loss of voice tone, facial expression, and body language. Then we ruminate on these slack messages and offline comments for hours: “Do they like me? Do they like me not?” On one side you are overwhelmed by information, on the other side you lack the information to know how others are really thinking about you. The truth is: 1. They are unlikely to be thinking about you at the moment, one way or another. 2. More importantly, it does not matter how they think about you. 3. Most importantly, to waste time thinking about how others are thinking about you bring no value to you, or the others. Live in the presence, the NOW. Part of growing up is to become self-reliant, physically, mentally and psychologically. Stop relying on other people’s perception of us to define our own self-image and self-worth. “Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my opened mind Possessing and caressing me Jai guru deva, om Nothing's gonna change my world Nothing's gonna change my world” - the BeetlesAN