I noticed a slightly weird thing about how I react to positive feedback.
When someone tells me I did a good job, I rarely think: great, now I should do even more of this.
Usually I think: okay, so this is enough.
Now I know the bar.
And once I know the bar, I start thinking about how to reach the same result with less effort.
If it took me eight hours, next time I will try to do it in six. Then maybe in four.
Not because I want to do worse or cut corners. I just no longer need to spend time figuring out whether the result is good enough.
Before that, I can easily overdo things. Add extra checks, polish details nobody asked for, think through edge cases that probably do not matter.
Then someone says: this is good.
And for me that is not really praise. It is information.
It means I now have a pattern that works.
And if a pattern works, I can simplify it, automate part of it, give some of it to agents, or at least stop solving the same problem from zero every time.
This is probably why vague feedback is so annoying.
“Be more proactive.”
“Show more ownership.”
Okay, but what exactly worked? What result are we trying to repeat?
Give me one concrete example of work that was valuable, and I can optimize around it.
Give me a vague principle, and I will probably spend twice as much time guessing what you meant.