Comfort your friends but also challenge them. Listen to their ideas but also give them feedback. Often what we need is the opposite of what we want. But if we keep hearing what we want to hear, we are only getting more of the same. And nothing changes from that.

Moralizing Behavior

In the right context, comfort can be medicine: imagine a sick child or someone who has endured a loss. In the wrong context, it can be poison: imagine an addict, someone in a toxic relationship, someone without a future. It's when we assert morality, good or bad into tasks, that we lose sight of context. We fear that if we don't accomplish what is intended or expected, we are bad. Even when no one tells us so. Because when we do complete a task, if we're always told we are good, then the opposite must also be true when we can't accomplish it.

Just as when one child is told they are good, the other children assume they are bad. (So we end up telling every child they are good.) And when we don't accomplish something, we must be bad. That is the framework of logic we've been taught. Only being given positive reinforcement does not mean we are unaware of its opposite. Even without negative reinforcement, the unintended outcome of positive reinforcement is negative reinforcement, because any lack of positive reinforcement will be considered a negative. We don't need to be told we're bad because being told nothing will mean the same. That is the indirect consequence. Now everyone is being praised, which defeats the purpose in which it was initially created, to facilitate improvement.

Rather than being encouraged to love growth, the emphasis on comfort motivates us to fear discomfort — running away from fear rather than running towards growth. The expectation to be perfect is suffocating us. We can't move because always being told we are "good" is unnerving. It sets up expectations that cannot be matched. We eventually stop trying. After a while, we don't even want comfort, we just want to be left alone.

Growth is a system. We improve through trial and error not trial and validation. Without error, when we fear error, we rob ourselves of improvement. We mustn't take feedback as being more than it is; they're observations and they say nothing about our virtue or value.

Criticism, like positive reinforcement, is all about value — approval and disapproval, good or bad. When we approve, when things are good, it's positive reinforcement. When we disapprove, we things are bad, it's criticism. Feedback is neither of these things; it's only information for improvements.

Variety Is Healthy