Stop Caring So Much About Approval

The truth is, to make an impact through tech, you simultaneously have to care a whole lot and not at all about the audience. You have to care deeply about their problems but not at all about their praise.

Rick Rubin, co-founder of Def Jam records, said “The audience comes last. I believe that. I'm not making it for them. I'm making it for me. And it turns out that when you make something truly for yourself, you're doing the best thing you possibly can for the audience.”

It’s true when writing a book (I’m back in the saddle again, so this is top of mind). You have to understand your audience deeply and care a lot about their problems, but not about what they have to say about you. It’ll make you run scared and not do anything with any real impact.

And it’s also true when creating something of impact in the world of tech.

Because the truth is, praise may not come quickly, and it may not come from those you want it from at the moment you want it. You have to be confident enough in what you’re doing to chase impact not adulation.

And there’s another point about that too: be very careful if what you are doing is aimed at winning over a particular person. You can often hear their voice in your mind when this is happening. A mentor, a family member, a friend you never felt quite cool enough for, a colleague who always seemed to doubt you. Mine used to often come from a mentor whose praise I craved but rarely received until I stopped chasing it.

Our wounds are powerful drivers and most people have them. They give us empathy with others and can be very useful for that reason. They can inspire great art when they come from a place of thoughtful reflection or even raw expression. But it’s best not to chain oneself to them unwittingly. If you feel a deep, gnawing anxiousness about something, take the time to ask whose voice you hear or whose face you see?

Are they in your target audience?

Is there objective reason to consider what they have to say?

If not, move on. My trick is to remind myself of who I am serving: the end users, and our client organizations. That’s who matters. Even the individual people at our client organizations, while I often like them a lot and form great relationships with them, cannot be my focus in terms of earning approval. I want them to have a great experience with our team and I want them to be proud of the end result. But I can't chase their approval.

The reason is that chasing approval will keep a person playing scared and small. And revolutions don’t happen from that space. Think about the word: approval. It’s like rubber stamp. It’s binary: approved or denied. What gets approved? A loan application. A visa application. A PTO request. All things that are paperwork-oriented, largely about not screwing up. It's an exercise in following the existing process, not in creating change. There’s no change to anyone involved, no growth. Just a decision. That is not the outcome you seek.

I know this because it’s not the outcome I seek either. If you’re a leader, you want to make things better. You want someone to say “My life is better because of this.” Not “I approve. There is nothing here that I find fault with." That's the sort of outcome we refer to as "damned by faint praise."

When I was working on my first book, I remember someone in the industry telling me that you're really aiming for a review average of 4 stars. Why? Because if you do anything meaningful at all, it's going to push some buttons. You're going to create a reaction and while you want the majority of people to experience that positively, it's natural that some resistance arises for others.

The difference here is the change to the audience. And that requires pushing some boundaries, asking people to connect in a way they hadn’t previously. Getting a little uncomfortable. Uncomfortable people don’t often shout their approval. But if you make them a little uncomfortable in the right way, at the right time, with the right opportunity in front of them, they will make a change for the better. And that’s what UX and technology and frankly most of them big ideas in the world today are about.

So how do you know what matters? Look inside yourself, and look at those in your audience you know best. What are the moments when the emotion kicks up a notch? Where’s the pain? Where’s the hope? Where’s the fear? You can almost always hear the pitch change in someone’s voice when they are talking, the moment when it flips from an analytical discussion to something they feel deeply. Pay attention to that moment - that’s where the opportunity lies. That’s the thing to prioritize.

The praise will come. But the impact is what matters.