Your Best Work May Not Be Noticed

I've worked on some sensitive and complicated projects where there were plenty of second-guessers. In some cases, their knowledge of the work matched my mastery of Bulgarian literature but that didn't seem to restrain them. Some professionals feel compelled to answer every jibe or analyze every bizarre suggestion. I don't because doing so can interfere with the real reason I'm there: to produce positive results.

You ignore the buzz and do the work. If you can find an easier, more pleasurable, way, you take it, but you need to do what is right for the client. That means putting aside your ego.

There is, of course, a flaw in that quiet approach. An inexperienced person will not know the 50 different ways in which matters could have quickly gone south; ways which you prevented. Some of the finest aspects of a job well done are never acknowledged because they are unnoticed.

Good work, like virtue, can be its own reward.