What you do is not nearly as important as how it makes people feel

April 11, 2007

I listened to First Things First by Covey again last night on the way to the Perl Mongers meeting, and it reminded me to re-evaluate what I think is actually important in life, especially in my worklife as I deal with frustrations during the workday.

This morning, I find Ed Yourdon pointing to a great blog post by Seth Godin] that ends with "By a factor of three, what you do is not nearly as important as how it makes people feel." He's talking about customers, but it applies to everyone in a community, including your co-workers. It doesn't matter if we make the best wiki software in the world if people think we're jerks. It doesn't matter how incisive your assessment of a situation is if it makes the person responsible feel small. That's not wishy-washy or namby-pamby. It's just pragmatic.

We forget what people do for us, but we always remember how people made us feel.