Who decides if you've done well?

At some point on the way up, praise thins out. And when it does come, it rarely has the same impact that it used to.

The easy explanation is that things are more complex now.

Early in your career you fixed the thing, delivered the result, and the praise came quickly with specifics.

At senior levels what you deliver is more subtle. It’s more influence than action.

The outcomes are months down the line, and the credit, when it comes, is for work half forgotten. So the praise lands oddly.

But that isn't the whole story.

Praise put you where you are today. The whole climb was a machine that paid out. Hit the target, get the recognition, get promoted, repeat. Twenty years of a reliable external signal telling you that you were doing well.

Which means what felt like drive and high standards was partly chasing validation. And it can work beautifully, right up to the level where it stops.

And when the supply dries up, you find out how much of your sense of value comes from you. For a lot of us, it’s less than we thought. After all the bar was always moving.

And I know for myself, I’d have a success and be looking at the next thing before the last one had settled. Chasing the next success and the, hoped for, next recognition.

What’s hard to ask, isn't "how do I get more recognition." It's why you needed it in the first place.

Because if your sense of having done well lives entirely in other people's reactions, you've handed them something very powerful that belongs to you.

I don't think the answer is to stop caring about what people think. We're not made that way, and I'd be suspicious of anyone who claims they've nailed that. But there's a difference between valuing recognition and requiring it.

The more helpful skill is being able to know, yourself, whether the work was good. With or without someone else saying so.

When the praise stops, how do you know you've done well?

Who decides if you've done well?