We should react because it matters, not because it hurts.
You have probably heard the expression “Kill your darling“. If you haven’t just imagine any idea/design/code/work that you have done. Now someone comes along and points out, rightfully so, that whatever we made isn’t good and needs to go. This hurts a little but has to happen – kill your darling.
Now I had this happen to me not to long ago when I had created a document that I took to someone who was going to add their things into that same document. Sitting besides her I watched as she probably took out 70-80% of what I had taken time to create.
Now you might think – who is this delete-happy person? Well actually she is really nice and awesome at her job so I just let her do it. But when she took away something that mattered I politely asked her to back-up and take an extra look at it. And it stayed.
To read another good post on killing your darlings go over to Tereza Brazen’s post at Adaptive Path.
So why am I writing about this?
Because I noticed that everytime she took something away that I had spent time on – it was a little painful. But how much pain is involved isn’t the metric that should trigger our response. But rather how much it impacted on the value of the overall document. Did it get better or worse?