The important thing is this: Do not be discouraged by this or any other momentary setback. The road is long; the struggle must go on.
This is just so well done.
Finding a way to be both kind, supportive, and honest is one of the hardest things in the world. Especially at scale.
If this doesn’t seem hard to you right now, just wait. In the same way that crap web hosts oversell the bandwidth they’ve promised their customers, our various social networks, both formal and informal, encourage us to way oversell on familiarity and assumed attention. And, more importantly, they exist primarily to enable unlimited access without doing anything to express, produce, or negotiate a shared expectation.
Viz: Imagine a day when every one of those friends (contributors? publishers? aspiring anybodies?) all need you at exactly the same moment, and that each cares intensely about how and when you respond personally. Heck, maybe they even judge you based solely on how well you help them, without knowing how many other folks expect precisely the same treatment. A pebble is just a pebble, right? Exactly.
That’s the day you realize what Mr. Junker appears to have learned. That, sometimes, the best kindness you can pay someone is to be candid about what they can expect from you. But, yes, oh gosh yes absolutely, it does help to be very kind about it.
Because every word matters when a stranger offers you his pebble.
(Man. Somebody should write a book about this stuff.)
[via]
emphasis mine.
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