The Unprocessed Version (Or, “Tell Me Now, Not Three Months Later”)
As their words got harder to understand, my girlfriend’s laugh rang louder and louder, and her mother’s grin got wider.
Where had this gone so badly wrong?
The mystery narcotic that sent us spinning into gales of numb, chaotic laughter?
Cranberry sauce.
It was the first Thanksgiving of our dating life. Partly to show that I know my way around the kitchen but also because I enjoy it, I volunteered to cook some side dishes. (Future Mom-in-Law, fortunately, had the foresight not to let me prove my mettle with the bird. And we will not speak of the meringue, intended for pie, that refused to set and was henceforth known as “egg-and-sugar soup” until meeting its end in the garbage disposal.)
For me, cranberry sauce is whole berries, sugar and water, heated in a saucepan. Maybe add some pieces of an orange or a sliced apple? Sure. But please, don’t bring that canned, slurp-and-glup jelly missile into any kitchen I’m in.
And yes, I also like a touch of clove flavor. A quarter-teaspoon of ground cloves is just enough to flavor a pound of berries, reduced in boiling simple syrup at a 1:1 berry-to-syrup ratio.
Important: Ground cloves.
On this occasion, all I had in the cabinet were whole cloves—and I had never used them before. For anything.
But, I reasoned in the moment, how do ground cloves happen? Someone takes whole cloves and grinds them.
It never occurred to me that store-bought ground cloves have been dried, processed, and packaged such that most of their spicy, oily mojo is gone by the time they hit you in the berries. And that oil is serious stuff: strong enough to dissolve plastic, and to numb your mouth before your dentist gives you an injection.1
And, in fact, a quarter-teaspoon of hand-crushed whole cloves turned my cranberry sauce into a mild anesthetic.
It’s way, way too much.
The unprocessed version of “enough”
That cranberry disaster reminded me of something important: the raw, unprocessed version of something is almost always more potent than the watered-down thing you buy at the store. And it turns out that’s true for a lot more than spices.
Take the word “enough.”
In my working life, I’ve had a complicated relationship with the woo-woo, self-helpy notion that whatever adversity you face, you are “enough” to overcome it.
“Perfect, just as you are. Strong enough for any challenge that gets thrown your way.”
If that works for you, no judgment. For me, it never quite landed.
“Enough,” to me, seemed like the tip of the scorpion’s tail. When someone takes a resigned breath and decides we’ve “done enough,” that’s the moment of the sting, after which it’s hard to imagine doing or being more. “Better,” it has seemed to me, is always possible, and “enough” is a complacency trap.
When I believed the boss or client who told me I’d done enough, and built an idea in my mind of what I thought “enough” looked like in a given context, behavioral conditioning seemed to take over. The desire to push for “more, clearer, better” seemed to diminish. And to advance the work to a place I knew I was capable of reaching, it would take an extra push—or something extrinsic—to remember that I could, should, must.
Conversely, at work we’re often shown or told by well-meaning co-workers, bosses, or clients that we haven’t met that definition of enough—without acknowledging how vague and hugely subjective that is as a form of feedback.
How is anyone supposed to know, all by themselves, how to bridge the gap between “not enough” and “enough”?
Giving the kind of specific feedback about what you’re doing right—and should do more of—while you are doing it is a learned skill. It’s too rarely taught, and it’s a low priority in preparing most new managers for their roles.
Great feedback is clear, specific and timely
Consider it as a new team member might:
“When you only tell me I’m enough, I might believe you. But sooner or later I’ll be surprised by how much it feels like I suck. And if you only tell me I’m not enough, I might believe you, and I’ll try harder, work longer, experiment until something sticks. But unless you tell me *where* to make changes, I might just become neurotic, or sad, or disengaged.”
Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, in their Harvard Business Review piece The Feedback Fallacy, argue that we learn and grow not by cataloging our deficiencies, but by replaying our moments of excellence—catching people doing the right thing and telling them what we saw, while they can still remember the context and build on it.
That’s the part most feedback misses: the timing. If you wait until July to tell me what I did well in mid-April, I probably don’t remember what I was thinking, how I approached it, or what felt different that time. And if you wait three months to tell me I missed the mark, I’ve probably made the same mistake a dozen more times by then, and now it feels like a character flaw instead of a moment I could have adjusted in real time.
If you’re leading a team, or working closely with someone, here’s the ask:
- Tell your feedback subject what’s working.
- Tell them *why* it’s working, in enough detail that they can recognize the pattern and repeat it.
- And do it now—not in a quarterly review, not in a feedback sandwich three months later, but while the moment is still warm and they can actually do something with it.
That’s the version of “enough” that might actually help: not a vague reassurance that I’m “fine as I am,” and not a vague warning that I’m falling short. Specific, timely attention to what’s happening right now. The unprocessed version. The kind that hasn’t been dried out, committee-edited, and packaged into a performance review template.
Just like whole cloves, a little of that goes a long way. Use it carefully, and use it when it counts.
- The active compound in clove oil, eugenol, really does dissolve certain plastics and is used as a natural anesthetic in dentistry before injections. (If we ever meet in person, ask me why this is important.) ↩︎