Appreciation Is a Skill

A few days off with a nasty bug taught me something I keep having to relearn: you don't appreciate what you take for granted until you lose it, even briefly.

It's not a new lesson, just one I keep needing reminding of. William B. Irvine writes about it in A Guide to the Good Life: the old Stoic trick of imagining you've already lost something, just to notice it properly. Viktor Frankl takes it further in Man's Search for Meaning, in the bleakest setting there is: people in the camps had to consciously relearn the ability to be pleased by small things. Appreciation, it turns out, is a skill you can lose, not a mood hardship hands you for free.

Elsewhere this week, an early piece of work to support another programme landed. Rather than quietly absorb it and pile extra onto teams already stretched, the way we've sometimes done before, we ran it through the front door process properly. Early days, not fully worked through yet, but the current signal is there's no spare capacity in Q3. Protecting the work we've already committed teams to matters more than looking accommodating.

A risk and issue review this week showed the maturity gap you'd expect: some teams managing risk well, others not yet there. Rather than a scorecard, I'd call it an opportunity: we've got some genuinely good examples in the room now to help level up the rest.

Lesson learned

Appreciation is a skill, not a side effect. Noticing what you'd miss, and being deliberate about it, takes practice. Hardship doesn't hand it to you for free.