Too little
The private subtraction
Their success shows how far behind I am.
Comparison consumes the opportunity to enjoy what is there.
Benevolence
Your friend’s bird has taken flight. There is still air for yours.
A settled wish for the good of others.
Benevolence welcomes another maker’s good as something worth having. A finished piece, a newly learned skill or a first willing audience can be a real pleasure even when it belongs to someone else. You can attend to what has been achieved and respond specifically. Your own unfinished work need not turn the moment into a comparison.
Benevolence gives pleasure in a creative good beyond your own achievement
A friend shows a bright hanging paper bird they have finally balanced. In your open bag is a smaller bird whose wings are still waiting for an agreement. You look at the turning shape, applaud and tell your friend what you enjoy about its movement. Their success has made something lovely available in the room. It has not issued a verdict on the bird in your bag.
Finding the balance in Benevolence
An illustrative everyday situation
Enjoy a friend’s completed work and name what succeeds in it.
A fitting response
A good worth welcoming
That turning movement is beautiful; I am glad you finished it.
You respond to the person and the actual work.
Pursued too far
Performed delight
I must praise everything so nobody suspects envy.
A performance replaces an honest, particular goodwill.
Another maker’s achievement can enlarge the world you work in.
When the situation changes
You do not enjoy this particular piece. You can still welcome the person’s sustained effort or a genuine achievement you recognize. Benevolence does not require inventing praise or providing a false review.
What Benevolence makes possible
Creative company can become a place of discovery and encouragement rather than continual ranking. You may learn from someone else’s success, but it need not earn its place by becoming useful to you. Sometimes the fitting response is simply to enjoy and acknowledge a good thing.
Benevolence in ordinary life
A first performance
Attend to a friend’s debut and name a moment that reached you. Let their occasion remain theirs.
A new opportunity
Welcome a maker’s good news without immediately explaining why you deserved something similar. Return to your own next step afterward.
Nearby virtues, different work
Generosity
Generosity offers practical help. Benevolence can take pleasure in a good outcome even when you contributed nothing to it.
Sincerity
Sincerity keeps the response honestly meant. Benevolence directs that response toward another person’s good.
Benevolence and its counterfeits
Counterfeit: Approval as a bargain
Praising to secure praise in return is a counterfeit of Benevolence. Genuine goodwill can welcome a good without repayment.
Counterfeit: Compulsory cheerfulness
Demanding that you feel only delight can counterfeit Benevolence. Mixed feelings need not prevent a considerate, truthful response.
How to cultivate Benevolence
Attend to what has actually been made or achieved.
Name something specific you can honestly welcome.
Let comparison pass without making the other person manage it.
Try it today
Goodwill does not require false endorsement, unlimited availability or renewed contact with someone who harms you. Choose an ordinary, welcome exchange.
Give a willing maker’s work your attention and acknowledge one genuine achievement or effect. A private message or conversation is enough when welcome. Then give your own work its next fitting piece of attention.
In a diplomatic conversation
Enjoy another maker’s achievement as something good in itself.
Questions worth returning to
What can I enjoy here before I rank it against myself?
Which good belongs to this person without needing my contribution?
Keep the practice proportionate
Goodwill does not require false endorsement, unlimited availability or renewed contact with someone who harms you. Choose an ordinary, welcome exchange.
About these practices · DisclaimerQuotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
It is surely also a more important thing, for young people and unprofessional students, to know how to appreciate the art of others, than to gain much power in art themselves.
Ruskin includes appreciation among the purposes of learning to draw. Another maker’s accomplished work is a pleasure available to you, beyond comparison with your own.
Such were the men we honour in honouring those works.
Morris is praising the often unnamed craftspeople behind admired objects. Enjoying a finished piece can include glad recognition of the person who made it.
Of course there was a great jubilee, and when the story came everyone read and praised it,
Jo’s family celebrates her first prize story. Their delight in her accomplishment is a real gift, even though her father also thinks her writing can develop further.
And enjoyment radiates.
George Eliot · Middlemarch · CHAPTER XXII. · English original, 1871–1872 · excerpt
Will Ladislaw is defending pleasure in art during a disagreement with Dorothea about exclusion and suffering. His argument is not the novel’s final moral verdict; the short sentence captures how visible enjoyment can welcome others into a work.
There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had well-nigh thought and said.
Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays · THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. · Edna H. L. Turpin edition, 1907 · excerpt
Emerson describes the joy of finding one’s own half-formed thought in a poet. Another person’s achievement can feel like recognition rather than a defeat.
The execution of the plumage in Bewick's birds is the most masterly thing ever yet done in wood-cutting;
Ruskin praises a particular accomplishment even while criticizing other features of Bewick’s work. Appreciation becomes more generous when it can name something genuinely well done.
Nothing has ever more moved, more delighted, more refreshed me; nor has the influence quite passed away.
Stevenson recalls seeing Rosalind played by Mrs. Scott Siddons, after already loving the character on the page. His delight honors both Shakespeare’s writing and the performer who gave it a new presence.
Continue exploring
Take these ideas into everyday life
Read freely, follow the fourteen-virtue program, or adapt this collection in My Virtues. Begin with a piece you want to make.