Know your strengths even when nobody’s handing out compliments. Praise is weather; skill is climate.

Praise arrives according to who happened to be paying attention that week, which makes it a poor instrument for measuring anything. Skill moves slowly, in a direction, and barely registers day to day. Confusing the two means feeling talented on Tuesday and worthless on Thursday while the underlying ability did not move at all. Only the weather report changed.

Keep an honest, unglamorous record of what you can do now that you could not a year ago. Add to it occasionally. In a week with no praise in it, that record is what you check instead of your mood.