The work that changed you may matter more than the praise that arrived afterward.

Praise is loud and brief, and it attaches to a result rather than to you. What stays is what the work did while you were inside it: the patience you had to find, the thing you can now do that you could not before, the fear you got used to. Applause sometimes arrives for work that changed nothing, and the deepest work sometimes passes unremarked. The two are measuring different things.

Look back at something you made and ask what it left in your hands rather than what it earned. Then choose the next project partly for what it will teach you.