The Work and What Someone Else Sees in It

You show something you have made to two people. One of them responds immediately. There is a part they cannot follow. Something about the work feels unresolved to them. The other sees the same part and tells you it is the most interesting thing there.

Nothing about the work changed between those two encounters. But something new now exists. There is the work you made, what the first person encountered in it, and what the second person encountered in it.

Before anyone else saw it, you could work inside a relatively closed system. You knew what you were trying to do. You could look at what you had made, compare it with your intention, revise it, decide whether it was ready, and keep going.

Then another mind entered the system. They did not receive your intention directly. They encountered whatever the work made available to them, through their own attention, experience, preferences, knowledge and standards. They noticed some things and not others. They made connections you may not have anticipated. They assigned significance differently from you.

You authored the work. You did not author their experience of it. That sounds obvious until their interpretation matters to you.

A second interpretation now exists

Once someone else encounters what you have made, their response is not imaginary simply because you disagree with it. If they found something confusing, then confusion was part of their encounter. If they found it moving, then that response occurred. If they thought the work was conventional, excessive, unfinished, precise, pretentious, generous, dull or extraordinary, that judgment now exists too.

You cannot make it disappear by explaining what you intended. The explanation may change their reading. It may give them information they did not have. They may look again and see something differently. Or they may understand your intention perfectly and still reach the same conclusion.

Their interpretation is real. But there is a small step that often disappears here: their interpretation is real as an interpretation. It is not therefore identical to the thing being interpreted.

Someone saying, “This feels unfinished,” gives you information about what they encountered. It does not transform this feels unfinished to me into this work is unfinished simply by removing the person from the sentence.

That second version may eventually prove to be an excellent description of the work. The person may have seen something you did not. Several other people may notice the same thing. You may return to it yourself and realise that they were right. But something happened between the encounter and the conclusion. An interpretation became a description of reality.

The collapse is easy to miss

This happens constantly because interpretations rarely arrive labelled as interpretations. We do not usually say, “Given what I noticed, the standards I am applying, my understanding of what you were trying to achieve and everything I may have missed, my current interpretation is that this does not work.” We say, “This doesn't work.”

Ordinary language compresses the distinction. Often that is harmless. Conversation would become unbearable if every sentence carried its complete epistemological status. The difficulty begins when the compression disappears from view.

“This doesn't work” can start functioning not as one person’s account of an encounter but as the thing itself: it doesn't work. And when the work matters deeply to us, the collapse can travel surprisingly far: they think the work is weak; the work is weak; I am not capable of doing this; this direction was a mistake; I should stop. A response has moved through several different realities without the transitions being examined.

The opposite move can collapse them just as quickly: they do not understand the work; their judgment is irrelevant; nothing they said tells me anything. Here too, an interpretation of their response has become a conclusion before much has been allowed to remain visible.

Perhaps they misunderstood. Perhaps they saw something accurately and described it badly. Perhaps the work required knowledge you assumed the audience would have. Perhaps they understood exactly what you were doing and disliked it. Perhaps their response reveals more about their preferences than about the quality of the work. Perhaps their interpretation is better than yours.

At this point, we do not know. That uncertainty is not a failure to reach a conclusion. It is a more accurate description of what exists.

The creator does not have automatic final truth either

There is an appealing way to preserve authorship here: to say that other people have opinions, but the creator knows what the work really is. I don't think that holds either.

Creating something gives you a particular relationship to it, not omniscience. You know intentions another person cannot see. You know the decisions that produced what is there. You may understand relationships inside the work that become obvious only because you have been living with them for months.

You are also unusually capable of supplying what the work itself has failed to communicate. You can see the connection because you know it exists. You can experience the ending through everything you meant it to resolve. You can read an ambiguity as deliberate because you remember choosing it.

Someone encountering the work without that internal architecture may expose a gap between what you believe you made and what is actually available to encounter. Their interpretation does not become the truth because it came from outside. Yours does not become the truth because you made the thing.

Now there are at least two readings of the same reality. And that is useful, not because every reading deserves equal weight. It doesn't. Some interpretations are poorly informed. Some depend on criteria irrelevant to what the work is trying to do. Some catch something with extraordinary precision. Some survive examination much better than others.

The important change is simpler: once more than one interpretation is visible, no single interpretation has to remain invisible as reality itself. There is something to examine.

The work has entered a world you do not control

Perhaps this is part of what makes releasing meaningful work feel different from making it. While you are making it, you can change the object. Once another person encounters it, you cannot fully control what happens between the object and their mind.

They may see exactly what you hoped they would see. They may see something better. They may see something you wish were not there. They may miss what matters most to you.

And sometimes their interpretation will have practical consequences. A person may choose not to commission the work, publish it, fund it, buy it, select it or invite you back. Their decision is real too.

Preserving the distinction between interpretation and reality does not protect us from consequences. It gives us a more exact account of what the consequence means. Someone can have the authority to decide whether they want the work without acquiring authority over every question the work raises.

They can decide, “Not for me.” They may even decide, “Not here.” Those are consequential realities. They are still different from: This has no value. This cannot work anywhere. This tells us what you are capable of. This settles what you should make next. Those additional conclusions require additional interpretation.

Something now exists between you and the work

Before the work met another person, you had your own reading of it. Afterwards, there is more reality available.

There is what you intended. There is what you made. There is what another person encountered. There is the interpretation they formed from that encounter. And there is what you make of their interpretation.

Those things can influence one another without becoming the same thing. You may eventually decide that another person saw the work more accurately than you did. You may change it substantially because of what they revealed. You may understand their response and decide not to follow it. You may not yet know what to think.

All of those possibilities remain available for as long as the distinctions remain visible. The important shift may happen before any decision about what to change.

Someone else has seen what you made. Their seeing is now part of the reality around the work. It deserves to exist there without being reduced to noise simply because it is theirs. And it can exist there without quietly becoming the work itself.

When this becomes difficult to see from inside

When someone else’s judgment begins to affect how you see your work, your capability or what you should do next, the difficulty is not always deciding whether to accept or reject it. Sometimes the first task is to see more precisely what has actually happened: what belongs to the work, what belongs to another person’s interpretation of it, what their response genuinely changes, and what conclusions you may be adding yourself.

This is part of the work I do through Coaching: creating a thinking space in which a situation can be examined with enough precision to see what is actually happening, what remains uncertain, and what—if anything—you want to do from there.