When I ran the bed and breakfast in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, we had an amazing little restaurant with one of the most talented chefs I’ve known. We served no more than 20 guests a night (our limit), and his food was upscale and … well, perfect.

He frequently tried different recipes to ask for opinions. I’d take a few bites and jump into a critique. “Perhaps this is a little too spicy for the normal palate,” or “Could you serve this with the roasted rosemary potatoes?” One day I took a bite of something and simply moaned with pleasure. It was just too good, like all of his food. And I spent a couple of paragraphs waxing poetic about how my life would never be the same after eating this delicacy.

The chef’s face completely lit up. He was so pleased that I was so pleased. The funny thing was that I was always pleased with his food. But I just assumed that he knew he was amazing and was simply looking for critiques to improve a smidge for the table.

I learned my lesson that even artisans want to know they’re doing a good job, even if it’s a given that they are doing a fantastic job. Very few people in the universe eschew sincere praise.

As a professional copywriter, I provide a service. I write. I produce brochures, press releases, articles for newsletters, flyers… That’s what I do. And I’m becoming much more accustomed to the concept that people expect my writing to be perfect or at least darn good. If I sucked at writing, I wouldn’t be a writer. When you go to a fast-food restaurant and order a hamburger, and the woman at the window gives you a hamburger, rarely do you stop and say, “Wow… thanks for giving me a hamburger that tastes like a hamburger.” It’s what you expect.

I wrote a pretty durn good press release the other day, and I was quite excited to give it to my clients. The feedback I got was, “Please change the contact name and change the dates for the event. We have no other changes.”

It’s fantastic, fantastic, fantastic that I nailed the release in the first draft. I had budgeted 2 rounds of review into the  proposal, and I’m done. I’m proud, and they’re probably content that they got a hamburger from a place that produces hamburgers. And just because they didn’t send me a fruit basket to thank me for my beautiful press release, I’m still very content.

I spent much of Saturday working up first drafts for another new client who had hired me for a marketing analysis but who hadn’t really seen much of my copywriting. The first part of their response was a list of small changes to content and layout. It wasn’t quite like getting an English paper full of comments in red from your teacher, but I sure was hoping they liked what I sent. Then I saw it…. at the bottom of their list of changes, they wrote, “I love it! Good stuff.”

I do get wonderful feedback on a fairly regular basis. When I received a late-night email from one of my clients last week, I popped her back a note that she works too much (with the requisite smiley face to show I was being friendly). She wrote back another friendly note saying, “But you sure help make my life easier!” She’s actually is the toughest with a red pen when it comes to editing my first drafts, and I was thrilled to know that she saw what I do as such a help to her.

I’m glad I’m at the point in my career that I recognize my writing not as some kind of gift to humanity but rather as a service I perform for people who have neither the time nor the inclination to perform it themselves. I’ll revel in positive feedback when I receive it, but I’m content to know that if people just grab what I create and go, I’m successfully providing a needed service and I should be proud as well.