Perhaps no one will notice that I've posted this.

Oh well.

From Alan Perlis' Epigrams on programming comes the following nugget:

"Dealing with failure is easy: Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle: You've solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve."

- something I more or less live by. The case that that quote doesn't handle, however, is a lack of feedback, positive or negative, which I find much harder to handle. You can't even safely default to the eventual "work hard to improve" path, because you don't know where to put more work in. The path of least ambiguity here is to set on fire the person whose responsibility giving feedback is supposed to be, but even that's still slightly ambiguous. After all, they might think (in the short period during which they still can think at all, that is) that you're setting them on fire for some other, entirely unrelated reason.

(* Disclaimer: Setting people on fire isn't (usually) necessary. Most of the time, a quick flame war will suffice, with the additional benefit of not damaging the carpets.)