I've always judged myself, to a great extent, on my ability to make others happy. It seems sensible, and I haven't gotten many complaints about it over the years from my family, friends, or colleagues. Part of this stems from my upbringing, and it helps meet a standard requirement for young female behavior. In part, it simply reflects my personality.
In light of that strategy, my choice to enter journalism raised a problem at the outset. If I did my job right, some people were going to be angry. For a while I took refuge in the idea that I was dealing with facts, since I didn't engage in opinion journalism. This worked well, even if a lot of public officials seemed offended at times by unvarnished, unspun facts.
When I decided to write a book on how polarized and dysfunctional Congress had become, however, I couldn't entirely hide behind the facts. After covering the House of Representatives for a decade, I decided to lay out how ideologically extreme lawmakers have undermined democracy by ignoring voters and pursuing their own narrow goals. If I didn't write with authority, and convey what I had seen in the course of covering Congress for years, then the book would be pointless.
I assumed Republicans, in particular, would be furious at me once the book was published since their party runs the House. This caused me some concern because I depend on them, along with some key Democrats, as sources for my daily reporting. Instead, when my book came out this spring, I came under attack from the left for not being harsh enough toward the GOP. Being criticized publicly is always unpleasant, especially when you've spent months working on a book. I took hostile questions during book readings, surveyed snide comments on blogs, fielded angry e-mails, and read a snarky review posted on the Internet about how I had fallen prey to the cult of objectivity. Some conservatives didn't like the book, of course, and they mouthed off at me too.
In the end, I realized that I didn't really care if people got upset over the arguments I made in my book. Some of them made valid points, which I thought about, and others were simply misguided. What mattered most is that I had provoked a reaction, and forced many of the people responsible for the current state of Congress to think about what they had been doing over the past dozen years. One House Republican told me he had forgotten about some of the ways his party had mistreated the minority, while a Democrat confessed he felt sick after realizing how much legislating has deteriorated over the time he's served in Washington.
It made me realize that making people happy shouldn't always be a top priority. In fact, sometimes what people need is a clear-eyed diagnosis of what's ailing them, even if this news may be unpleasant. Occasionally you have to anger people in order to get things done, and it's not so scary once you try it.
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