Are you hungry enough?
So I’m at home on a Saturday night, and I’m watching America’s Next Top Model, one of my guilty pleasures and trashy TV shows that I sometimes tune into (it’s that, Project Runway, and Suits that make me curl up with a bowl of popcorn after a long day).
While you can hold your comments about my show preferences, I noticed something about people in competition — and in life — that’s critically important.
Three models are competing to book a show. They’ve got their fierce looks on, they have to show their chops, demonstrate what they’ve learned, and show their skill in posing and/or walking. Two of them get booked — and one of them doesn’t.
Sometimes, after a competition, the TV cuts to a scene of the competitor in a corner, crying. “I don’t know what I did wrong,” they wail, teary-eyed. “I just don’t get it! I thought I was totally going to get this job!”
In two cases, however, I watched as one of the contestants got cut — and she walked up to the judge and asked,
How can I be better?
The judge gave a few remarks about confidence, etc, and the model continued to drill him:
“I’d really love your feedback because I want to get this right. I know it’s fiercely competitive, and I’m interested in upping my game.”
Both times, the contestants that took the exact moment where they got feedback that told them they weren’t as good as their peers, taking that opportunity to learn, grow, and build — the contestants transformed the most week over week.
Granted, this is ANTM. I’m blushing just writing about this.
But I see this happen all the time in real life, too.
My friends who are building programs on the internet, making projects, delivering results, starting companies — the most successful people I know are insanely curious about making things better. They take their project, put it in the world, and ask for feedback.
They know that life is a continuous game of learning, one that started when we were born. As toddlers, we might fall a hundred times while learning to walk, but very few of us sat pouting in a corner after we fell down a couple of times. We wanted to walk.
Not all feedback is the same, however.
Great feedback you can use. Great feedback is specific, clear, and something that you can work on. Negative comments for the sake of being mean should be ignored. (That’s called a troll). When someone has something to say that’s constructive, file it away. Store it — because it’s valuable. We wanted to explore, to move.
The hunger to learn is innate.
When life gets a little rough, we can cry. (I do that sometimes. And it often involves trashy TV and a bowl of popcorn in my bed).
And we can also ask,
Good post.
It is very hard to get a good feedback since people are so self-centered and the feedback they give you is not going to be that useful. An approach that works for me is to provide the options that I have come up with and walk the person through the pros and cons of each one and inform the one that I have selected. All I want them to do is ask questions so that I know whether I need to tweak anything.
I struggle with feedback all the time. Both kinds, positive and negative.
As much as I enjoy hearing the good things about my work, it’s also very distracting at times. This is one of the reasons I closed comments on my personal blog. There were posts that became an ego stroke in the comments, and that wasn’t good for me.
I want to write, just to write.
With negative feedback, I have a hard delineating what’s constructive, and what’s meant to tear me down. Sometimes it’s easier to curl up in a corner and not hear anything.
Just being unfiltered, here. ;-)
Sarah – great post! I have to confess, I’m not a huge fan of “feedback”. I don’t mind asking for it, (in fact, I think it’s important), yet find it’s easy to over-react to feedback (both positive or negative) in a way where I’m responding and kow-towing to the vocal minority or outliers (vs the majority or core customer avatar). That said, there’s always patterns to look out for across aggregate feedback.
In our recent StoryU workshop, overall feedback was extremely positive with some great constructive feedback for improvement. Almost everyone scored us 8-10 on key questions, except for two outlier participants who were super disappointed with the workshop and scored us 3-4. So 95% of participants validate general direction (with areas for improvement), and 5% poured on the haterade. So easy for me to get lost in the 5% and forget that people project their own assumptions, story, discomfort, etc…when giving their feedback. i.e. it’s not about me.
Feedback is almost never about the receiver, it’s always about the giver. My intellect gets it, yet my emotional ego still has a hard time letting go and not getting defensive. Just being honest. So I guess, give me the feedback, I just want someone else to look at it. ;)
Such a good post. I have a hard time getting feedback, but I also know I could be more pro-active about seeking it. I’ve been really unmotivated lately, in business and personal life, and something needs to change. I know I can’t continue like this. Thank you for this post, for forcing me to ask myself how I can be better.
Asking yourself “How can I be better?” can be extremely powerful. For me, it helps to see negative emotions as action signals. Instead of fighting these emotions, I let myself feel them and process them. I ask “Why am I feeling this way?”. Then I get curious, get confident, make a decision, and take action. I do as many things as possible to generate enjoyment.
Michael — I totally agree. My logical brain “gets it,” my emotional brain wants to cry in a corner. Honestly, it’s sometimes the hardest thing about making new work in the work: it feels like I’m constantly getting that 5% haterade and I have to learn ways to get through it and deal with it.
My friend Jeff and I have been working on extracting your core value as a person (and the stories you tell to yourself about your value) and the feedback you get about something you’ve made or done — which is distinct and separate from your invaluable presence as a human being. That process has helped me tremendously in becoming excited about getting feedback (and weighting them accordingly to the grumps, groaners, and adoring fans).
Love the unfiltered approach. I am lucky to have had a majority of commenters who are thoughtful, kind, and considerate — like you — and so the comments end up being conversations that teach me more. In this case, I appreciate hearing the additional notes about whether or not comments are useful, how they are useful, and when it doesn’t work.
I think in the context of a competition, getting feedback from the one person who is there specifically to evaluate you can be extremely helpful. I didn’t make it clear that feedback is often best done with very specific people in mind — I don’t think opening up the feedback space for everyone to chime in willingly is the best approach.
Thanks for making me think more about all of this. It comes at the right time!