Spend even a few hours interviewing job candidates and you’ll hear the phrase “I love getting feedback” over and over again.
Some of these claims are sycophantic, simply attempting to convince the interviewer that the candidate is infinitely adaptable. But most of the claims are honest – the candidate genuinely believes this about themselves.
The problem is, those candidates are wrong.
There is a real thing that they love getting. But it’s not feedback. It’s guidance.
In school, when you are assigned math homework, you know several things:
- There is a correct answer to this question.
- If I can’t find it, other people, like my teacher, WILL know how to find it.
- I will know, or be able to easily verify, when my answer is correct.
Then, when you struggle, you are given pointers to help you slowly make your way towards the known correct answer; and when you get the correct answer, you get praise. You never need to feel uncertainty – you know when you’re right, and even when you’re wrong, you know there are safety rails that can ensure you get to the right answer as long as you’re willing to listen.
This is a comfortable state to live in, hence so many people believing they “love feedback.” Who wouldn’t love to have a job where they could always know if they had done the best thing, and if they ever struggled, someone would be able to give them 100% accurate guidance on how to improve?
The problem, of course, is that this isn’t how actually interesting problems in the real world work.
In most jobs, you never know if your approach is the best one; you only find out later whether it was at least good enough. But you’re never given that reassurance that you’ve “finished” the work, because there IS always more to learn and improve on.
In most jobs, when you don’t know the answer, it’s YOUR job to figure it out as the expert; if someone else already knew the answer, they’d be giving it instead of having you waste time figuring it out.
Real problems aren’t like solving math homework. They aren’t even like finding your way through an obstacle course in pitch blackness, because that assumes that there’s a “real” obstacle course with a “real” answer somewhere just out of sight.
No, real problems are like discoveries in science. There’s no guarantee there even will be an answer, any more than the universe promises some “perfect cure for cancer” exists. You might end up wasting days, or weeks, or decades on a project that was always hopeless, because literally nobody could tell it was hopeless up front.
If you’re doing the real work of solving something *new*, whether it’s a large or small problem, you are never ever finished except when you decide you are. It’s never ever good enough except when you decide it is. And nobody can ever tell you how to do better, because they don’t know the answer either. The best help anyone can offer is some vague gestures at what they would do, or more often, some areas where they can tell you’re NOT doing the best thing, even if they don’t know any better than you what the best thing would be.
That is what “feedback” actually is.
Guidance is reassuring and always helpful. Feedback is, at best, companionship while flailing in the dark; and at worst, is simply being reminded of all the limitations and flaws of what you’ve done so far, and even who you are, and the way you operate and think.
Being good at taking feedback isn’t about enjoying it. No matter how exciting or energizing the problem, being reminded of the vast uncertainty surrounding you is never fun.
Being good at taking feedback is about caring more about improving than about your current conception of yourself.
If you want to believe that you’re smart, feedback will constantly remind you of the limits of that intelligence.
If you want to believe you’re charismatic, feedback will constantly remind you of your gaffes and ill-thought comments.
If you want to believe you’re dedicated, feedback will constantly remind you of your lapses and distractions.
But if you don’t care if you’re smart, or charismatic, or dedicated, so long as you win, if you know that no illusion or delusion will improve your life half as much as actually solving the problem, then you can at least appreciate, if not enjoy, feedback.
Not because it helps – by definition, nobody can ever really know if it will or not, and it’s up to you to judge.
You simply appreciate it because you know that whoever is giving it to you also cares about solving the problem, and now you have the brainpower, creativity, and expertise of two people instead of one.
Stop talking about how much you love feedback. Start talking about the problems that matter enough to you that feedback is worth the burden.
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