The Value of Failure and Feedback: A Guide
When people are huddled at a conference or professional event, the subject often turns to the value of failure and embracing feedback. “It is the key to self improvement!”, many chant, channeling their inner self-help gurus, Sadly, many don’t quite practice what they preach.
Seeing the value in critical feedback and the lessons that failure can offer is a tough pill to swallow. For those confident in their capabilities, their social standing (in their companies/communities etc), and their abilities, the pill goes down a little easier. For those who experience imposter syndrome, feel insecure about their work, or are new in their careers, it is more difficult.
Here’s the thing: these are not binary personalities. While some people are overly confident about themselves, and some people are overly insecure about themselves, most people have a blend of both. As such, even the most confident people can feel the sting when they get critical feedback or screw something up. This is a guide with some things I have learned over the years about how to turn feedback and failure to your advantage.
The Ideal Blend
In my not-so-humble opinion, the perfect blend of a human being is confidence in their ability to execute and accomplish their goals, but with a healthy dose of awareness of their current limitations. Let’s face it, overly confident people are often not just at risk of being swallowed up by ego, but can also lack the empathy to understand other folks they need to work with who don’t share the same confidence.
An understanding of our current limitations is healthy. When we understand we are not great at something, but we are eager to learn and improve, it opens us up to counsel and tuition. The confidence piece plays an important role in helping us to remember: “I might suck now, but I am going to learn and get better”. When we have this in our heads it makes the journey more palatable: we know that our failure to succeed right now is temporary and it will improve.
Pictured: me in a kitchen.
As an example, historically I was an awful cook. When I moved to the US I barely knew how to cook an egg. I was just never interested to learn. Then, I decided to learn to BBQ (after eating some mind-blowing brisket and deciding I needed to make that in my back yard). I started smoking brisket, then pork, and then ribs. Of course, it was all awful and my family suffered through painful bite after painful bite with a lego-like fixed grin on their faces to offer their (at times quite reasonably muted) encouragement.
When I started BBQing though I knew I was at the start of my journey. My previous experiences learning new things (e.g. community strategy, programming in Python, playing the guitar/drums) taught me that we all suck at first. While it was awful, and the failure of making terrible food at family gatherings stung, I knew this was just part of the journey. It would not suck forever, and that focus on the journey helped to seal my confidence to keep succeeding. Importantly, the failure shone a light on where I need to look to improve.
Failure
So, let’s first dig into failure.
When we think of “failing” we typically think of screwing something up. We didn’t deliver a great talk, we didn’t handle a conversation with a peer/boss/customer very well, we didn’t deliver a project on time, the thing we did deliver didn’t work, etc.
Like many things, failure has two pieces to it: a logical and emotional component.
