Creative work doesn’t happen in a vacuum — Make the most of your feedback opportunities
Quality work does not happen in a vacuum, especially creative work. It’s usually the result of great collaborations and a great deal of feedback.
Direct feedback cycles
In Malcolm Gladwell’s acclaimed book Outliers, he illustrates that many top performers accrued 10,000 hours of practice while receiving tons of feedback.
While the 10,000-hour rule — the idea that top performers put in 10,000 hours of practice to become great — is a gross simplification, there are important lessons to pull from it.
Youth league hockey players born closer to January 1 are more likely to make the team. Why? Because they’re older and have a physical advantage over their peers. They get to benefit from a progressive spiral of quality coaching early on and have increased odds of playing professionally.
From 1960 to 1964, The Beatles did over 1,200 shows in Hamburg, Germany. These shows were 8+ hour day-long sets. They were forced to work through tons of material and eventually crafted their own sound through these shows.
There’s a huge difference between getting those hours in the confines of a garage vs. performing in front of a live audience day after day.
Both examples point to the importance of feedback loops.
Most of us get feedback from peers, managers, clients, or even an audience. This feedback is critical to growth, but we don’t always see it that way because something is always at stake: our jobs, ideas, and most of all — our egos.
Getting past our egos and embracing a growth mindset is the first step to receiving quality feedback. But there’s a lot more we can do to make the most out of it.
- Prepare questions
- Prepare for the moment
- Be curious instead of defensive
- Schedule more opportunities for feedback
Early in our careers, we make many intuitive choices but lack the ability to effectively communicate them. This shows up when our work is questioned and we fumble to explain why did things a certain way. Instead of wallowing in frustration, understand that it’s part of the process of creative development.
Preparing for these moments can be challenging for many reasons. Start with knowing your audience and what’s expected of you at the moment. If you have a chance to ask questions, spend some time working through the context they need and how you can provide it with the minimum amount of explanation.
Then prepare those questions. Tim Ferriss is amongst the best out there in crafting questions. I would argue he owes his whole career to that one skill. Here’s a short video on his tips to ask better questions.
Experiments
Experiments are perhaps the most important feedback loop. They help us understand reality. Through experimenting, we discover what works and perhaps more importantly, what doesn’t work.
There are countless examples of one-hit wonders. While the reasons vary, I would argue not knowing why they succeeded in the first place is a vital part of the equation.
It’s easy to focus all of our attention on creating output, after all, it takes a lot of time, effort, and care to produce the work and there never seems to be enough time.
But experiments are critical to being successful and they can also be a lot of fun!
Experiments must be designed and while they don’t always need to follow the rigor of a scientific study, we want to isolate and reduce as many variables as possible.
Let’s say you’re trying to create a specific glaze color for pottery, you’ll need to go through plenty of experiments to come within proximity of that goal. Different glaze combinations will need to be applied to numerous pots. The combinations will need to be documented and any variation in temperature and other conditions will need to be accounted for.
It helps to start experiments on the most fundamental assumptions of your work. What does all of your success depend on?
In the tech world, experiments are a regular activity. Most features and products go through some form of testing whether it’s having potential users work through prototypes or an A/B test where two versions of a screen are presented to different segments of customers.
In The Lean Startup, Eric Reis presented a concept of testing our most fundamental assumptions by shipping an MVP, or Minimum Viable Product. Today, the term is notoriously thrown around to mean anything and everything in tech companies, but it’s essentially a feature/product release stripped down to the essentials to determine whether or not customers really want It.
Reis learned that most startups were creating these elaborate plans and frequently shipping feature releases at a rapid pace without ever understanding if people actually wanted them. As you might imagine, the process led to many failed companies despite the brilliant minds building the products.
The Lean Startup became a movement that emphasized building learning feedback loops into the release cycles which allowed companies to react to what their customers were telling them and change direction if needed.
Performing artists, especially comedians, are also very experimental in their approach to creation. They use the stage and their audience to try different material before recording a comedy special.
In Amy Schumer’s recent docuseries Expecting Amy, we get to see her process of building the material for a Netflix stand-up special.
To create her material for the special, her team schedules numerous gigs across the country and she’s on a tight schedule to get through all of them. Her early shows prove to yield about 10–15 minutes of quality material. Her goal is to put together an hour’s worth.
Successful jokes are repeated at every stop and she tests some variations to see what gets the most laughs. She rewatches her shows as well to better understand what’s working. New jokes are crafted and tested regularly. Over that span of time, a lot of material is discarded and you see her tracking and accruing minutes of material until she finally has enough of it.
It’s a rigorous process, in the docuseries, Schumer is pregnant and also going through the challenges of a very difficult pregnancy while staying on schedule and endlessly working out her jokes.
In Skip the Line, James Altucher dedicates a whole chapter to experiments and he gives two examples of some wild experiments he does as an amateur comedian.
One experiment was performing a comedy act on the New York City Subway. Talk about dealing with a tough crowd!
Another experiment involved doing his act as a follow-up to the famed comedian Tracy Morgan at a comedy club. Most amateurs dread this experience. The crowd was already delighted with an unexpected celebrity and the best act they would see that night. They’re no longer paying attention.
Altucher took each of these moments as an opportunity for experiments.
Performing in front of a non-responsive crowd is tough, but every comedian deals with it. He chose to exaggerate that experience in both of these scenarios.
By doing so, he learned about himself as a performer and the effectiveness of his material. How did the situations impact his delivery? Did certain jokes land well despite all these challenges? How effective is he at thinking on his feet in more stressful environments?
Out of all of these feedback loops, experiments give us the most valuable information on what to focus on and what to abandon. The Lean Startup introduces the build, measure, and learn feedback loop and experiments are an integral part of that cycle.
Originally published on Boundless Canvas on January 26, 2023.
