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3 Types of Useless Feedback That Hurt More Than Help
These kinds of advice will slow your professional growth unless you ignore them
I was sitting next to my boss on a 12-seat plane flying to a small town called Gillam, Manitoba on one of the first days of my first real job as a prosecutor in northern Canada. Over the drone of the propellors I asked him if he had any reading recommendations to help me get up to speed as fast as possible. He reached into one of the two tactical bags full of files next to his seat, pulled out an extra copy of the 2012 Tremeear’s Criminal Code of Canada, and plopped it in my lap.
“The Code,” he growled, referring to the 2000+ page tome he’d just given me.
“What part?” I asked.
“All of it,” he replied, pausing just long enough to make it obvious that he thought my question answered itself.
This exchange has stuck in my mind for over twelve years. Not because I thought the advice was particularly helpful, but because I’d encounter similar advice again and again, both in law and in freelance writing.
In this story, I’m going to write about three kinds of unhelpful advice and feedback that say more about a lack of effort on the part of the mentor than they do about the skills or potential of the mentee. Let’s go!
The indiscriminate
I don’t mean to give the wrong impression of my first law boss with my introduction. I really did end up learning a ton from him. He was just kinda rough around the edges.
And conversations like the one I described didn’t really help to soften his image. Yes, it was obvious that I was going to have to be familiar with the Criminal Code of Canada. It formed the core of the law I was setting out to practice.
But it was equally obvious that there were more and less applicable parts of the Code. Some bits I would deal with every day. Some I might use only once or twice in my entire career. What I was clearly looking for at that time was some help prioritizing and categorizing the massive amount of information available to me as a student-at-law.
