The Proper Way to Handle Criticism

When you say feedback makes you better, I believe in that more than I believe in just about anything on Earth. If you want to improve, you need really good feedback. But I would also say there are a lot of forms of feedback, including negative feedback that isn't really criticism that isn’t painful at all.

Well, I think about like, I’m a kind of mid-career golfer, one of my favorite things about golf is that the feedback loop is super tight. It’s so short because it’s immediate, right? You see if the ball went where you want it to go. And also, once you start to learn a little bit about the physics of the swing and how it works, you become self-diagnosing. So, you do not only know where the ball went, you know why it went off course. And that to me is a really exciting thing because it’s hard to learn or improve at anything without getting feedback. But the kind of feedback I’m talking about is criticism of how I did a certain thing assessed by someone else.

Everybody says they want it and nobody really does. And honestly, I think it is a universal paradox that we know it’s good for us. Here’s the way I feel about accepting criticism. If people are coming at you with feedback that is useful for improving yourself, then you should run at it and embrace it, even if it’s painful. But if they’re criticizing you on a dimension that is either dogmatic or personal, or unbalanced, which you often encounter, what you have to do is you have to learn to sort out the different categories of criticism.

Let’s say I write an article or do a podcast that gets 500 comments or replies on Twitter. It doesn’t take that long to triage through and say, okay, those 400 likes saying, Yeah, that’s nice but then there’s 80 that say, oh, I can’t believe you let this person come on your show to say these things. And to them, I say, okay, that’s a listener who’s got a point of view that I disagree with. I think it’s nice to have people you may disagree with voice their views and hear about them, right. And then there might be 10 or 15, that actually say, you know, you tried to make this point, but ultimately, you failed because you didn’t bring in this variable or this idea. And to me, that is the most valuable.

I feel the biggest problem with criticism and accepting feedback is that since the vast majority is mostly noise, most people don’t want to sift through to get the signal that will actually make them better.

I personally still find it hard to take. I really do. If you taught a class, and your students rate your class. And then they have these open-ended comments. You’re hoping to get 10 out of 10. You see a student’s given you a three out of 10, which happens, so, you’re awake at night worrying about it. They are completely anonymous, so you can’t seek out that person.

So many of us just want praise but there’s another competing part of me that wants to get better and wants to make the next class better. And I think this explains why everybody knows that feedback makes them better. And then nobody wants it. It’s not inconsistent when you just realize that people contain multiple cells, multiple motives. And I found this helpful trick where you ask for feedback. If you get critical feedback, grade yourself on how you received the feedback. It gives you the opportunity to, you know, still get a 10 out of 10. Because you could get a 3 out of 10 from the student. And then you could say, oh, but you know what, I give myself a 10 out of 10, for listening to the feedback.

For a short while, I was asking for numeric ratings on dinner, like from a scale of zero to 10. How are we rating this enchilada? Seven? How can I make it an eight? One thing I will say is that when it comes to things that are not part of your identity, I mean, the paradox is that the core identity of a person is the actual thing that they do want to probably get better at, right? So, say somebody says, like, you’re a little condescending. In my identity, I really don’t want to be that sort of person, so I immediately tag it as ridiculous. But that’s the exact kind of criticism I should be open to. So, I think I’ve achieved some kind of awareness and I think that’s progress.

I think it’s also fair to ask yourself, Well, okay, this person has a critical thing to say, I recognize it as legitimate. But there’s also a reason that you do it. And you’re okay with that. It’s important to acknowledge that there’s great heterogeneity among humans, and no one likes everything.

So, here’s an example: When I was in grad school, I did an MFA writing program. And there were workshops and seminars, seminars were kind of instruction workshops where students would bring in their writing. So you would get somebody’s manuscript and it would usually be like 30, to 50 pages of a novel or a short story, take them home and read and then you’d come in and you’d discuss them. As you can imagine, those conversations could become very fraught with all different sorts of emotions. There were all kinds of cliques, friendships, enemies, there were people who liked a certain style of writing and others who didn’t. But what was really interesting to me, is, once you get a few weeks into the semester, it was totally predictable who would like what and why? So, you knew probably even before you entered the room, everybody knew really, who was going to like it in an earnest way, who is going to like it in a grudging way, and so on and on. And then I started to think, well, what if you brought in here a manuscript that didn’t have a name on it anonymous? And let’s say I’m the professor and I slip in a manuscript that’s not written by someone in the class, maybe it’s Virginia Woolf? Maybe it’s Tolstoy, and I can tell you that Virginia Woolf would have gotten the crap beat out of her in that class, including by people who think they love Virginia Woolf.

So, I’m saying that sometimes, these are biased reviews.

I’m saying, there’s bias, there are tastes, and there’s preference. And so, when you are the person getting the criticism, you have to say to yourself, you know, what, if it’s golf, the shot was good or not, right? But if it’s subjective, you have to say there is a group of people out there who are not interested in this idea for reasons that I may think are legitimate or not, and I’m going to be okay with having that criticism exists.

If you’re a banker, you’re a writer, you’re a parent, creative person, whatever, the biggest mistake we can make, and I’ve made this mistake, is to let criticism hurt you to the point where you narrow and shrink your drive. You shouldn’t let someone else’s criticism, which may or may not have been legitimate, shrink your choice set, I want to be the only one shrinking my choice. And that’s where I feel that criticism hurts a lot of people unduly.

At the end of the day, you’re the one that’s making the decision, you need to forge on until you’re convinced that it’s no good or good.

So, I think the summary recommendation is that we should be hungry for feedback. And actually, that appetite for knowing what other people think doesn’t mean that we have to swallow everything. I read a study colloquially known as the “wise-feedback paper,” which found that teachers were able to make feedback 40 percent more effective by prefacing it with 19 words. The 2014 study was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General and is called, “Breaking the Cycle of Mistrust: Wise Interventions to Provide Critical Feedback Across the Racial Divide.”

It was a random assignment study. I remember very well from reading it the first time where students are writing essays in class. And the miraculous effect was that the students who got this short encouragement, just 19 words, were much more eager to do something with the feedback. So, they revised their essays. I think in some subsequent studies, they did better academically, especially students who had been struggling. And it’s terrific advice for all of us feedback givers. And we all are in one way, shape, or form, which is I think what we’re trying to communicate to people is useful information. And this little preface inoculates the receiver from the kind of like, I’m not good, and you don’t think I can make it. And I think a lot of times when people get criticism, they think the real message is that they’re not going to make it. And this little 19-word preface says, the reason I’m giving you this feedback is because I think you are going to make it and this is going to help you get there.

I will say, as a receiver of feedback, not a dispenser, but as a receiver, I kind of am attracted to the idea of radical candor, as some people call it. Obviously, every environment is different but some of the criticism that I remember the most as feeling hurtful, it was unspoken criticism, kind of like a passive-aggressive.

So, this idea of radical candor came from Kim Scott who wrote a book called Radical Candor, and Bridgewater Associates’s Ray Dalio famously practices radical transparency. Kim Scott refers to that type of language as obnoxious aggression. And she says that when practicing radical candor, feedback should be delivered in a kind and helpful manner. And I think the basic idea is, when you have a culture of truth-telling, like at all times, like, you know, Blessing, your breath smells. That joke was both unfunny and inappropriate. I think the problem is when you have some people who are blind to radical candor and other people who hate it.