Hey you, what’s up?
I was having a conversation at work today and I’m leaving a note here. What Rotten Tomatoes and Yelp can teach you about quality feedback in the workplace.
A friend of mine that I was sharing with has been struggling with a bit of doubt and second guessing himself at work. Basically just a doubt spiral. Asking questions like, am I crazy? Am I the only one seeing this? Am I just nuts and everyone else is sane? And I told him is that you really need to treat all feedback that you get, not just at work, but all feedback in life, just treat that feedback that you receive like a Yelp review. Treat it like a Rotten Tomatoes review.
Now, what do I mean by that? As a kid, I loved movies. I would often ask for recommendations and sometimes people I really like, some of my best friends would give me recommendations that were garbage. Garbage for me. They were just sharing their opinion, their experience, but as it related to me, it just wasn’t really useful. I don’t like Titanic. I think it’s a terrible movie. Plenty of people love it. All the Oscar show it. But for me that’s a bad note to tell me that I should see Titanic because it’s just not my speed.
In the same way, when you get feedback from other people, understand that, one, it’s just feedback. It’s not even useful or important, only someone sharing something with you. But if you really want to get insight from that feedback, you just have to build a squad of people whose thinking and perspective you trust and who you’ve seen that over time they’re consistent and their points of view have really proven themselves out.
If you don’t have such a team, check out how to stand out with brilliant people.
And you can use this framework to better structure your critical communications with others.
Without that curated squad of people that you know are aligned to you, your interests, smart, thoughtful people that will see things that you won’t, until you get to that point, you just have to treat feedback like feedback or like a review from a random person on the internet. Don’t stress about it. What do you think? Is all feedback good feedback? Is it all useful? Am I crazy? Yeah, just let me know.