One (more) theory on feedback 💎 Issue #69
Plus: awesome habits for managers, more mental models, and the games we play through a bible story.
Happy Friday👋
What’s up? 🧩
🍗 I’ve been chewing on this theory about feedback and I want to share it with you, irreducible reader.
🤼♂️ The way we usually look at feedback always involves one person reaching out to another to offer a perspective on a certain event and maybe some tips on how to achieve better outcomes next time around. And there are exactly zero things wrong with that.
🕳 The thing is feedback is entirely dependent on the other person having the will, and dare I say talent, to come up with it. As a growing tool, if you are reliant on having others coming to you with it, you might be waiting forever, or at a minimum, you might be missing important blind spots because they were also invisible to the people working with you.
👠 There might be an alternative to keeps us busy though. But it’s not going to be comfortable.
📢 My theory is that we should pay our best attention to what makes us uncomfortable about what others are doing and saying because more often than not, it’s our ego raising its defenses against what it knows we are lacking.
💖 Our ego loves us, probably more than our mothers when breastfeeding us, and it will do everything in its power to keep us from making mistakes and expose our weaknesses. Every time I feel discomfort about someone’s behavior and start asking questions, digging deep, more often than not, I discover my ego coming up with a lot of excuses as to why we should never do what that guy is doing because that must be wrong, or insane since we are not like that.
☣ This is not a campaign for you to copy others, or worse, start with unacceptable behaviors. I’m trying to demonstrate that experiencing others doing something we don’t do, or are doing it better than us, will feel very similar to the same person doing something worse than us, or plain wrong. It will be uncomfortable.
🔎 Next time that happens, investigate a little further, and see if you find your ego coming up with excuses. I’m willing to bet that, sometimes, the feedback someone is not giving you, the feedback you need, is being covered up by the little guy telling you to feel weird.
And now the best things I found on Internet this week.
New to me 💡
The 25 Micro-Habits of High-Impact Managers | 21 min read
🧭 The title sums it up nicely and there are great nuggets here for leaders and people interested in getting their teams to their best version.
🦸♂️ “Sean Twersky, VP of Operations at UserLeap, suggests managers commit one particular phrase to memory — and use it liberally. “I trust you, make the call” might be the six most powerful words you can hear from a supervisor.”
Peter Thiel on Cain and Abel | 3 min read
📙 I enjoyed Peter Thiel’s ‘Zero to One’ (short and you can’t find fluff in it), but never in thousands of years would I connect it to one of the most famous bible stories.
🎯 “Why do so many prodigies burn out? They can’t take the stress of competition. They don’t want to be Cain or Abel. What is the solution to the conundrum? To transform a desire to beat a competitor into a desire to find beauty in the game itself. Aesthetics moves us from asking “How can I win?” to “How can I appreciate?””
Mental model examples: How to actually use them | 16 min read
🧠 It’s a long time since the last article I shared about one of my favorite topics. This has been on my reading list for a while and it was worth it since it’s one of those articles with examples of how to apply the stuff it describes.
🚀 “Here's a mental model that Musk uses to reduce complex systems: First Principles — What is the most efficient way to solve a problem if you started from scratch? If you look past humanity’s attempts to solve it, what is the best approach if you reasoned from its fundamental principles? The SpaceX team looked past decades of incremental rocket improvements to re-examine spaceflight from scratch. They asked, What do the underlying engineering (not historical) principles reveal to be the most cost-efficient and power-efficient way to build a rocket? They worked up from those physical realities to build the world’s most efficient rocket.”
The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday | 3 min read
📈 We need these examples: Doing something little for a long time can return surprising dividends.
🧱 “I shall write some code every day before or after work. That’s it. No deadlines, no quarterly goals, no milestones. I did not have a choice really — I was about to get married and was already working full-time in a demanding role. As you can imagine, building a search engine from scratch is not a trivial undertaking, so that was my way of not having to deal with additional stress.”
Please help me grow this newsletter! I’d love if you shared it with your more curious friends.
A most researched tweet ⏱
This week in a gif 😤
High note ⚡
This issue cover picture comes from here.
Last issue most clicked link was 6 Photographers Asked to Shoot Portraits of 1 Man… With a Twist.
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Until next week,
Filipe