Feedback Importance Quotes

I think it's very important to have a feedback loop, where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better.

When we stop caring about what people think, we lose our capacity for connection. When we become defined by what people think, we lose our willingness to be vulnerable. If we dismiss all the criticism, we lose out on important feedback, but if we subject ourselves to the hatefulness, our spirits gets crushed. It's a tightrope, shame resilience is the balance bar, and the safety net below is the one or two people in our lives who can help us reality-check the criticism and cynicism.

Feedback is important to people. We all want to know how well we’re doing. That’s why it is essential for an effective performance review system to provide ongoing feedback.

Another important consequence in the arrival of digital technology and its facilitation of feedback is that we can look at large systems and recognize them once more not only as part of ourselves, but also as components that can change... Now, though, we live in a world where text is fluid, where is responds to our instructions. Writing something down records it, but does not make it true or permanent. So why should we put up with a system we don't like simply because it's been written somewhere?

The important thing about little bets is that they’re bite-sized. You try one. It takes a few months at most. It either succeeds or fails, but either way you get important feedback to guide your next steps. This

Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.” No doubt, entering space is an unforgiving business to deal with but Musk mastered it. His biggest advice is to, “really pay attention to negative feedback and actively solicit it, particularly from friends... hardly anyone does that. It's incredibly helpful.

Giving people room to make mistakes doesn’t mean excusing bad behavior, ignoring poor decisions, or avoiding the feedback they need to hear to be better. Teaching people to problem-solve on their own is important, but so is helping them grow from their mistakes. If they don’t realize they’re doing something wrong to begin with, someone has to tell them.

The next time you are part of a conversation that goes awry, ask for feedback. Let the other person know that the exchange didn’t go as you hoped and you wonder if you could have phrased things differently, or if you were focused on the wrong things, or if you didn’t understand their point. Then listen. Listen to what they have to say without taking offense. Maybe start with someone you know well, like a sibling or a friend. Listening to constructive criticism is never easy, but if your goal is to become better at conversations, it’s important to get an honest assessment of the areas most in need of improvement.

Seeing progress in changing numbers makes the repetitive fascinating and creates a positive feedback loop. Once again, the act of measuring is often more important than what you measure. To quote the industrial statistician George Box: “Every model is wrong, but some are useful.

Nonlinearities are important not only because they confound our expectations about the relationship between action and response. They are even more important because they change the relative strengths of feedback loops. They can flip a system from one mode of behavior to another.

Symptoms of illness and distress, plus your feelings about them, can be viewed as messengers coming to tell you something important about your body or about your mind. In the old days, if a king didn't like the message he was given, he would sometimes have the messenger killed. This is tantamount to suppressing your symptoms or your feelings because they are unwanted. Killing the messenger and denying the message or raging against it are not intelligent ways of approaching healing. The one thing we don't want to do is to ignore or rupture the essential connections that can complete relevant feedback loops and restore self-regulation and balance. Our real challenge when we have symptoms is to see if we can listen to their message and really hear them and take them to heart, that is, make the connection fully.

As CEO, you should have an opinion on absolutely everything. You should have an opinion on every forecast, every product plan, every presentation, and even every comment. Let people know what you think. If you like someone’s comment, give her the feedback. If you disagree, give her the feedback. Say what you think. Express yourself. This will have two critically important positive effects:   Feedback won’t be personal in your company. If the CEO constantly gives feedback, then everyone she interacts with will just get used to it. Nobody will think, “Gee, what did she really mean by that comment? Does she not like me?” Everybody will naturally focus on the issues, not an implicit random performance evaluation.   People will become comfortable discussing bad news. If people get comfortable talking about what each other are doing wrong, then it will be very easy to talk about what the company is doing wrong. High-quality company cultures get their cue from data networking routing protocols: Bad news travels fast and good news travels slowly. Low-quality company cultures take on the personality of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wiz: “Don’t nobody bring me no bad news.

One important role pattern is called “accidental adversaries.”3 If two people bump into each other enough and cause each other enough frustration, each will begin considering the other an “adversary.” Each attributes the problem to the personality and questionable intentions of the other. But often the true culprit is the structure of the roles they are in, which are (accidentally) creating chronic conflict. If we are each at one end of a rope and our job is to pull, then merely doing our jobs creates a tug-of-war.

Like technical debt, management debt is incurred when you make an expedient, short-term management decision with an expensive, long-term consequence. Like technical debt, the trade-off sometimes makes sense, but often does not. More important, if you incur the management debt without accounting for it, then you will eventually go management bankrupt. Like technical debt, management debt comes in too many different forms to elaborate entirely, but a few salient examples will help explain the concept. Here are three of the more popular types among startups: 1. Putting two in the box 2. Overcompensating a key employee, because she gets another job offer 3. No performance management or employee feedback process

Having a learning system in place that enables feedback loops in a practical way is equally important.

the most important driver of autonomy is significance: the sense that what we’re doing matters to us or to others.

When you practice a soft skill, focus on making a high number of varied reps, and on getting clear feedback. Don’t worry too much about making errors—the important thing is to explore. Soft skills are often more fun to practice, but they’re also tougher because they demand that you coach yourself. After each session ask yourself, What worked? What didn’t? And why?

Openness and transparency is a great first step, but it is equally as important to take the results of that openness--the feedback and market research--and integrate it into the product itself.

Performance = Mismatch (Expected Effort/Actual Sense of Effort) Where: Expected Effort= Previous Experience+ Psychological drive (importance) Actual Sense of Effort= (Internal + External feedback)* Hazard + current Psychological Drive

Paying attention to the present moment without letting your thoughts and ideas about the past and the future get in the way is essential. Why? Because it makes room for the views of others. It allows us to begin to trust them—and, more important, to hear them. It makes us willing to experiment, and it makes it safe to try something that may fail. It encourages us to work on our awareness, trying to set up our own feedback loop in which paying attention improves our ability to pay attention. It requires us to understand that to advance creatively, we must let go of something. As the composer Philip Glass once said, “The real issue is not how do you find your voice, but … getting rid of the damn thing.

When we stop caring about what people think, we lose our capacity for connection. When we become defined by what people think, we lose our willingness to be vulnerable. If we dismiss all the criticism, we lose out on important feedback, but if we subject ourselves to the hatefulness, our spirits get crushed. It’s a tightrope, shame resilience is the balance bar, and the safety net below is the one or two people in our lives who can help us reality-check the criticism and cynicism.

Breaking Free Activity #15 It can be difficult to make a direct link between your caretaking behavior and the emotional pukes which inevitably follow. Observe the ways you hurt the people you love. •Do you make cutting remarks or hurtful "jokes"? •Do you embarrass them in public? •Are you frequently late? •Do you "forget" things they've asked you to do? •Do you criticize them? •Do you withdraw from them or threaten to leave? •Do you let frustration build until you blow up at them? Ask the significant others in your life to give you feedback about your caretaking and emotional pukes. This information may be hard to hear and may trigger a shame attack, but it is important information for breaking out of the victim triangle.

The greater the challenge, the higher the probability that one seeks and needs feedback, but the more important it is that there is a teacher to provide feedback and to ensure that the learner is on the right path to successfully meet the challenges.

In addition to beginning and maintaining relationships, many women have let established relationships slip away. Small occasions and important events with other people are missed: there are an increasing number of missed thank-you notes, missed birthdays, or invitations that are not reciprocated. The connections just aren’t kept up, and eventually they’re gone. They then anticipate scolding, rejection, or negative reactions when they think about trying to reconnect or rectify a situation, so they tend to avoid them altogether. While this may be true for everyone to some extent, women with AD/HD with particular histories or wounds are especially sensitive to and avoidant of this kind of potentially critical feedback further increasing the negative cycle.

When a white woman starts to cry, I ask her to take some deep breaths as I invite the group to let her experience her feelings and not try to take care of her or rescue her in the moment. I clearly state that this person can easily be in her feelings and continue engaging and doesn’t need to be comforted or saved by anyone. I then refocus my attention onto the white woman and say how I really respect people who can express their emotions and talk through their tears. I then ask if she is ready to share her reactions to the feedback. In the vast majority of situations, white women are able to continue engaging effectively, and group members realize a number of things, including: people can cry and talk at the same time; jumping in to support someone may be more about trying to avoid our own feelings of discomfort; interrupting the learning moment by handing out Kleenex, rubbing someone’s back or challenging the person of color’s comments may deny the white woman a potentially important growth opportunity; and the entire group may benefit from fully experiencing and processing this emotional moment.

In Wegner’s studies, participants are asked to try hard not to think about something, such as a white bear, or food, or a stereotype. This is hard to do. More important, the moment one stops trying to suppress a thought, the thought comes flooding in and becomes even harder to banish. In other words, Wegner creates minor obsessions in his lab by instructing people not to obsess. Wegner explains this effect as an “ironic process” of mental control. 32 When controlled processing tries to influence thought (“Don’t think about a white bear!”), it sets up an explicit goal. And whenever one pursues a goal, a part of the mind automatically monitors progress, so that it can order corrections or know when success has been achieved. When that goal is an action in the world (such as arriving at the airport on time), this feedback system works well. But when the goal is mental, it backfires. Automatic processes continually check: “Am I not thinking about a white bear?” As the act of monitoring for the absence of the thought introduces the thought, the person must try even harder to divert consciousness. Automatic and controlled processes end up working at cross purposes, firing each other up to ever greater exertions. But because controlled processes tire quickly, eventually the inexhaustible automatic processes run unopposed, conjuring up herds of white bears. Thus, the attempt to remove an unpleasant thought can guarantee it a place on your frequent-play list of mental ruminations.

After seven centuries of existence and at least four centuries where few citizens existed without it, the datasphere – including the All Thing and all comm and access bands – simply ceased to be. Hundreds of thousands of citizens went insane at that moment – shocked into catatonia by the disappearance of senses which had become more important to them than sight or hearing. More hundreds of thousands of datumplane operators, including many of the so-called cyberpukes and system cowboys, were lost, their analog personas caught in the crash of the datasphere or their brains burned out by neural-shunt overload or an effect later known as zero-zero feedback.

a human mind with no fear, no happiness, nothing but a limited, artificially induced autism, bent to one task over all. But fear was deemed to be too important a feedback mechanism, too critical to the learning process, so our generation was left with most of our emotions intact, and the vague theory that time would teach us how to make the best use of things.

The strength of a balancing feedback loop is important relative to the impact it is designed to correct. If the impact increases in strength, the feedbacks have to be strengthened too. A thermostat system may work fine on a cold winter day—but open all the windows and its corrective power is no match for the temperature change imposed on the system. Democracy works better without the brainwashing power of centralized mass communications. Traditional controls on fishing were sufficient until sonar spotting and drift nets and other technologies made it possible for a few actors to catch the last fish. The power of big industry calls for the power of big government to hold it in check; a global economy makes global regulations necessary.

We feel the emotions of the people whom we have helped or hurt, loved and hated, or affected positively or negatively. We feel their emotions very deeply, because this is a powerful learning device, a sort of instant intense feedback about our behavior while we were on earth, in physical bodies. We learn through relationships, and thus it is important that we understand how we have touched others.

When I took over as chair of the fashion program, I was horrified that only the faculty member was allowed to speak in a critique. I'm talking about perfectly nurturing teachers. But the rule was there would be no call of hands for students to contribute their feedback. It was embedded in the department's culture. That was alarming to me. When I was teaching, I was the least important person in the room as far as I was concerned--my students' points of view mattered most. I wanted to learn who they were and teach them to respect one another's perspectives. I would start off by saying something like, "I am having trouble understanding how this work solves the problem at hand. Here are some things about the work that I appreciate: X, Y, Z. But I see these virtues independent of the problem we're solving.

Jenna Wortham from the Times describes this mentality well: “We, the users, the producers, the consumers—all our manic energy, yearning to be noticed, recognized for an important contribution to the conversation—are the problem. It is fueled by our own increasing need for attention, validation, through likes, favorites, responses, interactions. It is a feedback loop that can’t be closed, at least not for now.

What, in fact, do we know about the peak experience? Well, to begin with, we know one thing that puts us several steps ahead of the most penetrating thinkers of the 19th century: that P.E’.s are not a matter of pure good luck or grace. They don’t come and go as they please, leaving ‘this dim, vast vale of tears vacant and desolate’. Like rainbows, peak experiences are governed by definite laws. They are ‘intentional’. And that statement suddenly gains in significance when we remember Thorndike’s discovery that the effect of positive stimuli is far more powerful and far reaching than that of negative stimuli. His first statement of the law of effect was simply that situations that elicit positive reactions tend to produce continuance of positive reactions, while situations that elicit negative or avoidance reactions tend to produce continuance of these. It was later that he came to realise that positive reactions build-up stronger response patterns than negative ones. In other words, positive responses are more intentional than negative ones. Which is another way of saying that if you want a positive reaction (or a peak experience), your best chance of obtaining it is by putting yourself into an active, purposive frame of mind. The opposite of the peak experience—sudden depression, fatigue, even the ‘panic fear’ that swept William James to the edge of insanity—is the outcome of passivity. This cannot be overemphasised. Depression—or neurosis—need not have a positive cause (childhood traumas, etc.). It is the natural outcome of negative passivity. The peak experience is the outcome of an intentional attitude. ‘Feedback’ from my activities depends upon the degree of deliberately calculated purpose I put into them, not upon some occult law connected with the activity itself. . . . A healthy, perfectly adjusted human being would slide smoothly into gear, perform whatever has to be done with perfect economy of energy, then recover lost energy in a state of serene relaxation. Most human beings are not healthy or well adjusted. Their activity is full of strain and nervous tension, and their relaxation hovers on the edge of anxiety. They fail to put enough effort—enough seriousness—into their activity, and they fail to withdraw enough effort from their relaxation. Moods of serenity descend upon them—if at all—by chance; perhaps after some crisis, or in peaceful surroundings with pleasant associations. Their main trouble is that they have no idea of what can be achieved by a certain kind of mental effort. And this is perhaps the place to point out that although mystical contemplation is as old as religion, it is only in the past two centuries that it has played a major role in European culture. It was the group of writers we call the romantics who discovered that a man contemplating a waterfall or a mountain peak can suddenly feel ‘godlike’, as if the soul had expanded. The world is seen from a ‘bird’s eye view’ instead of a worm’s eye view: there is a sense of power, detachment, serenity. The romantics—Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Goethe, Schiller—were the first to raise the question of whether there are ‘higher ceilings of human nature’. But, lacking the concepts for analysing the problem, they left it unsolved. And the romantics in general accepted that the ‘godlike moments’ cannot be sustained, and certainly cannot be re-created at will. This produced the climate of despair that has continued down to our own time. (The major writers of the 20th century—Proust, Eliot, Joyce, Musil—are direct descendants of the romantics, as Edmund Wilson pointed out in Axel’s Castle.) Thus it can be seen that Maslow’s importance extends far beyond the field of psychology. William James had asserted that ‘mystical’ experiences are not mystical at all, but are a perfectly normal potential of human consciousness; but there is no mention of such experiences in Principles of Psychology (or only in passing).

Assuming you’re going to have to live with negative feelings, develop standards for behaving well in spite of them. No, you shouldn’t expect yourself to force smiles so much that they break your face and scare children. You should, however, invite feedback about your behavior from those you trust, so you can be confident that your actions and words don’t hurt people or interfere with your positive strategic goals and, most important, make you act like an asshole.

When we stop caring about what people think, we lose our capacity for connection. When we become defined by what people think, we lose our willingness to be vulnerable. If we dismiss all the criticism, we lose out on important feedback, but if we subject ourselves to the hatefulness, our spirits get crushed. It's a tightrope, shame resilience is the balance bar, and the safety net below is the one or two people in our lives who can help us reality-check the criticism and cynicism.

When we stop caring about what people think, we lose our capacity for connection. When we become defined by what people think, we lose our willingness to be vulnerable. If we dismiss all the criticism, we lose out on important feedback, but if we subject ourselves to the hatefulness, our spirits get crushed. It’s a tightrope, shame resilience is the balance bar, and the safety net below is the one or two people in our lives who can help us reality-check the criticism and cynicism. I

When calculating the likely future constraints on our options, the presence or absence of a competitive agent makes all the difference, just because when there is an information-gathering, feedback-loop-closing agent out there, one’s activities may be predicted by this agent, and hence foreseen and systematically thwarted.21 It is important that the airline pilot, in evading the thunderstorm, doesn’t have to worry about hiding his true intentions from the storm, which might, if it knew, switch its own course and come after him!

Life is a closed loop control system. You take inputs from your environment, from what you read, from your social interactions and from your family and it goes as a feedback into your system, modifying you a little every day. Those who are obstinate are like an open loop control system where nothing affects them. It isn’t really good to remain in an open loop for not only will you be isolated, but also miss out important things in life. It isn’t too wise either to let that feedback system be so strong that you forget your own ideals and principles. A balance is necessary.

The threat of nuclear holocaust fosters pacifism; when pacifism spreads, war recedes and trade flourishes; and trade increases both the profits of peace and the costs of war. Over time, this feedback loop creates another obstacle to war, which may ultimately prove the most important of all. The tightening web of international connections erodes the independence of most countries, lessening the chance that any one of them might single-handedly let slip the dogs of war. Most countries no longer engage in full-scale war for the simple reason that they are no longer independent.

Journalists are hardly immune to these forces. We become more polarized, and more polarizing, when we start spending our time in polarizing environments. I have seen it in myself, and I have watched it in others: when we’re going for retweets, or when our main form of audience feedback is coming from partisan junkies on social media, it subtly but importantly warps our news judgement. It changes who we cover and what stories we chase. And when we cover politics in a more polarized way, anticipating or absorbing the tastes of a more polarized audience, we create a more polarized political reality.

There is a positive feedback loop between all these four factors. The threat of nuclear holocaust fosters pacifism; when pacifism spreads, war recedes and trade flourishes; and trade increases both the profits of peace and the costs of war. Over time, this feedback loop creates another obstacle to war, which may ultimately prove the most important of all. The tightening web of international connections erodes the independence of most countries, lessening the chance that any one of them might single-handedly let slip the dogs of war. Most countries no longer engage in full-scale war for the simple reason that they are no longer independent.

I purposely used a pretty cocky, abrasive writing style in Sex and Crime, to stir up some drama. My confrontational style quickly became the talk of the scene. Some of the things I wrote were so inflammatory, people had to vent about it on online forums. So suddenly everyone in the scene was talking about Sex and Crime, just as I had hoped. I enjoyed playing the role of agitator, and people from competing hacking crews didn't even realize that the more they bitched about the things I wrote, the more credibility and notoriety they were adding to my scene mag. Thanks to all the positive as well as negative feedback I was getting, the things I wrote actually mattered. Suddenly I was the most important opinion maker in the scene.

The basic unit of analysis in face-to-face communication is the feedback loop. For example, if you were given the task of describing an interaction between a cat and a dog, you might make entries like: "Cat spits, ... dog bares teeth, ... cat arches back,... dog barks,... cat—" At least as important as the particular actions described is the sequence in which they occur. And to some extent, any particular behavior by the cat becomes understandable only in the context of the dog's behavior. If for some reason your observations were restricted to just the cat, you would be challenged by the task of reconstructing what the cat was interacting with. The cat's behavior is much more difficult to appreciate and understand in isolation.

In Molecules of Emotion, Pert revealed how her study of information-processing receptors on nerve cell membranes led her to discover that the same “neural” receptors were present on most, if not all, of the body’s cells. Her elegant experiments established that the “mind” was not focused in the head but was distributed via signal molecules to the whole body. As importantly, her work emphasized that emotions were not only derived through a feedback of the body’s environmental information. Through self-consciousness, the mind can use the brain to generate “molecules of emotion” and override the system. While proper use of consciousness can bring health to an ailing body, inappropriate unconscious control of emotions can easily make a healthy body diseased,

Hey Pete. So why the leave from social media? You are an activist, right? It seems like this decision is counterproductive to your message and work." A: The short answer is I’m tired of the endless narcissism inherent to the medium. In the commercial society we have, coupled with the consequential sense of insecurity people feel, as they impulsively “package themselves” for public consumption, the expression most dominant in all of this - is vanity. And I find that disheartening, annoying and dangerous. It is a form of cultural violence in many respects. However, please note the difference - that I work to promote just that – a message/idea – not myself… and I honestly loath people who today just promote themselves for the sake of themselves. A sea of humans who have been conditioned into viewing who they are – as how they are seen online. Think about that for a moment. Social identity theory run amok. People have been conditioned to think “they are” how “others see them”. We live in an increasing fictional reality where people are now not only people – they are digital symbols. And those symbols become more important as a matter of “marketing” than people’s true personality. Now, one could argue that social perception has always had a communicative symbolism, even before the computer age. But nooooooothing like today. Social media has become a social prison and a strong means of social control, in fact. Beyond that, as most know, social media is literally designed like a drug. And it acts like it as people get more and more addicted to being seen and addicted to molding the way they want the world to view them – no matter how false the image (If there is any word that defines peoples’ behavior here – it is pretention). Dopamine fires upon recognition and, coupled with cell phone culture, we now have a sea of people in zombie like trances looking at their phones (literally) thousands of times a day, merging their direct, true interpersonal social reality with a virtual “social media” one. No one can read anymore... they just swipe a stream of 200 character headlines/posts/tweets. understanding the world as an aggregate of those fragmented sentences. Massive loss of comprehension happening, replaced by usually agreeable, "in-bubble" views - hence an actual loss of variety. So again, this isn’t to say non-commercial focused social media doesn’t have positive purposes, such as with activism at times. But, on the whole, it merely amplifies a general value system disorder of a “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT HOW GREAT I AM!” – rooted in systemic insecurity. People lying to themselves, drawing meaningless satisfaction from superficial responses from a sea of avatars. And it’s no surprise. Market economics demands people self promote shamelessly, coupled with the arbitrary constructs of beauty and success that have also resulted. People see status in certain things and, directly or pathologically, use those things for their own narcissistic advantage. Think of those endless status pics of people rock climbing, or hanging out on a stunning beach or showing off their new trophy girl-friend, etc. It goes on and on and worse the general public generally likes it, seeking to imitate those images/symbols to amplify their own false status. Hence the endless feedback loop of superficiality. And people wonder why youth suicides have risen… a young woman looking at a model of perfection set by her peers, without proper knowledge of the medium, can be made to feel inferior far more dramatically than the typical body image problems associated to traditional advertising. That is just one example of the cultural violence inherent. The entire industry of social media is BASED on narcissistic status promotion and narrow self-interest. That is the emotion/intent that creates the billions and billions in revenue these platforms experience, as they in turn sell off people’s personal data to advertisers and governments. You are the product, of course.

Equally important, statistical systems require feedback—something to tell them when they’re off track. Without feedback, however, a statistical engine can continue spinning out faulty and damaging analysis while never learning from its mistakes. Many of the WMDs I’ll be discussing in this book, including the Washington school district’s value-added model, behave like that. They define their own reality and use it to justify their results. This type of model is self-perpetuating, highly destructive—and very common. If the people being evaluated are kept in the dark, the thinking goes, they’ll be less likely to attempt to game the system. Instead, they’ll simply have to work hard, follow the rules, and pray that the model registers and appreciates their efforts. But if the details are hidden, it’s also harder to question the score or to protest against it.

they feel ignored, unappreciated, and unloved. That’s because their context-blind Aspie family members are so poor at empathic reciprocity. As we have learned, we come to know ourselves in relation to others. This doesn’t just apply when children are developing self-esteem. Throughout our lifespan, we continue to weave and re-weave the context of our lives, based on the interactions we have with our friends, coworkers, neighbors and loved ones. This is why it is so important for an NT parent/partner to get feedback from their spouse. A smile, a hug, a kind word, a note of encouragement: These are messages that reinforce the NT’s self-esteem and contribute to a healthy reciprocity in the relationship. Without these daily reminders from their loved ones, NTs can develop some odd defense mechanisms. One is to become psychologically invisible to others and even to themselves.

But what separates human consciousness from the consciousness of animals? Humans are alone in the animal kingdom in understanding the concept of tomorrow. Unlike animals, we constantly ask ourselves “What if?” weeks, months, and even years into the future, so I believe that Level III consciousness creates a model of its place in the world and then simulates it into the future, by making rough predictions. We can summarize this as follows: Human consciousness is a specific form of consciousness that creates a model of the world and then simulates it in time, by evaluating the past to simulate the future. This requires mediating and evaluating many feedback loops in order to make a decision to achieve a goal. By the time we reach Level III consciousness, there are so many feedback loops that we need a CEO to sift through them in order to simulate the future and make a final decision. Accordingly, our brains differ from those of other animals, especially in the expanded prefrontal cortex, located just behind the forehead, which allows us to “see” into the future. Dr. Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, has written, “The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future. As one philosopher noted, the human brain is an ‘anticipation machine,’ and ‘making the future’ is the most important thing it does.” Using brain scans, we can even propose a candidate for the precise area of the brain where simulation of the future takes place. Neurologist Michael Gazzaniga notes that “area 10 (the internal granular layer IV), in the lateral prefrontal cortex, is almost twice as large in humans as in apes. Area 10 is involved with memory and planning, cognitive flexibility, abstract thinking, initiating appropriate behavior, and inhibiting inappropriate behavior, learning rules, and picking out relevant information from what is perceived through the senses.” (For this book, we will refer to this area, in which decision making is concentrated, as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, although there is some overlap with other areas of the brain.)

Summary of Rule #4 The core idea of this book is simple: To construct work you love, you must first build career capital by mastering rare and valuable skills, and then cash in this capital for the type of traits that define compelling careers. Mission is one of those traits. In the first chapter of this rule, I reinforced the idea that this trait, like all desirable career traits, really does require career capital—you can’t skip straight into a great mission without first building mastery in your field. Drawing from the terminology of Steven Johnson, I argued that the best ideas for missions are found in the adjacent possible—the region just beyond the current cutting edge. To encounter these ideas, therefore, you must first get to that cutting edge, which in turn requires expertise. To try to devise a mission when you’re new to a field and lacking any career capital is a venture bound for failure. Once you identify a general mission, however, you’re still left with the task of launching specific projects that make it succeed. An effective strategy for accomplishing this task is to try small steps that generate concrete feedback—little bets—and then use this feedback, be it good or bad, to help figure out what to try next. This systematic exploration can help you uncover an exceptional way forward that you might have never otherwise noticed. The little-bets strategy, I discovered as my research into mission continued, is not the only way to make a mission a success. It also helps to adopt the mindset of a marketer. This led to the strategy that I dubbed the law of remarkability. This law says that for a project to transform a mission into a success, it should be remarkable in two ways. First, it must literally compel people to remark about it. Second, it must be launched in a venue conducive to such remarking. In sum, mission is one of the most important traits you can acquire with your career capital. But adding this trait to your working life is not simple. Once you have the capital to identify a good mission, you must still work to make it succeed. By using little bets and the law of remarkability, you greatly increase your chances of finding ways to transform your mission from a compelling idea into a compelling career.

If you’re comfortable, I’m not teaching and you’re not learning. It’s going to get uncomfortable in here and that’s okay. It’s normal and it’s part of the process.” The simple and honest process of letting people know that discomfort is normal, it’s going to happen, why it happens, and why it’s important, reduces anxiety, fear, and shame. Periods of discomfort become an expectation and a norm. In fact, most semesters I have students who approach me after class and say, “I haven’t been uncomfortable yet. I’m concerned.” These exchanges often lead to critically important conversations and feedback about their engagement and my teaching. The big challenge for leaders is getting our heads and hearts around the fact that we need to cultivate the courage to be uncomfortable and to teach the people around us how to accept discomfort as a part of growth. For the best guidance on how to give feedback that moves people and processes forward, I turn to my social work roots. In my experience the heart of valuable feedback is taking the “strengths perspective.” According to social work educator Dennis Saleebey, viewing performance from the strengths perspective offers

The human mind wants to “win” whatever game is being played. This pitfall is evident in many areas of life. We focus on working long hours instead of getting meaningful work done. We care more about getting ten thousand steps than we do about being healthy. We teach for standardized tests instead of emphasizing learning, curiosity, and critical thinking. In short, we optimize for what we measure. When we choose the wrong measurement, we get the wrong behavior. This is sometimes referred to as Goodhart’s Law. Named after the economist Charles Goodhart, the principle states, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”9 Measurement is only useful when it guides you and adds context to a larger picture, not when it consumes you. Each number is simply one piece of feedback in the overall system. In our data-driven world, we tend to overvalue numbers and undervalue anything ephemeral, soft, and difficult to quantify. We mistakenly think the factors we can measure are the only factors that exist. But just because you can measure something doesn’t mean it’s the most important thing. And just because you can’t measure something doesn’t mean it’s not important at all.

Reducing your anxiety to zero isn’t possible or useful. Anxiety itself isn’t the problem. The problem occurs when anxiety gets to the point that it’s paralyzing, and you become stuck. I think of these bottlenecks as anxiety traps. We’re going to work on managing your responses to five anxiety traps: excessively hesitating before taking action, ruminating and worrying, paralyzing perfectionism, fear of feedback and criticism, and avoidance (including procrastination). The reason I’ve chosen to focus on these particular five traps is that I’ve found them to be the common threads that affect virtually all of the anxious clients I’ve worked with. The traps are self-perpetuating because they generate additional stress. For example, someone hesitates so much that she misses important opportunities, and this leads to being financially worse off. Or someone avoids feedback and then isn’t alerted to real problems that could have been rectified earlier. When people are caught in any of the five anxiety traps, they often fail to see the big picture and don’t problem-solve in effective ways. Learning how to navigate these bottlenecks will allow you to manage your anxious tendencies so that you can pursue your goals in life, whatever those goals may be.

Here are four more strategies to help you stack the deck in your favor when seeking a raise or a promotion: ✓ DO YOUR RESEARCH: Understand your market value and, more important, your value to the company. Be prepared to explain, candidly and concretely, what you feel you’re doing that you’re not being compensated for. Have confidence in your own worth. ✓ ASK TO BE PAID FOR THE JOB YOU’RE ACTUALLY DOING: If your responsibilities have increased but you haven’t been recognized since, say, you’ve taken over for the manager who left several months earlier, approach your new boss and say, “I’ve been effectively doing this person’s job since she departed and I’d like to formally assume her position.” Have a conversation. Express that you feel confident you can grow in this role and create value for the organization. ✓ PROVE YOUR WORTH: To earn an increase in salary, you need to be increasing your responsibilities and performing at a higher level than when you were hired. ✓ DON’T NEGOTIATE IF YOUR BOSS SAYS NO: Typically no means no when it comes to this type of discussion. If your boss says no, you have two choices: you either accept the rationale, think about it, and grow based on the feedback, or you leave. This is a good time to be reflective. Ask why you haven’t earned the increase. You may not walk away with a new title or more money, but hopefully you’ll learn something that will help you correct your course moving forward.

Subject Line:  This means a lot… Or Would love to get your opinion…   Email Text:  Dear friends, family, and colleagues:    Thank you so much for reading this email. This isn’t an easy one for me to send, but it is extremely important to me, so I sincerely appreciate you investing your valuable time reading (and hopefully responding to) it. This email is going out to only a select group of people. Each of you knows me well, and I’m hoping will give me honest feedback about my strengths and most importantly, my weaknesses (aka “areas of improvement.”) I’ve never done anything like this before, but I feel that for me grow and improve as a person, I need to get a more accurate picture of how I’m showing up to the people that matter most to me. In order to become the person I need to be to create the life and contribute to others at the levels that I want, I need your feedback. So, all I’m asking is that you take just a few minutes to email me back with what you honestly think are my top 2-3 “areas of improvement.” If it will make you feel better to also list my top 2-3 “strengths” (I’m sure it will make me feel better J), you are definitely welcome to. That’s it. And please don’t sugarcoat it or hold back anything. I will not be offended by anything that you share. In fact, the more “brutally” honest you are, the more leverage it will give me to make positive changes in my life. Thank you again, and if there is anything else I can do to add value to your life, please let me know. With sincere gratitude,   Your Name

To Greg, who had suffered from bouts of depression throughout his life, this seemed like a terrible approach. In seeking treatment for his depression, he—along with millions of others around the world—had found that cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) was the most effective solution. CBT teaches you to notice when you are engaging in various “cognitive distortions,” such as “catastrophizing” (If I fail this quiz, I’ll fail the class and be kicked out of school, and then I’ll never get a job . . .) and “negative filtering” (only paying attention to negative feedback instead of noticing praise as well). These distorted and irrational thought patterns are hallmarks of depression and anxiety disorders. We are not saying that students are never in real physical danger, or that their claims about injustice are usually cognitive distortions. We are saying that even when students are reacting to real problems, they are more likely than previous generations to engage in thought patterns that make those problems seem more threatening, which makes them harder to solve. An important discovery by early CBT researchers was that if people learn to stop thinking this way, their depression and anxiety usually subside. For this reason, Greg was troubled when he noticed that some students’ reactions to speech on college campuses exhibited exactly the same distortions that he had learned to rebut in his own therapy. Where had students learned these bad mental habits? Wouldn’t these cognitive distortions make students more anxious and depressed?

The aim is to get the students actively involved in seeking this evidence: their role is not simply to do tasks as decided by teachers, but to actively manage and understand their learning gains. This includes evaluating their own progress, being more responsible for their learning, and being involved with peers in learning together about gains in learning. If students are to become active evaluators of their own progress, teachers must provide the students with appropriate feedback so that they can engage in this task. Van den Bergh, Ros, and Beijaard (2010: 3) describe the task thus: Fostering active learning seems a very challenging and demanding task for teachers, requiring knowledge of students’ learning processes, skills in providing guidance and feedback and classroom management. The need is to engage students in this same challenging and demanding task. The suggestion in this chapter is to start lessons with helping students to understand the intention of the lesson and showing them what success might look like at the end. Many times, teachers look for the interesting beginning to a lesson – for the hook, and the motivating question. Dan Willingham (2009) has provided an excellent argument for not thinking in this way. He advocates starting with what the student is likely to think about. Interesting hooks, demonstrations, fascinating facts, and likewise may seem to be captivating (and often are), but he suggests that there are likely to be other parts of the lesson that are more suitable for the attention-grabber. The place for the attention-grabber is more likely to be at the end of the lesson, because this will help to consolidate what has been learnt. Most importantly,Willingham asks teachers to think long and hard about how to make the connection between the attention-grabber and the point that it is designed to make; preferably, that point will be the main idea from the lesson. Having too many open-ended activities (discovery learning, searching the Internet, preparing PowerPoint presentations) can make it difficult to direct students’ attention to that which matters – because they often love to explore the details, the irrelevancies, and the unimportant while doing these activities. One of Willingham's principles is that any teaching method is most useful when there is plenty of prompt feedback about whether the student is thinking about a problem in the right way. Similarly, he promotes the notion that assignments should be primarily about what the teacher wants the students to think about (not about demonstrating ‘what they know’). Students are very good at ignoring what you say (‘I value connections, deep ideas, your thoughts’) and seeing what you value (corrections to the grammar, comments on referencing, correctness or absence of facts). Thus teachers must develop a scoring rubric for any assignment before they complete the question or prompts, and show the rubric to the students so that they know what the teacher values. Such formative feedback can reinforce the ‘big ideas’ and the important understandings, and help to make the investment of

Important: Be sure to put the outgoing email addresses in the BCC field of the email, so that each recipient doesn’t see everyone else you’re sending it to. (Or, you can copy and paste, then send the email to each person individually.) Subject Line: This means a lot… Or Would love to get your opinion… Email Text: Dear friends, family, and colleagues:  Thank you so much for reading this email. This isn’t an easy one for me to send, but it is extremely important to me, so I sincerely appreciate you investing your valuable time reading (and hopefully responding to) it.  This email is going out to only a select group of people. Each of you knows me well, and I’m hoping will give me honest feedback about my strengths and most importantly, my weaknesses (aka “areas of improvement.”) I’ve never done anything like this before, but I feel that for me grow and improve as a person, I need to get a more accurate picture of how I’m showing up to the people that matter most to me. In order to become the person I need to be to create the life and contribute to others at the levels that I want, I need your feedback.  So, all I’m asking is that you take just a few minutes to email me back with what you honestly think are my top 2-3 “areas of improvement.” If it will make you feel better to also list my top 2-3 “strengths” (I’m sure it will make me feel better ), you are definitely welcome to. That’s it. And please don’t sugarcoat it or hold back anything. I will not be offended by anything that you share. In fact, the more “brutally” honest you are, the more leverage it will give me to make positive changes in my life.  Thank you again, and if there is anything else I can do to add value to your life, please let me know.  With sincere gratitude, Your Name

All use of speech implies convention and therefore at least duality of minds. The problem of communication through language may in this light be seen as the search for the means supplied by the conventions (or code) to transmit a message from one mind to another. (This definition is as applicable to "literary" communication as it is to "non-literary.") ...Is the code exactly the same for transmitter and receiver? Indeed, can it ever be? It hardly seems likely, since in the strict sense no two people have ever acquired exactly the same code. Consequently, the correspondence between the writer's understand of his writing (I do not, of course, mean merely a conscious or reflective understanding) and the reader's understanding of it will be at least approximate. Another variable is the mental, emotional, and cultural constitution of the being who used the code to transmit a message, and of the being who decodes it. To what extent are they capable of understanding each other? To what extent will they be willing to cooperate in dealing with the inevitable problems in communication? To what extent will anticipated or actual reaction ("feedback") from the receiver affect the framing of the message? Perhaps more important than any of these variables, there is the as yet unresolved question of the very nature of language, and therefore of communication through language. What do agreed upon symbols stand for? Is it conceivable that they correspond to something objectively identifiable? Perhaps not. But even so, is it conceivable that a given message can recreate in another mind whatever it is supposed in the first place to represent in the mind of the sender? All of these questions are in the last analysis as relevant to literary studies as they are linguistics

Principles That Great Teachers Follow Great teachers know that each brain is unique and uniquely organized. Great teachers know that all brains are not equally good at everything. Great teachers know that the brain is a complex, dynamic system and is changed daily by experiences. Great teachers know that learning is a constructivist process, and that the ability to learn continues through developmental stages as an individual matures. Great teachers know that the search for meaning is innate in human nature. Great teachers know that brains have a high degree of plasticity and develop throughout the lifespan. Great teachers know that MBE science principles apply to all ages. Great teachers know that learning is based in part on the brain’s ability to self-correct. Great teachers know that the search for meaning occurs through pattern recognition. Great teachers know that brains seek novelty. Great teachers know that emotions are critical to detecting patterns, to decision-making, and to learning. Great teachers know that learning is enhanced by challenge and inhibited by threat. Great teachers know that human learning involves both focused attention and peripheral perception. Great teachers know that the brain conceptually processes parts and wholes simultaneously. Great teachers know that the brain depends on interactions with other people to make sense of social situations. Great teachers know that feedback is important to learning. Great teachers know that learning relies on memory and attention. Great teachers know that memory systems differ in input and recall. Great teachers know that the brain remembers best when facts and skills are embedded in natural contexts. Great teachers know that learning involves conscious and unconscious processes. Great teachers know that learning engages the entire physiology (the body influences the brain, and the brain controls the body).

We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died. We wanted to dig deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to be overworked and reduced to our last wit. And if our bosses proved mean, why then we’d evoke their whole and genuine meanness afterward over vodka cranberries and small batch bourbons. And if our drinking companions proved to be sublime then we would stagger home at dawn over the Old City cobblestones, into hot showers and clean shirts, and press onward until dusk fell again. For the rest of the world, it seemed to us, had somewhat hastily concluded that it was the chief end of man to thank God it was Friday and pray that Netflix would never forsake them. Still we lived frantically, like hummingbirds; though our HR departments told us that our commitments were valuable and our feedback was appreciated, our raises would be held back another year. Like gnats we pestered Management— who didn’t know how to use the Internet, whose only use for us was to set up Facebook accounts so they could spy on their children, or to sync their iPhones to their Outlooks, or to explain what tweets were and more importantly, why— which even we didn’t know. Retire! we wanted to shout. We ha Get out of the way with your big thumbs and your senior moments and your nostalgia for 1976! We hated them; we wanted them to love us. We wanted to be them; we wanted to never, ever become them. Complexity, complexity, complexity! We said let our affairs be endless and convoluted; let our bank accounts be overdrawn and our benefits be reduced. Take our Social Security contributions and let it go bankrupt. We’d been bankrupt since we’d left home: we’d secure our own society. Retirement was an afterlife we didn’t believe in and that we expected yesterday. Instead of three meals a day, we’d drink coffee for breakfast and scavenge from empty conference rooms for lunch. We had plans for dinner. We’d go out and buy gummy pad thai and throat-scorching chicken vindaloo and bento boxes in chintzy, dark restaurants that were always about to go out of business. Those who were a little flush would cover those who were a little short, and we would promise them coffees in repayment. We still owed someone for a movie ticket last summer; they hadn’t forgotten. Complexity, complexity. In holiday seasons we gave each other spider plants in badly decoupaged pots and scarves we’d just learned how to knit and cuff links purchased with employee discounts. We followed the instructions on food and wine Web sites, but our soufflés sank and our baked bries burned and our basil ice creams froze solid. We called our mothers to get recipes for old favorites, but they never came out the same. We missed our families; we were sad to be rid of them. Why shouldn’t we live with such hurry and waste of life? We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to decrypt our neighbors’ Wi-Fi passwords and to never turn on the air-conditioning. We vowed to fall in love: headboard-clutching, desperate-texting, hearts-in-esophagi love. On the subways and at the park and on our fire escapes and in the break rooms, we turned pages, resolved to get to the ends of whatever we were reading. A couple of minutes were the day’s most valuable commodity. If only we could make more time, more money, more patience; have better sex, better coffee, boots that didn’t leak, umbrellas that didn’t involute at the slightest gust of wind. We were determined to make stupid bets. We were determined to be promoted or else to set the building on fire on our way out. We were determined to be out of our minds.

I believe that social media, and the internet as a whole, have negatively impacted our ability to both think long-term and to focus deeply on the task in front of us. It is no surprise, therefore, that Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, prohibited his children from using phones or tablets—even though his business was to sell millions of them to his customers! The billionaire investor and former senior executive at Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya, argues that we must rewire our brain to focus on the long term, which starts by removing social media apps from our phones. In his words, such apps, “wire your brain for super-fast feedback.” By receiving constant feedback, whether through likes, comments, or immediate replies to our messages, we condition ourselves to expect fast results with everything we do. And this feeling is certainly reinforced through ads for schemes to help us “get rich quick”, and through cognitive biases (i.e., we only hear about the richest and most successful YouTubers, not about the ones who fail). As we demand more and more stimulation, our focus is increasingly geared toward the short term and our vision of reality becomes distorted. This leads us to adopt inaccurate mental models such as: Success should come quickly and easily, or I don’t need to work hard to lose weight or make money. Ultimately, this erroneous concept distorts our vision of reality and our perception of time. We can feel jealous of people who seem to have achieved overnight success. We can even resent popular YouTubers. Even worse, we feel inadequate. It can lead us to think we are just not good enough, smart enough, or disciplined enough. Therefore, we feel the need to compensate by hustling harder. We have to hurry before we miss the opportunity. We have to find the secret that will help us become successful. And, in this frenetic race, we forget one of the most important values of all: patience. No, watching motivational videos all day long won’t help you reach your goals. But, performing daily consistent actions, sustained over a long period of time will. Staying calm and focusing on the one task in front of you every day will. The point is, to achieve long-term goals in your personal or professional life, you must regain control of your attention and rewire your brain to focus on the long term. To do so, you should start by staying away from highly stimulating activities.

Most exciting, the growth mindset can be taught to managers. Heslin and his colleagues conducted a brief workshop based on well-established psychological principles. (By the way, with a few changes, it could just as easily be used to promote a growth mindset in teachers or coaches.) The workshop starts off with a video and a scientific article about how the brain changes with learning. As with our “Brainology” workshop (described in chapter 8), it’s always compelling for people to understand how dynamic the brain is and how it changes with learning. The article goes on to talk about how change is possible throughout life and how people can develop their abilities at most tasks with coaching and practice. Although managers, of course, want to find the right person for a job, the exactly right person doesn’t always come along. However, training and experience can often draw out and develop the qualities required for successful performance. The workshop then takes managers through a series of exercises in which a) they consider why it’s important to understand that people can develop their abilities, b) they think of areas in which they once had low ability but now perform well, c) they write to a struggling protégé about how his or her abilities can be developed, and d) they recall times they have seen people learn to do things they never thought these people could do. In each case, they reflect upon why and how change takes place. After the workshop, there was a rapid change in how readily the participating managers detected improvement in employee performance, in how willing they were to coach a poor performer, and in the quantity and quality of their coaching suggestions. What’s more, these changes persisted over the six-week period in which they were followed up. What does this mean? First, it means that our best bet is not simply to hire the most talented managers we can find and turn them loose, but to look for managers who also embody a growth mindset: a zest for teaching and learning, an openness to giving and receiving feedback, and an ability to confront and surmount obstacles. It also means we need to train leaders, managers, and employees to believe in growth, in addition to training them in the specifics of effective communication and mentoring. Indeed, a growth mindset workshop might be a good first step in any major training program. Finally, it means creating a growth-mindset environment in which people can thrive. This involves: • Presenting skills as learnable • Conveying that the organization values learning and perseverance, not just ready-made genius or talent • Giving feedback in a way that promotes learning and future success • Presenting managers as resources for learning Without a belief in human development, many corporate training programs become exercises of limited value. With a belief in development, such programs give meaning to the term “human resources” and become a means of tapping enormous potential.

While paying attention to positive and negative feedback is very important, it is not enough. What also matters is acknowledging and responding to this feedback. This is how you nurture your relationship with your audience.

In the very early days of Pixar, John, Andrew, Pete, Lee, and Joe made a promise to one another. No matter what happened, they would always tell each other the truth. They did this because they recognized how important and rare candid feedback is and how, without it, our films would suffer. Then and now, the term we use to describe this kind of constructive criticism is “good notes.

Amis, un dernier mot! - et je ferme à jamais Ce livre à ma pensée étranger désormais, Je n'écouterai pas ce qu'en dira la foule, Car qu'importe à la source où son onde s'écoule?

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Some of my best friends work for us, too. Justin Martin, or Martin as we call him, played football at West Monroe High School. I pick on him, joking that he’s the only man I know who looks dumb but is really smart and looks old but is really young. If you’ve seen him on the show, you know exactly what I’m talking about. He only lacks his thesis to complete a master’s degree in wildlife biology, and he had a full scholarship to college. Martin is actually the only employee we have who ever worked in a sporting goods store that sold hunting products. He understands competitive pricing and inventory. I met Martin when he came to play poker at our house one Friday night. While on summer break from college, Martin was looking for some work. I was going out of town the next week, but I told him to come in and start calling sporting goods store. About three days later, I received an e-mai from martin@duckcommander.com. The guy already had a Duck Commander e-mail with his name on it! I really thought he was only going to be with us for a few days and then go back to what he was doing. I never really hired him; he just ended up staying. But Martin is an excellent hunter-which gave him an advantage-and he knows all about animals. Martin will do anything for you, and he is my liaison in the blind. I’ll give him new products that companies want us to try out, and he’ll come back to me with everyone’s feedback. Most important, Martin learned how to make our duck calls, which made him invaluable. Plus, he’s another guy I enjoy hanging out with, and what’s it all worth if you can’t work with people you like?

Organizer—Using work breakdown, estimating, and scheduling techniques, determines the complete work effort for the project, the proper sequence of the work activities, when the work will be accomplished, who will do the work, and how much the work will cost. • Point Man—Serves as the central point-of-contact for all oral and written project communications. • Quartermaster—Ensures the project has the resources, materials, and facilities its needs when it needs it. • Facilitator—Ensures that stakeholders and team members who come from different perspectives understand each other and work together to accomplish the project goals. • Persuader—Gains agreement from the stakeholders on project definition, success criteria, and approach; manages stakeholder expectations throughout the project while managing the competing demands of time, cost, and quality; and gains agreement on resource decisions and issue resolution action steps. • Problem Solver—Utilizes root-cause analysis process experience, prior project experiences, and technical knowledge to resolve unforeseen technical issues and to take any necessary corrective actions. • Umbrella—Works to shield the project team from the politics and “noise” surrounding the project, so they can stay focused and productive. • Coach—Determines and communicates the role each team member plays and the importance of that role to the project success, finds ways to motivate each team member, looks for ways to improve the skills of each team member, and provides constructive and timely feedback on individual performances. • Bulldog—Performs the follow-up to ensure that commitments are maintained, issues are resolved, and action items are completed. • Librarian—Manages all information, communications, and documentation involved in the project.

Paying attention to the present moment without letting your thoughts and ideas about the past and the future get in the way is essential. Why? Because it makes room for the views of others. It allows us to begin to trust them—and, more important, to hear them. It makes us willing to experiment, and it makes it safe to try something that may fail. It encourages us to work on our awareness, trying to set up our own feedback loop in which paying attention improves our ability to pay attention.

There can also be a particular problem with couples in a group. Sometimes a couple will form a faction splinter group. Then if they are upset about something going on in the group, they will collapse into collusion and gossip with each other, instead of airing their concerns with the whole group. Other times the factions are created along political lines or gender lines. With gender lines frequently the men think the women are “too sensitive” and controlling. The women think the men are “too insensitive” and domineering. When these judgments are shared by people without Nonviolent Communication skills, they most often create painful unresolved conflict. When they are thought and not shared it creates a tense depressed feeling in the group. 7. Remember that after you have shared something of yourself in front of a group you almost always need some kind of honest feedback in response. If you don’t ask for this feedback your mind will often project, onto the blank screen, nightmarish self-judgments which will serve to shut you down in the future. Example: You have just shared with the Committee to Create an Alternative School that you are afraid that the school will not be created in time for your five year old to attend and you will have to enroll her in public schools. You find yourself crying as you explain how important it is for you to protect her from the many kinds of violence found in public schools. Having cried, you feel vulnerable. You might ask: “I feel a bit vulnerable, having cried in public. I would like to know how people are feeling about what I have shared.” Then be prepared to empathize with the worst. Take a moment now to write down the three things that would be the most scary to hear after you have made yourself vulnerable and then asked for feedback. Here is what I came up with when I asked myself what would be scary feedback to receive and some possible empathic responses. So I have cried in front of the Committee to Create an Alternative School and asked for feedback and heard back:

why has almost everyone done the calendar thing, but almost no one has moved everything else in their life into a similar zone, by capturing it all and creating the habit of assessing it all appropriately? Three reasons: First, the data that is entered onto a calendar has already been thought through and determined; it’s been translated down to the physical action level. You agreed to call Jim at noon on Monday: there is no more thinking required about what the appropriate action is, or where and when you’re going to do it. Second, you know where those kinds of actions need to be parked (calendar), and it’s a familiar and available tool. And third, if you lose track of calendar actions and commitments, you will encounter obvious and rapid negative feedback from people you consider important.

Guideline #8: Test-market your résumé. When you have completed writing your résumé, identify five to seven people whose opinions you value and ask for their honest feedback. You may want to show it to a human resource manager, an executive recruiter, or an English teacher. Ask these five to seven people if you left anything important out or if there is something that needs to be deleted. Have them look for any lingering typos or grammatical errors. When you have five to seven sets of eyes review your résumé, chances are you’ll end up with a perfectly constructed document that you can be proud of and that will do you proud!

Your profile, your cover letter, your portfolio, and your feedback are all FAR more important than the tests you’ll take.

The most important thing is not the feedback you receive, not the fear you have, but what's important is that you've done it wit all your love for him. So, do it for him.

The most important thing is not the feedback you receive, not the fear you have, but what's important is that you've done it with all your love for him. So, do it for him.

it is important to listen to your thoughts, dispute them when they are out of line, and replace them if they are not positive, because our thinking affects our behaviour and our behaviour dictates the feedback the world gives us.

He married military history with science, building his theory upon Gödel, Heisenberg, Popper, Kuhn, Piaget and Polanyi, who highlighted the unavoidable feature of uncertainty in any system of thought (as well as the limits of the Newtonian paradigm). Cybernetics and systems theory offered him the concept of feedback, the combination of analysis–synthesis as well as the Second Law of Thermodynamics and entropy, the distinction between open and closed systems, the importance of interactions and relations, and the need for a holistic approach. The cognitive revolution, combined with neo-Darwinist studies, showed him the role of schemata formed by genetics, culture and experience. Chaos theory highlighted non-linear behavior.

Passage Four: From Functional Manager to Business Manager This leadership passage is often the most satisfying as well as the most challenging of a manager’s career, and it’s mission-critical in organizations. Business mangers usually receive significant autonomy, which people with leadership instincts find liberating. They also are able to see a clear link between their efforts and marketplace results. At the same time, this is a sharp turn; it requires a major shift in skills, time applications, and work values. It’s not simply a matter of people becoming more strategic and cross-functional in their thinking (though it’s important to continue developing the abilities rooted in the previous level). Now they are in charge of integrating functions, whereas before they simply had to understand and work with other functions. But the biggest shift is from looking at plans and proposals functionally (Can we do it technically, professionally, or physically?) to a profit perspective (Will we make any money if we do this?) and to a long-term view (Is the profitability result sustainable?). New business managers must change the way they think in order to be successful. There are probably more new and unfamiliar responsibilities here than at other levels. For people who have been in only one function for their entire career, a business manager position represents unexplored territory; they must suddenly become responsible for many unfamiliar functions and outcomes. Not only do they have to learn to manage different functions, but they also need to become skilled at working with a wider variety of people than ever before; they need to become more sensitive to functional diversity issues and communicating clearly and effectively. Even more difficult is the balancing act between future goals and present needs and making trade-offs between the two. Business managers must meet quarterly profit, market share, product, and people targets, and at the same time plan for goals three to five years into the future. The paradox of balancing short-term and long-term thinking is one that bedevils many managers at this turn—and why one of the requirements here is for thinking time. At this level, managers need to stop doing every second of the day and reserve time for reflection and analysis. When business managers don’t make this turn fully, the leadership pipeline quickly becomes clogged. For example, a common failure at this level is not valuing (or not effectively using) staff functions. Directing and energizing finance, human resources, legal, and other support groups are crucial business manager responsibilities. When managers don’t understand or appreciate the contribution of support staff, these staff people don’t deliver full performance. When the leader of the business demeans or diminishes their roles, staff people deliver halfhearted efforts; they can easily become energy-drainers. Business managers must learn to trust, accept advice, and receive feedback from all functional managers, even though they may never have experienced these functions personally.

Non-verbal listening, in which the listener displays what they’re thinking based on their expressions and gestures, is important for feedback and can give you information on which direction to take the story. If the

I think mentoring is simply an inborn passion and not something you can learn in a classroom. It can only be mastered by observation and practice. I also realized that most mentees select you, and not the other way round. The mentor’s role is to create a sense of comfort so that people can approach you and hierarchy has no role to play in that situation. The mentee has to believe that when they share anything, they are sharing as an equal and that their professional well-being is protected, that they won’t be ridiculed or their confidentiality breached. As a mentor you have to create that comfort zone. It is somewhat like being a doctor or a psychiatrist, but mentoring does not necessarily have to take place only in the office. For example, if I was travelling I would often take along a junior colleague to meet a client. I made sure they had a chance to speak and then afterwards I would give them feedback and say, ‘You could have done this or that’. Similarly, if I observed somebody when they were giving a pitch or a talk, I would meet them afterwards or send them an e-mail to say ‘well done’ or coach them about how they could have done better. This trait of consciously looking for the bright spark amongst the crowd has paid me rich dividends. I spotted N. Chandrasekaran (Chandra), TCS’s current Chief Executive, when he was working on a project in Washington, DC in the early 1990s; the client said good things about him so I asked him to come and meet me. We took it from there. Similarly urging Maha and Paddy to move out of their comfort zones and take up challenging corporate roles was a successful move. From a leadership perspective I believe it is important to have experienced a wide range of functions within an organization. If a person hasn’t done a stint in HR, finance or operations, or in a particular geography or more than one vertical, they stand limited in your learning. A general manager needs to know about all functions. You don’t have to do a deep dive—a few months exploring a function is enough so long as you have an aptitude to learn and the ability to probe. This experience is very necessary today even from a governance perspective.

Appendix 1 Our Family's Core Values and Mission YOUR CORE VALUES What are the most important values in your family? Do your kids know these are critical? Do both parents agree on the ranking of values? This worksheet will help you develop and communicate your top values. A "value" is an ideal that is desirable. It is a quality that we want to model in our own lives and see developed in the lives of our kids. For instance, honesty is a very important value, for without it you can't have trust in your relationships. Take time in writing your answers to the following questions. 1. When time and energy are in short supply, what should we make sure we cover in parenting our children? List a few ideas. Then circle the nonnegotiables. 2. What are the "we'd like to get around to these" values? These are the semi-negotiables. 3. What were the top three values of each of your families of origin (the family you grew up in)? Father Mother 1. 1. 2. 2. 3. 3. 4. Think about a healthy, positive family-one that serves as a role model for you. What would you say are their top three values? 1. 2. 3. 5. What are three or four favorite Scripture verses that communicate elements of a healthy family? 1. 2. 3. 4. Based on these verses, what are the three or four principles from Scripture that you'd like to see evidenced in your family? 1. 2. 3. 4. 6. What values are your "pound the table with passion" values? What are the ones that you feel very strongly about? (You may already have them listed.) To help you with this, complete the following sentences: More families need to ... The problem with today's families is ... DEVELOPING YOUR FAMILY'S MISSION STATEMENT Besides writing out your core values, you will do well to develop a family mission statement (or covenant). These important documents will shape your family. The founders of the United States knew that guiding documents would keep us on course as a fledgling democracy; so too will these documents guide your family as you seek to be purposeful. Sample mission statement: We exist to love each other and advance Gods timeless principles and his kingdom on earth. Complete the following: 1. Our family exists to ... 2. What are some activities or behaviors that you imagine your family carrying out? 3. Describe some qualities of character that you can envision your family being known for. 4. What is unique about your family? What makes you different? What are you known for? What sets you apart? 5. What do you hope to do with and through your family that will outlive you? What noble cause greater than yourselves do you want your family to pursue? 6. With these five questions completed, look for a Scripture that supports the basic ideas of your rough-draft concepts for your family mission statement. If there are several candidates, talk about them thoughtfully and choose one, writing it out here: 7. Using the sample as a template, your five questions and your family Scripture, write a rough draft of your family mission statement: 8. Rewrite the mission statement, keeping the same concepts but changing the order of the mission statement. This is simply to give you two options. 9. Discuss this mission statement as a family if the kids are old enough. Discuss it with a few other friends or extended family members. Any feedback? 10. Pray about your family mission statement for a couple of weeks, asking God to affirm it or help you edit it. Then write up the final version. Consider making a permanent version of your family mission statement to hang on a wall in your home.

Schedule a sit-down with your direct boss and establish what she expects you to be focusing on in the first days and weeks of the job. Take written notes and determine—this is especially important—what your deadlines are. … Then be sure to request feedback about how you’re doing. A few weeks after you’ve started, schedule another meeting with your boss. Don’t say, “Am I doing okay?” Say, “I’m really enjoying my job. Are there any suggestions you’d offer?

One of the methods that he and Bowie used on Low was the “Oblique Strategies” he’d created with artist Peter Schmidt the year before. It was a deck of cards, and each card was inscribed with a command or an observation. When you got into a creative impasse, you were to turn up one of the cards and act upon it. The commands went from the sweetly banal (“Do the washing up”) to the more technical (“Feedback recordings into an acoustic situation”; “The tape is now the music”). Some cards contradict each other (“Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities”; “Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics”). Some use Wildean substitution (“Don’t be afraid of things because they’re easy to do”). And several veer towards the Freudian (“Your mistake was a hidden intention”; “Emphasise the flaws”). The stress is on capitalising on error as a way of drawing in randomness, tricking yourself into an interesting situation, and crucially leaving room for the thing that can’t be explained—an element that every work of art needs. Did the Oblique Strategy cards actually work? They were probably more important symbolically than practically. A cerebral theoretician like Eno had more need of a mental circuit-breaker than someone like Bowie, who was a natural improviser, collagiste, artistic gadfly. Anyone involved in the creative arts knows that chance events in the process play an important role, but to my mind there’s something slightly self-defeating about the idea of “planned accidents.” Oblique Strategies certainly created tensions, as Carlos Alomar explained to Bowie biographer David Buckley: “Brian Eno had come in with all these cards that he had made and they were supposed to eliminate a block. Now, you’ve got to understand something. I’m a musician. I’ve studied music theory, I’ve studied counterpoint and I’m used to working with musicians who can read music. Here comes Brian Eno and he goes to a blackboard. He says: ‘Here’s the beat, and when I point to a chord, you play the chord.’ So we get a random picking of chords. I finally had to say, ‘This is bullshit, this sucks, this sounds stupid.’ I totally, totally resisted it. David and Brian were two intellectual guys and they had a very different camaraderie, a heavier conversation, a Europeanness. It was too heavy for me. He and Brian would get off on talking about music in terms of history and I’d think, ‘Well that’s stupid—history isn’t going to give you a hook for the song!’ I’m interested in what’s commercial, what’s funky and what’s going to make people dance!” It may well have been the creative tension between that kind of traditionalist approach and Eno’s experimentalism that was more productive than the “planned accidents” themselves. As Eno himself has said: “The interesting place is not chaos, and it’s not total coherence. It’s somewhere on the cusp of those two.

When it comes to your business, the people you surround yourself with can make or break you. The right people can help give you important feedback, get you exposure, bring in sales, and help you gain credibility quickly. The wrong people can run a business into the ground, create unnecessary negativity, and hold you back from doing something great. Be very picky and methodical with who you include in your business.

people are more likely to get into flow when their environment has four important characteristics. First, and most important, they’re doing something where their skills match the challenge of the task. If the challenge is too great for their skills, they become frustrated; but if the task isn’t challenging enough, they simply grow bored. Second, flow occurs when the goal is clear; and third, when there’s constant and immediate feedback about how close you are to achieving that goal. Fourth, flow occurs when you’re free to concentrate fully on the task.

Writing is not about the end product, yes that is extremely important. It's not even about the grammar or style you write in; style and grammar are in the eye of the beholder. With each person, someone will find problems so grammar and style are moot. Writing, truly diving in is about the creative process...discovering a newer side of yourself as you are writing; creating. The adventure from page one to being done is what it is about. Do you feel good with the end product? do you feel good half way through? The point to this is simple...feedback is vital to selling your work, paying attention to hurtful feedback can destroy your pursuit of your dreams. so write for you...sell to others but write from your soul. Whether it's fiction/faction/non fiction or somewhere in between if your heart and soul is not in it...you are not going to be happy with it.

Mathematical models are particularly important in the study of dynamics, because dynamic phenomena are typically characterized by nonlinear feedbacks, often acting with various time lags. Informal verbal models are adequate for generating predictions in cases where assumed mechanisms act in a linear and additive fashion (as in trend extrapolation), but they can be very misleading when we deal with a system characterized by nonlinearities and lags. In general, nonlinear dynamical systems have a much wider spectrum of behaviors than could be imagined by informal reasoning (for example, see Hanneman et al. 1995). Thus,

important, valuable companies that follow this pattern. One reason marketplaces are powerful is because they often tap into two-sided network effects. While it is difficult to create a successful marketplace from a cold start, the first marketplace that does manage to achieve liquidity—the ability for buyers and sellers to quickly and efficiently find a counterparty to conduct a transaction—becomes very attractive to both sides of the market. As buyers and sellers pour in, the marketplace becomes even more attractive to both parties, triggering a positive feedback loop that makes it very hard for new entrants to win any market share.

Every word was loaded with the appropriate gravity. If Heather Lyons’s family saw this, they wouldn’t find anything in it to call disrespectful. That was always important to him, and it was one of the things that set Ben apart from most of his peers: As far as he was concerned, the worst thing about Kellis-Amberlee was the way it robbed the dead of their dignity. He wanted to give it back, inasmuch as he could, even if it was only one sentence at a time.

it’s important to leave yourself time and space for reflection and feedback. It’s easy to get caught up in an endless to-do list and to lose sight of what is important. That’s one of the things I learned from Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Mark and Sheryl meet first thing every Monday and at the end of every Friday—no matter how busy they are or what else has come up. The Friday meeting is especially important because it gives them time to look back over the week and reflect on what they’ve learned.

I believe that there is a Maslovian hierarchy of fires that applies to most rapidly growing start-ups, where the top of the list is the most important fire to fight first: Distribution Product Revenue model Operations Competition What’s next? What this means is that for most consumer Internet start-ups, the most important fire is distribution; if your distribution goes up in flames, your company is doomed. If you are able to contain that fire, however, it will make fighting the other fires a whole lot easier. Acquiring users gives you feedback on how to improve your product. Acquiring millions of users or thousands of customers makes it a lot easier to generate revenue. Generating revenue makes it easier to pay for the infrastructure and personnel to scale up your operations, either out of cash flow or by raising investment. And if you have a successful and growing business, then it makes sense to worry about the competition.

Simply stated, our identity keeps us stable, organized, and functional when we are alone—when there is no one to supply us with feedback as to who we are. Those adults who emerged from faulty families without intact identities have to cling to others in order to keep their personality organized, just like Freda and Greta. Secondly, and equally importantly, our identity serves as our measuring stick of the universe around us. It acts as a stable point of reference that allows us to define who we are in relation to other people, to the world of work, to our community, and to our families and loved ones. Without a firm identity, we don’t know what to believe, where to go, or what to do. Comedy is often based on mistaken identities, concealed identities, or individuals who misunderstand their own identity.

Feedback plays an important role even in simple forms of argumentation. Take this banal exchange:

From a distance, the BrainTrust appears to be a routine huddle. Up close, it’s more like a painful medical procedure—specifically, a dissection that spotlights, names, and analyzes the film’s flaws in breathtaking detail. A BrainTrust meeting is not fun. It is where directors are told that their characters lack heart, their storylines are confusing, and their jokes fall flat. But it’s also where those movies get better. “The BrainTrust is the most important thing we do by far,” said Pixar president Ed Catmull. “It depends on completely candid feedback.

If you’ve got products that are proprietary as well as open source, it’s important for you (and your stakeholders) to remember that your open source customers who typically aren’t paying for your product are just as valuable as your paying customers . Their feedback, contributions, and support are integral to your success. Because of this, you need to protect the open source offerings that your company has. Don’t make the open source products subpar to your paid products. Offer support to them just like you would to your paying customers. And treat your open source community just like you would your paying customers—with respect and appreciation.

giving performance reviews is a very complicated and difficult business and that we, managers, don’t do an especially good job at it. The fact is that giving such reviews is the single most important form of task-relevant feedback we as supervisors can provide. It is how we assess our subordinates’ level of performance and how we deliver that assessment to them individually. It is also how we allocate the rewards—promotions, dollars, stock options, or whatever we may use. As we saw earlier, the review will influence a subordinate’s performance—positively or negatively—for a long time, which makes the appraisal one of the manager’s highest-leverage activities.

And another thing, very important for problem solving, is asking my colleagues, “How would you solve this?” It happens so many times that you go to them and you say, “I've been wondering about whether I should do it this way or that way. I've got to choose between A and B,” and you describe A and B to them and then halfway through that you go, “Yeah, B. Thank you, thank you very much.” You need this intelligent white board—if you just did it yourself on a white board there's no feedback. But a human being, you're explaining to them on the white board the alternative solutions and they join in the conversation and suggest the odd thing. And then suddenly you see the answer. To me that doesn't extend to writing code. But the dialog with your colleagues who are in the same problem space is very valuable.

I have offered solutions to leaders who feel they are not getting any buy-in from their team. Many times, it is because the leaders have the strategy in their heads but have failed to effectively communicate it to their team. In other words, they were sitting in the front of the canoe paddling, while their family or team sat behind them—with no paddles, clear vision, or even an idea of their destination. It’s essential to have a confidential inner circle of mentors and friends that you can confide in. And, it is equally as important that you are open and prepared to listen to them when they offer you feedback. They will offer you sound advice without expecting anything but your success in return. Your willingness to listen and embrace their ideas during these opportunities is crucial to your progress.

When managers have too much unilateral decision-making it’s bad for results, and it is a disaster for a boss’s ability to have a Radically Candid relationship with their employees. There are few things worse for a relationship than unilateral power. Also, when your boss’s boss requests you give feedback on your boss, it sends a clear “speak truth to power” message, which is also important to a culture of Radical Candor. When these reviews are transparent, 360s can also reinforce a culture of direct, caring feedback.

Claude Steele, this time joined by Geoffrey Cohen, offers important insights. To investigate how a teacher might gain the trust of a student when giving feedback across racial lines, they created a scenario in which Black and White Stanford University students were asked to write essays about a favorite teacher. The students were told that the essays would be considered for publication in a journal about teaching and that they would receive feedback from a reviewer who they were led to believe was White. A Polaroid snapshot was taken of each student and attached to the essay as it was turned in, signaling to the students that the reviewer would be able to identify the race of the essay writer. Several days later the students returned to receive the reviewer’s comments, with the opportunity to “revise and resubmit” the essay. What was varied in the experiment was how the feedback was delivered. When the feedback was given in a constructive but critical manner, Black students were more suspicious than white students that the feedback was racially biased, and consequently, the Black students were less likely than the White students to rewrite the essay for further consideration. The same was true when the critical feedback was buffered by an opening statement praising the essay, such as “There were many good things about your essay.” However, when the feedback was introduced by a statement that conveyed a high standard (reminding the writer that the essay had to be of publishable quality) and high expectations (assuring the student of the reviewer’s belief that with effort and attention to the feedback, the standard could be met), the Black students not only responded positively by revising the essays and resubmitting them, but they did so at a higher rate than the White students in the study.66