Everyone has an opinion about your work. Your boss, your mentor, your colleague who cc’d three people on that email. We’ve built entire industries around the idea that feedback is not just useful but essential — that the path to growth runs directly through other people’s assessments of you. And yet most of us have had the experience of following someone’s feedback faithfully and ending up somewhere worse than where we started. More cautious. More generic. More like whoever was doing the evaluating.
The problem isn’t feedback. The problem is that we’ve been taught to treat it as though the source doesn’t matter. It does. High quality feedback — the kind that lets you grow into the person you want to be — is invaluable. But not all feedback is created equal. Most of it tells you far more about the giver than the receiver. Here are five rules for telling the difference.
1. Most feedback is just people telling you what their biases are.
When Oprah Winfrey was 22, she was hired as a co-anchor at Baltimore’s WJZ-TV, the first African American woman to hold the position. Her co-anchor, a local news legend who expected his friend to get the job, spent commercial breaks quizzing her about Mississippi tributaries and asking, pointedly, “So, you got a degree?” Management had its own opinions. They told her she was “the wrong color, the wrong size,” and that she showed “too much emotion.” She was demoted within eight months.
What’s notable isn’t that her talent was dismissed. It’s what the feedback was actually measuring. Not her ability to connect with an audience, which was extraordinary, but her ability to fit within a template: a specific, unexamined idea of what an anchor was supposed to look like, sound like, emote like. She didn’t fit it. She went on to host her own show for twenty-five seasons and is worth an estimated $3 billion.
Giving feedback that helps someone grow is an unappreciated art that few people practice. Unsolicited feedback, in particular, should be treated as information about the giver, not instruction for you. It can still be valuable data — just not the kind they think they’re offering. As Maya Angelou said, when people show you who they are, believe them.
2. Identify the goals and values of the person offering feedback.
Not all biases are bad, but all of them are shaped by values and goals. So when feedback reveals a bias, the useful question is: do their values and goals align with yours?
When Timothée Chalamet said “no one cares about this anymore,” referencing ballet and opera, Misty Copeland and Andrea Bocelli didn’t argue with him. They responded with the only move that makes sense: consider the source of the ‘critique’. Chalamet is not a ballet dancer (his mom was though🤣). Thus his goals as an actor — box office, cultural relevance, awards — are simply not the goals of someone who has spent a lifetime in classical dance or opera. His values around what art is for are different. So his feedback, however confidently delivered, came from a yardstick built for a different craft.
The question to ask when receiving any feedback is whether this information will nudge you toward who you want to be or into a version of the feedback giver. Knowing their values and goals tells you how seriously to take what they’re saying.
Knowing that is clarifying, but it doesn’t always protect you. Someone can be measuring you by the wrong yardstick and still hold the authority to make your professional life difficult. Recognizing whose values are driving the feedback is the first move and understanding the power they hold is the second. Both matter, and ignoring either one is a mistake.
3. Know your goals and values — and who’s rooting for you.
Most people are self-referential when they give feedback. It’s not always malicious. People advise from their own experience, their own definitions of success, their own fears. Which means the deeper indicator of whether feedback will actually help you is whether the person giving it knows what you’re trying to build and wants you to succeed at it.
About a year before production began on James McAvoy’s directorial debut film California Schemin’, a distributor McAvoy had worked with a decade earlier was enthusiastic and wanted to come in as the UK distributor with upfront money. McAvoy ultimately passed on him in favor of StudioCanal UK, who offered a larger fee.
Fast forward to the edit — McAvoy had screened the cut extensively for industry people, and two days before the edit was locking, he did one final screening. It was a star-studded room: Sharon Horgan, Trudy Styler, actors, award-winners. The original distributor — the one they’d passed over — also happened to be there.
Afterward, McAvoy sat down with him for a cup of tea and asked what he thought. The guy’s verdict, delivered with all the enthusiasm of someone who’d just watched paint dry: “Yeah… there’s a film in there.”
McAvoy could have been disheartened but took a moment to process what he was hearing. As he told the hosts of the What Went Wrong podcast: “I thought…I think there’s personal stuff here. Maybe it’s that. And luckily, we tested the film up to the wazoo, and we were scoring really high. We knew audiences laughed at all the right points, cried at all the right points and on. So we were like, we knew it worked.”
Good feedback requires someone who knows what you’re trying to build and is genuinely rooting for you to get there. And multiple sources of feedback can let you know what feedback is an outlier, sometimes delivered with a sizable chip off someone’s shoulder.
4. It’s better to be proactive and picky.
David Rock of the Neuroleadership Institute has argued that instead of training people to receive feedback better, we should train them to ask for it better. We think he’s right.
The most reliable way to avoid absorbing someone else’s standards is to control the intake. Ask for feedback on specific areas you’re working to improve, from people with relevant experience who actually want you to succeed.
In January 1962, the Beatles auditioned for Decca Records — travelling ten hours to London, recording fifteen songs — only to be rejected a month later. The executives’ verdict was that “guitar groups are on the way out” and “the Beatles have no future in show business.”
As the proverb derived from Latin reminds us, there’s no accounting for taste. Furthermore, someone can be an excellent source of feedback in one area and completely unreliable in another. Maybe your most trusted mentor gives sharp strategic counsel and terrible advice about your creative instincts. Be picky about both: who you ask and what you ask them.
5. Don’t argue with feedback.
This holds for good and bad feedback, and it’s harder than it sounds.
If someone is giving you feedback from a place of bias or misaligned values, arguing is a losing move. They believe they’re offering a gift. Explaining why it’s insulting doesn’t land. The better move is to smile, say thank you, and compost it — turn it into a lesson worth passing on.
If you’ve sought feedback from people who know your goals and are rooting for you, arguing is even more of a waste. You asked for their impressions. Pushing back signals you didn’t really want them.
Rashida Jones says she got great advice from fellow actor Bill Hader when she started writing: take the note, not the solution. People can usually identify accurately when something isn’t working. Their proposed fix might be entirely wrong.
The classic example is trying to explain a joke. As all comedians know, a joke either lands with an audience or it doesn’t. If no one laughs, explaining the joke isn’t going to make it funnier. Your mom or dad offering advice on how to make the joke better is also probably not going to make it funnier. You’ve got to take the feedback and either drop the joke or workshop it until it works.
Good feedback is rare. It requires someone who knows what you’re building, wants you to succeed at it, and has the skill to tell you the truth in a way you can actually use. When you find people like that, hold onto them. They are diamonds in a world of coal and cheap sequins.
This blog was written by Minal Bopaiah and Sage Eubanks with the help of claude.ai. As a small business, we thoughtfully engage artificial intelligence to improve our efficiency, while also using human experts to review created content and mitigate bias. Photo by cottonbro studio