I think one of the most crucial meta skills i’ve developed is honing my sense of who’s criticizing me vs. who’s complaining.
A criticism is actionable, implicitly often it’s from someone who wants you to win. A complaint is when you can’t figure out how you’d actionably fix something or improve based on what you’re being told.
This simple binary story is problematic. It can empower you to ignore criticism you don’t like by providing a set of excuses, if you’re not careful. Sometimes it’s operationally impossible to parse out a criticism that runs so deep that it unsettles your premises from a complaint! I think people who are building things can be excused for ignoring advice if the only actionable way of accepting that advice is to completely overhaul their approach, for reasons of focus and other logistical concerns. If it’s that rare time in a project when you are going back to the drawing board and starting over, that’s definitely time to mine complaints for useful insight.
Related: the legend of the amazon customer in the 90s who was insatiably filling out customer feedback forms, to the point where 2000s or 2010s amazon named a boardroom after him. The idea was that this guy helped them improve a lot—surely it would have been easy to dismiss him as a complainer, but they didn’t, they found actionable advice within the complaints. I think your ability to take something that isn’t intended to help you, isn’t actionable on it’s face, and mining it for actionable insight can be very important. But for filtering, for attention, for sanity, dismissing something quickly because it doesn’t seem like it can help you or the project improve can be valid as well.
critiques and complaints
I think one of the most crucial meta skills i’ve developed is honing my sense of who’s criticizing me vs. who’s complaining.
A criticism is actionable, implicitly often it’s from someone who wants you to win. A complaint is when you can’t figure out how you’d actionably fix something or improve based on what you’re being told.
This simple binary story is problematic. It can empower you to ignore criticism you don’t like by providing a set of excuses, if you’re not careful. Sometimes it’s operationally impossible to parse out a criticism that runs so deep that it unsettles your premises from a complaint! I think people who are building things can be excused for ignoring advice if the only actionable way of accepting that advice is to completely overhaul their approach, for reasons of focus and other logistical concerns. If it’s that rare time in a project when you are going back to the drawing board and starting over, that’s definitely time to mine complaints for useful insight.
Related: the legend of the amazon customer in the 90s who was insatiably filling out customer feedback forms, to the point where 2000s or 2010s amazon named a boardroom after him. The idea was that this guy helped them improve a lot—surely it would have been easy to dismiss him as a complainer, but they didn’t, they found actionable advice within the complaints. I think your ability to take something that isn’t intended to help you, isn’t actionable on it’s face, and mining it for actionable insight can be very important. But for filtering, for attention, for sanity, dismissing something quickly because it doesn’t seem like it can help you or the project improve can be valid as well.