There are two main schools of thought when it comes to developing skill and improving craft: double down on your strengths or improve your weaknesses. We can do both, but the reality is that everyone is limited in time and there’s only so much that we can do.
Which should we do?
The answer to that is complex and nuanced and depends so much on your personal context. But that’s about the same as not answering at all as it leaves us in the same position of not knowing how to make that decision.
To understand whether or not we should work on our strengths or work on our weaknesses, we need to understand what those strengths and weaknesses are. We do that by examining them. The problem is that from where we stand, we can only see our strengths and weaknesses from one direction, our own. This is where feedback becomes vitally important to developing skill.
Imagine for a moment that you are standing in a room. There are four walls around you, each painted a different color. Furthermore, there are many objects on each wall that might catch your eye, each filled with incredible detail. If you are standing in the middle of the room looking at one of the walls, you might be able to pick up a lot of the detail, but there’s a huge amount of detail in the room that you’re unaware of. Even if you turn to examine the next wall, you’ll have lost sight of some of the details on the first wall. Furthermore, no matter how quickly you turn, there will always be a spot in the room that you can’t see. We all have these blind spots, and that’s where feedback becomes incredibly helpful, not only in allowing us to see the room from another angle but actually in filling in the blind spots that we aren’t even aware of.
Now, imagine that there’s another person in the room with you. They’re standing next to you, but they’re facing the opposite direction. You can describe to them what you see, and they can describe to you what they see. At the end of it, you’ll have a more complete picture of the whole situation. Now, imagine you added more people in the room.
Imagine there were a hundred people looking at each wall, each one describing what they saw. As long as all of them are accurately describing what they’re seeing, you’re going to have a much, much better picture of what’s going on. Your understanding of the room is going to be even clearer. This is what feedback gives us. A broader perspective, a bigger picture of what’s going on.
As authors, our job is to convey emotion through the shaping of words. I cannot tell you how many times I have written something and said to myself, “This is perfect. This is exactly what I want to say. It conveys the exact kind of emotion that I want my reader to have. People are going to love this.”
Then I’ve given it to readers, and they’ve come up with a completely different interpretation. They’ve come up with a completely different emotion. They’ve come up with a different way of seeing the same thing. If I had simply written what I had written, sent it out into the world, and never paid attention to the feedback that I got, I would never have known that. Because I was so locked in my mind, to my perspective, to my understanding of the world, and the way that the words I wrote conveyed emotion, that I simply never would have seen this alternative perspective. But in understanding that alternative perspective, I am better able to shape my words to communicate the emotion that I’m trying to communicate.
If I fail the first time, it doesn’t matter, because I can try again. See, that’s the beautiful thing about this, it’s not one shot. It’s not like we write one thing, and that’s our only chance. And if we don’t get it right, we’re never going to be a writer. That’s not how it works. I know it can feel like that’s how it works. It can feel like everything is riding on this single point, but it’s not.
I spoke a little bit about this in my video on detachment earlier this week. But the truth is that we have as many tries as we’re willing to give ourselves. And by getting feedback and incorporating that feedback, each new try is going to be better. We might never achieve perfection. In fact, we won’t achieve perfection, but we might get very, very close, as long as we are consistent in our application of the feedback that we’re getting. Because each time we redo, each time we try again, we have a bigger, better understanding of the situation. We have a better understanding of how to shape our words to create that emotion that we want.
But that’s only possible if we are willing to detach, if we are willing to put down our ego, if we’re willing to accept the feedback that other people are giving us as legitimate.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard an author say, “This person said this thing, but they’re wrong because X, Y, Z.” Now objectively, they might be wrong because of those reasons. It might be that you’re trying to do something, you’re trying to create a specific thing, and the other person doesn’t understand your intent so their feedback to you is just not helpful in creating what you want to create.
We just can’t start with that position. It is dangerous to think to yourself, “There’s nothing in what’s being said here that can help me.” If you want to supercharge your learning, your improvement, you have to take the opposite approach. You have to say, “In every piece of feedback, there is something that I can get out of it. There is something that can help me improve my craft.”
That doesn’t mean we are going to give every piece of feedback the same weight. In Monday’s post I talked a little bit about that, weighing out the feedback that you’re getting and judging it not as an isolated thing, but instead in the broader context of what you’re creating.
Just as we ask the one question relentlessly, “What is one thing I can do to improve?” We have to also understand that the feedback we’re getting is a perspective. It is somebody else’s perspective, and in it will be traces of truth. If we can put our ego aside and take apart that feedback, understanding what needs to be embraced and what needs to be discarded, we will not be able to help but fall into a loop of continually improving.
YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/VTTEa20sPKU
Thanks for reading and watching.
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