Learning From Negative Feedback

Key Takeaways

on my way to a meeting and it just started raining this is not good for my new electric bike so I'm stuck here under a bridge [Music] [Music] I hate the winter and I'm still trying to kind of delude myself that it's summer but so I go with t-shirts outside and I ignore the rain warnings and then I get stuck outside anyway you know the last few days and actually weeks I've been getting lots of feedback on prospr um using intercom so I get it to my email and usually it's stuff like yeah it's so cool it's very nice or even if people give me feedback why it's not working for them it's very it's very nicely done but the other day I got like really kind of a I would say a rude message like this is this this is really not solving my problems why the hell did you do it like this it should be that way and I read it and I was like whoa so and the the first I guess thing that I wanted to do was to react in the same way and to just say hey what do you mean this is I've been working so hard do you know how hard it is to design a product and of course we can't get everything right on the first time and it takes so long to develop I know it's not perfect but you know and I wanted to get into this kind of argument or be defensive but then I was like wait breathe and try to think wait this guy is being super honest with you he's not like everybody else who's trying to sugarcoat it and be nice to you he's actually telling you what's not working so I kind of replied hey thanks for the feedback uh why do you think this is not working uh as expected and what would you like to see there and this actually evolved into a conversation which was like I think one of the most insightful uh conversation with with real feedback as to how to make this product better and I think I think this is super common I know that you know it still happens to me with my client when they give me feedback and they do it not in a nice way because not everybody knows knows how to be nice uh so they just tell you I don't like this or this crap and because we are kind of in love with with our work and we're very passionate about it we tend to take it personally and we try to get defensive and explain why we did that way and why it is a good idea instead of just you know taking this as a learning opportunity and just open your ears and listen and get ideas as to how to do this much better so so obviously I'm not perfect at this I think it's it's it's very hard to do but it's really first of all my first rule is to never react immediately I mean if if I'm in a in a meeting then maybe I have to react but on emails and stuff like that I really try to breathe and then relax and think about this and actually think you know besides the fact that he's rude or he's not nice or he hurt my feeling is there something relevant this feedback that I can learn from and that I can improve my work and for me it's super important and I think this this feedback is actually going to make prospr much better so I'm happy with it all right another long and busy day is now over lots of client work new school stuff busy day anyway I kind of want to share a little story with you as to how I make friends because I told you before I think making friends is super important building your network of really awesome people that you can you know learn from um and this this weekend I'm going to Belgium for kick Festival so I've found out this really great designer called Sydney which is a Belgium designer so I hit him up on on Twitter and said hey man I really love your work and I'll be in Belgium this week would you like to meet and this kind of evolved into a conversation where uh Vlad CEO of webflow said that uh gasi the product designer of webflow will be there uh Sydney said that he actually knows my YouTube channel so hopefully I think we're going to have lunch all three of us together in Belgium and that's super super fun I'm going to have two new friends which are talented people that I can learn from uh we can share you know insights around design web technology web flow stuff like that um and you know I love doing this stuff and I think it really really helped me out you know both building my knowledge but also building you know my network and you never know what these things lead to so I encourage you to reach out to people that you know you have chance to meet and just make friends hope you guys have a great day I'll catch you tomorrow [Music]