But they called my baby ugly! (why you need to be disciplined when dealing with criticism)

-

A couple of days ago, on an email thread amongst friends I felt a familiar emotion. A friend criticized a product I once worked on, and my immediate response was "Ok, so you really don't know what you're talking about."

I'm pretty convinced I was right on the details, but I wasn't objective or analytical in my immediate response. I felt genuinely offended. It was like someone called my baby ugly (btw, I don't have a kid but I'm pretty sure I'd be immediately livid if you did... even if the facts agreed with you. :-)) 

I didn't have time to even process why the person felt that way or had come to the conclusion, my immediate response was defensive and aggressively so.

This is bad - for a few reasons.

First, for me its pretty uncharacteristic.

Second, it doesn't help anyone and only makes both you and the other person feel worse and take the effort to root themselves even more strongly in your contrarian positions.

Third, a overly strong defensive response (especially in person) prevents the person expressing their idea completely. Even if you are convinced the idea is mostly wrong there are often little pieces of feedback that you can glean from it. Yup, this extends even to the idiots that call your baby ugly.

To achieve the best outcome, asking the person to explain themselves further (e.g. 'Can you tell me more?' or even 'Why do you say that?') can lead to either

  • more information for you 
  • or have the person talk them out of their own stance.

Things to remember for the next time around...




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The "Rescue Me" minisodes

-
I'm a fan of the FX show " Rescue Me " I was lukewarm when Dennis Leary mentioned the mini-sodes on his Daily Show visit. But, for the Rescue Me's particular situation it works really well. First the mini-sodes are actually good! they use characters from the story and tell a little anecdote they were clearly pretty cheap to produce through what seems like a little bit of complicated mess, they're distributing like crazy: YouTube , Crackle (Sony's site), the FX site (powered by Brightcove), Hulu These do exactly what they're supposed to do new episodes aren't coming till Spring 2009 , the fans need something to tide them over and keep the show in their memory: done potentially rope in new fans (short episodes, lower commitment to start watching the show) without freaking out old school media which is loathe to risk potential DVD sales by putting older episodes/clips online: done Its not completely clear to me how much this is by their own design, and
Read more

A short love letter to ~8 years on Google Search - 8 things I’m grateful for.

-
  After a few weeks off, I started a new gig within Google yesterday and it hit me that for the first time in almost eight years I won’t be working on some part of Google Search. Eight years ago, I told the team when I was interviewing that I was “looking for a place to call home for a while and grow there”. My experiences here more than met that need.  I used to write a regular “10 things about…” listy column for a while at a college newspaper. So in that style here’s 8 things (one for each year) I feel grateful to have experienced/learned in this time. Also, like that column which I banged out the night before it was due, this post is something that I don’t need to do, yet I feel somehow compelled to do (and so it’ll likely be longer and less crisp than it should be :-))    It actually is awesome to work on something so many people use and love, and that positively touches people’s lives. There’s a talk I give externally about Search and a line I often end up using is how the mission
Read more

Avengers Endgame: how trivial passions can nudge a career

-
Image
The Internets reminded me that today was exactly 2 years since Avenger's Endgame was released. I remember that day vividly for a few reasons I woke up before sunrise (way before the alarm went off).   I wore this (now that I think about it) borderline appropriate T-shir t and then..  .. showed up before 7:00am to watch that movie at Century Shoreline before going to work.  This is still the only movie that has a scene that can make me tear up consistently every single time (I know, I know - it's ridiculous).  That day was interesting from a work perspective for another reason. Along with a few other people at work (and with some crazy last-minute negotiating), we'd pulled together the Thanos Easter Egg on Search. It was typical of a lot of Easter Eggs on Search at the time, in that it wasn't really anybody's job, but we pushed it through because we loved the idea enough to do it. My day job on Media experience on Search helped me justify it a little bit I guess.
Read more