The Multiplying Effect of Brutally Honest Feedback

You want to be the shit at motion design.

Hey cool. So do I.

Before I get into it, here are the main takeaways.

Takeaways

• Feedback, aka critique, aka someone saying you could have done better, can be a powerful tool to becoming a more awesome you faster.
• Brutally honest feedback isn't a reflection of your personal worth.

I want to make business videos that sell. I want to make non-profit videos that move people to help their fellow humans in need. I want to make films that make people cry or exclaim "What?! How'd he do that? That was rad. I wanna be like that guy."

I discovered a problem recently, though. I have always had this weird problem. Some people I talked with last week also have the same problem.

We believe that when we've found "our thing", that we should be AMAZING at it after trying it for only a few months or weeks.

"I'm pretty sure I'm a child prodigy. I just haven't found what the thing is yet. Also, I'm 31 now, so it's just taken me a while to find it."

My subconscious has been telling me a version of this story ever since I was a kid. I realized at a young age that I was pretty athletic and that I had a knack for visual creativity.

Unfortunately, I thought, "If I'm naturally good at these things, what am I going to be a rock star at automatically?"

There are a couple of problems with this.

1. Child prodigies/the best-of-the-best practiced their butts off.
2. They didn't do it alone.

This second point is the one I want to talk about.

I tend to work in a bubble. I get in the zone and go to town on a project. Especially for personal projects, when I feel good about it, it's done. I publish and move on to the next project.

The problem here is the lack of feedback. I'm still a noob at motion design. I'm sure I'm skipping crucial steps and missing an opportunity to learn faster. Since I'm not seeking any sort of feedback from an expert, someone who's well beyond noob stage and can spot my mistakes from a mile away, I'm going to grow at a marginal pace.

Feedback is hard to take sometimes. It's natural to want to avoid it. It doesn't feel good when someone says your work could have been better.

This is all basically a big pep talk to myself. I want to get better at motion design. And the best way to do that is to work hard and ask for brutally honest feedback from someone I trust and who is more experienced than me... and understand that the brutal truth isn't a reflection of my personal worth. It's a guide to being more awesome.

I'm in Mograph Mentor Class 3 right now. And I've received some pretty brutal feedback. Each week I come in feeling pretty good. And the mentor doesn't let anything slide. It's pretty rough to hear sometimes. But I'm so grateful for the opportunity to be corrected by someone who can see where I can be better.

You can ask for brutally honest feedback from people you trust about your life in general as well. I just started asking my wife to be brutally honest with me when she sees an area of my life that I could use improvement.

I hope this helps. Feedback is a guide to being a more awesome you. You're already awesome, but I'm pretty sure you wouldn't mind being even more so.