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Without feedback either from yourself or from outside observers — you cannot figure out what you need to improve on or how close you are to achieving your goals.
Feedback is essential for identifying areas for improvement and gaining a realistic view of your progress. Whether one-on-one coaching with a teacher, mentor, or peer or some form of self-assessment, you need a means of pinpointing your strengths and weaknesses. This is the only way to identify and work through trouble spots and advance from “just ok” to true mastery of a skill.
You’re entitled to your own opinion if you keep your opinion to yourself. If you decide to say it out loud, then I think you have a responsibility to be open to changing your mind in the face of better logic or stronger data. I think if you’re willing to voice an opinion, you should also be willing to change that opinion.”
We tend to think that what we think is true. And because we think something is true, we ignore information that might tell us it’s not true.
Charles Darwin deliberately looked for thoughts that disagreed with his own. He wrote, “whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from memory than favorable ones.” Darwin was out for truth, not to confirm his view of the world.
“If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change,” Marcus Aurelius said. “For I seek the truth, by which no one ever was truly harmed. Harmed is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance.”
Surprises alert you to flawed thinking. When results are not what you expected. When facts disagree with you. When someone does something unexpected. “What surprise tells you,” Adam Robinson says, “is that your model of the world is incorrect.” And when your model of the world is incorrect, you need to figure out why.
When you catch yourself saying “that doesn’t make any sense,” “that shouldn’t happen,” “I didn’t expect that,” you’re surprised. That’s your cue to pay attention.
Surprises are a clue that you’re missing something. Dive and figure out what.
100 Words Everyday 