The Feedback That Redirected Everything
I got a piece of feedback two years ago that I hated. I mean genuinely, viscerally hated. I went home and complained about it to three different people. I was convinced the person giving it was wrong, was missing the point, was projecting their own limitations onto my work.
They were right. It took me eight months to admit it.
What the Feedback Actually Said
The feedback was about a project I'd been working on for a year. I'd pitched it as one thing, built it as another, and was presenting it as a third. The person giving feedback — a creative director I respected but didn't know well — said: 'I can't tell what this is trying to be.'
I heard that as criticism of the work. It was actually a description of the problem. The work was confused because I was confused. I'd been so deep in the making of it that I'd lost track of what I was making.
Why I Resisted It
The creative community conversations have a thread about this — the way we resist feedback that requires us to admit we've been going in the wrong direction. Because admitting that means admitting the time we spent going that direction was... not wasted, exactly, but not what we thought it was.
I'd spent a year on this project. Accepting the feedback meant accepting that the year had produced something that needed to be reconceived, not refined. That's a hard thing to accept.
What Happened When I Accepted It
I took three weeks away from the project. Came back to it with the feedback in mind. Saw immediately what the creative director had seen. Spent two months reconceiving it.
The reconceived version is better. Not marginally better — significantly better. The kind of better that makes you embarrassed about the previous version.
The maker mindset essays have a piece about the version of a thing you have to let go of to get to the version that works. This was that. The year wasn't wasted — it produced the understanding that made the reconception possible. But I had to let go of what I'd built to get to what I was actually trying to build.
What I'd Tell Someone Getting That Feedback
Sit with it. Don't respond immediately. Don't defend. Don't dismiss. Just sit with it and ask yourself: what if they're right?
If they're wrong, you'll know after you've sat with it. If they're right, you'll know that too. The difference is that sitting with it gives you the chance to find out.
The youth and ambition writing at Wicked Youth has something about this — the specific difficulty of receiving feedback when you're still figuring out who you are as a maker. It's harder then. But it's also more important.
More from Girl Next Up when there's more to say.