When to take feedback seriously

To know if the feedback is true, helpful or informed, consider the motive, expertise & quality of the person giving feedback

There’s this neat little framework by author Adam Grant where he talked about when to take feedback seriously. There’s three inter-related factors at play:

• Motive - intent is to help you
• Expertise - has relevant domain expertise or experience
• Quality - message focuses on quality

Now try and imagine a Venn diagram with three circles overlapping, so there’s four overlapping areas:

• Motive + Expertise + Quality = Mine this for gold, and seek mentorship. Best is if mentor also has skin in the game to help you succeed (i.e. Motive++).
• Motive + Quality but no Expertise = Might be wrong or misguided, despite best intentions and advice that sounds ‘smart’
• Quality + Expertise but no intent to help you = Might be trying to look/feel smart at your expense, even though sounds legit or portray the confidence of it
• Motive + Expertise but no Quality (feedback feels ‘meh’, or not relevant) = Might be a matter of taste or personal, subjective beliefs

I love this framework, because it helps filter out the noise from the signal when it comes to getting feedback on your writing or any creative work.

These days it’s easy to get unsolicited advice from friends or people on social media. Everyone can start sounding and portraying the false confidence of an expert after a few google searches and reading up the top few results. The worse is when it’s someone whom you know love and care about you, so you feel subconsciously obliged to heed their advice. Accepting it blindly can compromise your own authenticity as well.

So, using this framework as a sort of first pass helps a lot in knowing when you should consider feedback seriously or not.

How to use the Motive–Expertise–Quality feedback framework for your writings

A great way to apply this framework is to ask these three questions:

• Is the person sincerely trying to help you (and/or have skin in the game)?
• Is the person a legitimate authority in the domain?
• Is the person taking effort to understand your situation in order to give quality feedback?

About unsolicited feedback from strangers

If you think about the factor of motive, most advice you get online from strangers are probably sh*t most of the time. Because they don’t know you and you don’t know them, so it’s hard to verify any intent of kindness.

You might be able to check up on the person’s background and career experience to see if he has any legit expertise, but who has time to check through every single comment that comes along? Besides, experience can be very dependent on context. If any feedback resonates, it might very well be just feeding your own biases (in that case, the feedback is a mirror to how you really feel about it, like flipping a coin to trick yourself into surfacing what you really want).

Realising all these caveats make it much easier to not get too hung up about feedback from strangers, or even friends and loved ones.

Another way to think about it is: rather than see it as accurate feedback, view it as a public brainstorming brain-dump session. They are just throwing out ideas from their own perspective, and you don’t have to feel obliged to take it, because none of it might be even true, helpful or even informed.

Take them as wild ideas, cherry-pick what you feel might potentially be helpful, and go do your own research in that direction.