The Feedback principle

The feedback principle is about critical analysis. Both self-analysis and putting yourself in situations where feedback comes from the outside. Without this analysis, learning is random. You might do the right thing, you might not, there’s no way to know! You make mistakes … but don’t actually learn from them.

That’s important enough to repeat. (Some people think merely doing stuff wrong is great and will continue making the same mistake until the end of time.)

Making mistakes is crucial for any learning. But only if you learn from them.

How do you analyze yourself? Where do you get feedback? I see these main components.

• Critical thinking (objectivity)
• Asking the right questions (prompting good feedback)
• Putting yourself out there (external feedback)
• Design the right environment (constant testing)

Critical thinking

This is obviously not something I can teach in this guide. It’s a mind-set, another skill, that unfortunately many people lack. It doesn’t help that schools teach you not do to this. Any critical or individual thinking in the educational system will open the gates to hell.

Honestly, the best (and most fun) way to practice this is by programming.

Nothing major. No need to be scared, if you have no idea how to code. There are great websites out there where you can learn to code through simple challenges and problem solving, such as CodeWars

Why do I recommend this? Because coding completely removes subjectivity and assumptions.

The computer does exactly what you tell it to do. It can’t guess what you want. It won’t do what you want just because you ask nicely. You need to think completely logically and critically.

This is how I learned critical, logical, objective thinking.

Remember when I told you I got defensive and irritated when I received my first feedback as a kid? That’s bad. You won’t learn from it. And others will hesitate to ever give feedback again. When I looked at my own work, emotions and assumptions guided me. “I spent so much time on this, it must be good” or “They just don’t play a lot of games, they don’t get it”.

Remove all that. Analyze yourself critically. And the best way to train that, is by trying to get a dumb computer to do the simplest task imaginable.

The right questions

Alright, skip forward a few years. I can now graciously accept feedback. That still didn’t solve my problems! Because the feedback I got was something like “yeah the game is fun” or “nah it’s just hard to understand”.

You need to ask the right questions if you want useful answers.

Self-analysis

Sure, you can start with a question like

• “Why is my basketball technique so bad?”
• “Why doesn’t this scene from my novel work?”
• “Why do I suck at playing the guitar?”

But you need to dig deeper than that.

• Try to get as specific as possible
• And remove value judgments; instead, phrase it as a problem to solve

Let’s say I throw a basketball and it doesn’t go in. Then we have a specific problem that needs solving: the basketball should go in! Instead of saying “man I suck at basketball”, say “how do I get the ball in there the next time?”

And then you can focus on specific parts. Was it my stance? Am I not strong enough? Do I need to aim higher? Go through each part involved, check it, and find possible changes to make.

Another example. When I feel a scene isn’t working in a story, I ask myself a myriad of specific questions.

• Is there tension? Is it enough?
• Does the story not flow? Are there badly written sentences?
• Are characters acting like themselves or not?
• Is there an interesting hook to this scene? Is it interesting enough?
• …

Once I have some idea what’s happening, I phrase the problem to solve and possible options. Perhaps: “The scene feels incoherent, all over the place. How do we solve that?” And possible solutions would be that too much is happening, that I contradict myself, that the scene starts one way but ends on a completely different note.

Now, remember the first principle: “Do”. Don’t look at all your options and start worrying and doubting. Hmm, I don’t know which solution is the best! What to do, what to do?

Just do one of them. Try them all, if possible.

External

The same applies when asking others for feedback. Many game developers will test their game and then ask: “So, did you have fun?” or “And what do you think?”

The first is a closed question (only yes/no). The second is so open and broad that people wouldn’t know what to say.

Instead, I learned to ask open questions, that are still specific enough to answer.

• “I notice you don’t use button X. What’s the reason?”
• “At level 3, you guys were stuck for a while. Talk me through your thought process.”

If that doesn’t work, I switch to more emotional and creative questions. These are sometimes closed, but it gets the feedback juice flowing.

• “What is your absolute favorite part of this game?”
• “Which part do you hate the most?”
• “If you could change one thing, what would it be?”
• “If I changed the rules to X or Y, would you like that or not?”

Once they’ve answered a few of these, they are ready for the real questions. (Sometimes the answers to these are just as instructive, though.)

The same is true for any other skill. When asking for feedback, don’t just show something to people (or send them something) and wait. Actually ask specific questions. Actually prompt them about the things of which you are most uncertain.

About dealing with feedback

Feedback isn’t 100% correct, both external and internal. You might think you suck at something, while others don’t. (We are quick to find ourselves incapable of anything or the best human to ever grace the earth.) Others might tell you to stop doing something, but they are actually wrong.

That’s why I started with critical thinking. Remove emotion, assumption, relationships with the people that gave you feedback, etcetera. If you think objectively and logically, you can discern which feedback is valuable and which is not.

In general, though, the rule is,

• If only one or two people give a certain feedback, it’s probably a matter of taste—ignore it.
• If almost everyone gives the same feedback, it’s probably a real issue—take it seriously.

Putting yourself out there

I’ve already given several examples of situations where I thought “this is bad, nobody cares”, but put something online anyway. And what do you know? Some people cared.

This isn’t a certainty. In fact, you will be rejected often, and you will do things (or make things) that nobody sees or likes. That will feel bad, and that’s fine.

Accept that downside for the enormous upside: putting yourself out there will lead to more feedback and more chances of success.

If applicable …

• Make a portfolio or post your work online.
• Join a local group or community around what you do
• Audition for competitions, jobs, whatever (yourself or your work)

I learned more from a few query letters to agents and some writing competitions, than writing several entire books. At the same time, this got my name out there.

This feeds back into the previous section. If you put yourself out there, you’ll receive more external feedback, usually from unexpected angles.

They will tell you things you would’ve never discovered yourself. Both mistakes to fix (and perhaps how to fix them), and things at which you actually already excel.

Design the environment

This is why games are such amazing learning tools. One of the core principles of gaming is feedback (loops):

You constantly either succeed (victory!) or fail (game over!). Both on the macro scale (e.g. losing the whole game) and micro scale (e.g. losing one life)

This means you constantly test your skill against the system. Such a short feedback loop is ideal for learning. The shorter the better. The clearer the better.

So try to design your environment to get this feedback. Find ways to easily test what you’re doing against some measurement. Yes, this is basically “gamifying” the learning process.

Because physical sports are just games, they have this by default. You kick a soccer ball, it goes where you want or not—immediate feedback.

This is harder for other skills. That’s why I say design your environment. You’ll need to try some things, make a few changes, so the environment allows constant testing.

But the crucial part of this is a clearly defined goal and an easy way to check it. A clear win state and fail state.

If you can formulate a goal—the thing you want to get out of your learning session—you can test your progress.

• When you succeed, you analyze it as a success and save it in your brain as “do that again!”
• When you fail, you analyze it using the techniques above and save it in your brain as “don’t do that again!”

Conclusion

Putting it all together, how do you analyze yourself?

• First, define what is actually wrong or right to you. Design your habits or training to easily check this.
• If you fail your test, formulate the failure as a problem to solve. List as many options as you can, then try those.
• Put what you do or make out there as much as possible. Ask external feedback, and ask it in the way that gives meaningful answers.
• At all times, think critically about yourself and the feedback. If you do this often, you get better at finding logical solutions to any problem.

As mentioned, when I started doing (creative) projects, I struggled a lot with this analysis. I usually thought something was good or bad purely based on mood or my energy levels. If I thought something needed fixing, I had no clue how to fix it.

But by trying again and again, I developed a basic sense of, well, “problem solving”. I see this with everyone who has some experience within their field. You get an intuition that immediately fires all possible solutions to problems, and can even sort them based on what is the most logical (or most probable to work).

Again, quantity breads quality. Quantity breeds intuition and experience. You will learn how to analyze and problem solve yourself just by trying to do it a lot.

This principle will be easier if you come from a more “logical” background (such as programming, science, etcetera).

It will probably be the toughest if you’re not from that background. Simply because many people unlearn how to think logically and critically.

Well, relearn it!