Regular feedback on our work is the clearest path to mastery.
Author and psychologist Carol Dweck rose to fame with her book, Mindset, which demonstrated the importance of disassociating our ego from our work. She defined the terms fixed and growth mindset.
A fixed mindset often inadvertently develops through people we respect praising us. In the long run, being told we are smart hampers our ability to embrace failure and growth.
A growth mindset allows us to see our intelligence and skill as malleable facets of our character. Being praised for our efforts creates a belief that with hard work and practice, we can improve.
To practice a growth mindset we must embrace the following:
- get lots of feedback
- see yourself as a work in progress with failure as an essential part of progress
- focus on the process of learning rather than pass/ fail
- embrace and actively seek opportunities to fail
This begs the question, “Why don’t we get more feedback?”
- we risk our reputation
- we might look silly in front of someone we respect
- other people’s resources are limited, and it takes time to give useful feedback
- we don’t want to burden someone with constant requests
Enter AI
Stanford University has been experimenting with using GPT4 to give feedback on research papers to increase the chance of getting published.
I’m cautiously optimistic about applying AI to a multitude of creative tasks where quality feedback is a pillar of progress.
AI can give us limitless feedback as we create, whenever we call on it with (almost) no cost.
Importantly, we feel no shame or stigma showing ‘poor’ quality work in progress to AI meaning a tighter feedback loop.
Kahn Academy is starting to do some interesting things with Kahnamigo, helping kids get dynamic feedback based on their current level of knowledge.
As a designer and a (very) amateur guitar player, embedding regular and quality feedback in my daily life seems like a huge win.