The Science Of Feedback

Let’s talk about the science of feedback and when it comes to feedback.

There are two types of feedback right.

One is negative feedback.

No you’re not doing that right.

Nope you’re doing that wrong.

That’s negative feedback.

It’s saying you’re doing something wrong.

So here’s a negative feedback.

Then there’s positive feedback.

Hey if you finish your homework I’ll give you some candy.

Hey if you accomplish this one goal then I’ll give you some money.

I mean a job is a positive feedback right.

You work and then you get salary at the end of the month.

And when it comes to learning you need feedback.

Because if nobody’s telling you if you’re doing something wrong or right then you’re just going blindly

and you don’t learn anything.

So feedback is an integral part of learning.

But let me ask you this.

Which one’s better is positive feedback better or is negative feedback better.

Maybe you have a preference.

Maybe you like being encouraged when you’re learning something maybe you like being told what you’re

doing wrong when you’re learning something.

It’s not absolutely conclusive.

If one is better than the other.

As a matter of fact as we’ll learn.

Each one is good for its own right.

But a recent study showed that experts that is people who are masters at a craft that were really really

good vastly preferred negative feedback versus positive feedback.

Why was that.

Because criticism is usually more actionable.

Right.

Instead of just getting compliments Hey you’re so good at this you’re so good at that by getting negative

feedback you know exactly what to fix or what people don’t like.

So negative feedback actually appears significantly more effective for learning especially when you’re

at a high level.

And another study actually uncovered that for certain tasks human learning system is actually capable

of learning without any positive feedback at all as long as you get negative feedback.

You can actually learn and you can really say the same thing for just getting positive feedback without

negative feedback.

So negative feedback is a very important thing.

Remember how I said both are important based on different situations.

Well positive feedback is actually great.

At the very beginning when you’re just starting to learn something you get a lot of self-doubt.

You get a lot of those obstacles where you think that you’re not good enough.

Right.

But when you have positive feedback at the very beginning it gets you over those obstacles at the beginning.

That’s actually how children get good at things.

Let’s say you join the soccer team.

Somebody tells you that you’re good at soccer or somebody tells you that you’re good at math.

You feel good.

And because of that you actually start to enjoy doing those tasks more and eventually you actually become

better than most people at soccer or math because you keep doing those tasks that you enjoy more so

positive feedback.

When you first starting out is a really really good thing but as you become more and more an expert

negative feedback is absolutely crucial.

The key here is that no matter what you do need feedback to learn.

And without feedback your rate of learning actually diminishes significantly.

If we had two people and one person got minimal feedback and the other person got lots of feedback that

second person with lots of feedback is definitely going to outperform the first person in the long term.

That’s why people get coaches.

Right.

You can train to become a professional basketball player by yourself at home but the person who gets

a coach and gets feedback watches video review of their place will outpace the first person very fast.

There’s no point learning something yourself from scratch when others have done it and others can help

you along the way.

You want to stand on the shoulders of giants.

You want to learn from other people’s mistakes other people’s experiences so that you can accelerate

your learning.

Now when it comes to feedback the best form of feedback when it comes to timing is immediate feedback.

If you want to be an efficient learner you need to get feedback right away.

If you’re doing something wrong you want to find out you’re doing something wrong right away instead

of waiting a week or a month as Anders Ericsson says which we’ll get to shortly.

He’s a very important figure when it comes to efficient learning mentioned that without feedback either

from yourself or from outside observers.

You cannot figure out why you need to improve on or how close you are to achieving your goal.

So without feedback we’re not going to be efficient learners and we’re going to use this feedback and

uncover some techniques in later on sections to make sure that we get this feedback that we need in

order to.