Monday morning, February 10th. The team lead next to me is conducting their third "feedback session" of the day. They're asking everyone how they feel about the new workflow, what could be improved, what they need more of, less of. Everyone's being very thoughtful and constructive. Nothing will change. Two weeks from now they'll do it again. I'm realizing: we've built a culture where asking for feedback feels like progress, but it's mostly just performative anxiety dressed up as growth mindset.

The Thesis

Constant feedback doesn't create growth—it creates feedback junkies who can't trust their own judgment. The modern obsession with "radical candor," 360-degree reviews, and perpetual check-ins has convinced us that improvement requires external validation at every step. It doesn't. Real skill development happens through extended periods of independent work, internal reflection, and learning to trust your own assessment of quality. Feedback culture has mistaken other people's opinions for the path to excellence, when mostly it just trains you to be reactive and fragile.

This goes against everything you've been taught about growth and learning:

  • Seek feedback early and often
  • Radical candor is kind
  • 360-degree reviews make you better
  • You can't see your own blind spots
  • Feedback is a gift

All of that sounds good. Most of it is wrong, or at least massively overstated.

Why Feedback Culture Fails

It makes you reactive instead of principled:

When you're constantly asking "What do you think?" you stop developing your own sense of what's good. You become a human A/B test, adjusting based on whoever spoke to you last.

The person who masters their craft doesn't poll their audience at every step. They develop taste, judgment, and internal standards. They make something, assess it against their own criteria, and iterate based on their own growing understanding.

Constant feedback short-circuits this. You never develop the internal gyroscope that tells you whether your work is good. You're always looking outside yourself for validation, which means you're always at the mercy of other people's (often confused, contradictory) opinions.

Most feedback is noise:

Here's what people won't tell you: most feedback is someone's personal preference dressed up as objective assessment.

"This section is too long" means "I personally would have made it shorter." "This approach seems risky" means "I'm risk-averse and projecting that onto you." "Have you considered doing X?" usually means "I would have done X, and I need you to validate my approach."

That doesn't make feedback malicious—it's just subjective. The problem is we've created a culture where subjective preferences are delivered as if they're diagnostic truth. And when you're collecting feedback from six different people, you get six different sets of preferences, all contradicting each other, all delivered with confidence.

You're not getting signal. You're getting noise and calling it data.

It trains fragility:

The more you depend on external validation, the more you need it. The more you need it, the less capable you become of working independently, taking risks, or trusting your own judgment.

People who need constant feedback can't function in ambiguity. They can't make a decision without consensus. They can't commit to an approach without someone else confirming it's the right one. They've outsourced their judgment so thoroughly that they've lost the ability to develop their own.

This is the opposite of resilience. You've created a dependency on other people's opinions that makes you fundamentally fragile.

It's often just anxiety management:

Let's be honest about what's happening: asking for feedback feels like doing something. It feels productive. Collaborative. Growth-oriented.

Often, it's just a way to share the emotional burden of uncertainty.

You're not sure if your work is good, so you ask someone else to tell you. You're afraid of making the wrong choice, so you want someone else to confirm you're on the right track. You're nervous about shipping something imperfect, so you invite someone to find the flaws first.

None of that is actually improving your work. You're just distributing your anxiety across more people while calling it "seeking input."

What Actually Works

Build your own taste first:

Before you ask anyone what they think, spend real time developing your own sense of what's good.

Study the best work in your field. Not to copy it, but to build internal standards. What makes great writing great? What makes good design good? What separates excellent code from merely functional code?

Then practice making your own assessments. Look at your work and ask yourself: Is this good? Why or why not? What would make it better? Don't poll others—develop the capacity to judge your own work honestly.

This is uncomfortable. You might be wrong! Yes. You will be. That's how you learn. Being wrong based on your own assessment teaches you something. Being wrong based on someone else's opinion just teaches you to trust them instead of yourself.

Work in longer cycles:

Instead of asking for feedback after every increment, work in extended periods of independent effort. Build something substantial. Spend weeks or months developing it based on your own judgment.

This forces you to trust yourself. To make decisions without external validation. To develop conviction about your approach. To learn what happens when you follow your own instincts all the way through.

Then—after you've built something complete, after you've made all the key decisions yourself—get feedback on the finished work. Not on every step. Not on whether you're going in the right direction. On the actual outcome.

You learn far more this way. You see the consequences of your judgment. You discover where your instincts were right and where they led you astray. And critically: you build the capacity to operate independently.

Choose feedback sources carefully:

Not all feedback is created equal. Most of it is worthless.

Useful feedback comes from someone who:

  • Has actually achieved what you're trying to achieve
  • Understands the context and constraints you're working with
  • Shares your goals and values
  • Has proven judgment in the specific area you're working on

Everyone else is just sharing their opinion. Which is fine, but it's not "feedback" in any meaningful sense. It's just noise.

Stop democratizing input. One person who deeply understands what you're doing is worth more than a dozen well-meaning people who don't.

Learn to sit with uncertainty:

The urge to ask for feedback is often just discomfort with not knowing whether you're on the right track.

Learn to sit with that discomfort. Keep working. Trust that clarity will emerge through the work itself, not through other people's reassurance.

The best work comes from people who can tolerate uncertainty long enough to discover something new. People who need constant validation can't do that—they course-correct too early, before they've explored the full implications of their approach.

The Hard Truth

You can't outsource judgment. You can't poll your way to excellence. You can't make something great by committee.

At some point, you have to decide what you think "good" means and commit to achieving it based on your own standards. You have to make decisions without consensus. You have to ship work that some people will dislike. You have to develop enough confidence in your own assessment that you can ignore feedback that doesn't serve your goals.

Here's what this actually looks like:

  • This week: Work on something without asking anyone's opinion until it's done. Build your own assessment of whether it's good. Then, if you want, ask one person whose judgment you trust.
  • This month: Identify one skill you want to develop. Study it. Practice it. Assess your own progress based on your own criteria, not other people's validation.
  • This year: Build something substantial based entirely on your own judgment. Make all the key decisions yourself. Learn whether your taste is good or not by seeing the results, not by asking permission at every step.

Stop asking what people think. Start trusting your own judgment.

Most feedback is noise. Learning to filter it out is more valuable than collecting more of it.

Today's Sketch

February 10, 2026