Comment by colin353
3 years ago
Positive feedback feels nice, but negative is way more useful to making a great product.
We're changing an website that millions of people use every day. Hopefully we mostly have a positive impact. But if we're making it worse, even in a small way, that matters a lot to be aware of.
Very true. I love “negative” feedback. But I don’t know how to not take it personally sometimes. It often feels like a failure. Especially when it’s a “darn I should have caught that!”
Everyone fails sometimes. Take every failure as a learning experience. Taking it personally and feeling emotions doesn’t actually help the problem - that you made a mistake and need to just learn and move on. Focus on the future, on the problem, on now, not the past. If however you make a mistake and get defensive and don’t learn anything then yeah it’s only a toxic thing on you. Learning from it helps you grow.
Masters of subjects don’t learn overnight. They learn over years, decades, a lifetime. In that time they make countless mistakes. But they persevere and don’t let it affect them emotionally and they grow into those masters.
I make mistakes daily. I’ve thrown away hundreds of thousands of lines of code in my career because it didn’t work as expected. But each time I grew a little and learned something to make the next iteration better.