We love to be told how great we are. Admit it. Someone has probably expressed admiration for what you do, and you’ve probably basked in it. It’s a lot harder to deal with honest feedback. In chapter 8 of Your Best Just Got Better, Jason Womack takes us on a tour of ways to define feedback and ways to make it more useful. On page 159, he offers the Wikipedia definition of feedback: “Feedback describes the situation when output from (or information about the result of) an event or phenomenon in the past will influence an occurrence or occurrences of the same.” Here’s why soliciting regular and honest feedback is a good idea. You probably have a self-image that is…
“So, what do you work on?” “Tell me about your research.” “What do you study?” If you’re interested in the life of the mind, you’re going to hear these. A lot. It’s essential to make sure you have a quick answer, preferably one that invites your interlocutor to inquire further about what you’re doing. Your answer can range from the embarrassingly vague (“economics”) to the embarrassingly detailed (“I’m working on relaxing l’Emenant’s Second Restatement of McBigshot’s Theorem, which, as you know, is the key result in [impossibly narrow subfield consisting of three papers, all of which were published Thursday]). You want to strike the right balance. You might be familiar with the “elevator pitch,” which relies on a simple thought…
