Peak Performance Newsletter #7 | Receiving Feedback, Playing your Game, and Resolving Conceptual Opposites
Hey all,
Well, I finally did the thing and migrated us to substack. This was in response to some candid feedback from a dear colleague:
"The content is great, but the presentation is lacking in zazz."
He was right. It's time to grow up a bit and commit. Which leads me to my first discussion point...
Gracefully Receiving Feedback
Feedback feedback feedback... It can be a nightmare to receive and a nightmare to give. I struggle to think of a word that more quickly triggers fear and the fight-flight response in the modern worker than "feedback."
I must admit, I have great leaps and bounds to grow in my own capacity to receive feedback. One negative tendency of mine is to always have an explanation for feedback. I feel compelled to justify why I made the choice that I did. This defensive posture is completely rations, it's my way of saying to the other person "Oh haha, I totally agree with your feedback, but I am also not an idiot and your feedback is the result of a conscious choice based on realistic tradeoffs of which you may not be aware." Which is a totally fine thing to want to convey. But the question I'm considering is, where does it land me?
A tendency to automatically defend or explain may aid us in maintaining social standing with the giver-of-feedback, but it also robs us of our full capacity to hear and receive feedback. More dangerously, it reinforces an unconscious and limiting belief that feedback is an indicator that there is something fundamentally wrong with us as people, that feedback is inherently personal, that "good enough" means some absurd form of perfection in which no one would ever feel compelled to give us feedback. It robs us of the ability to see that feedback is, at heart, an opportunity for us to grow.
And so an invitation, to you and to myself: to commit to taking feedback gracefully, to not taking it personally, to see the opportunity to grow not only in the feedback itself but in developing our capacity to see feedback as an opportunity to grow, and to respond with, "that's a good point, thanks for bringing it to my attention."
Playing Your Game: A Path to Self-Authoring
One concept that has repeatedly come up lately is that of Playing Your Own Game. This prompt is meant to serve as a correction to our tendency to operate from an overly-socialized place: we often unconsciously adopt our measures of success, hell even our ideas of how we should operate and who we should be, from socialized narratives.
To take it a step further, we often adopt them from our idea of the socialized narratives around us.
When you operate from this place, not only are you divorced from yourself, you're divorced from reality. You're taking your cues from ideas of how things "should" be rather than an experimental dance between how you'd like them to be and how they are.
Last week, I took a dive into the Freudian model of the id, ego, and superego. Some brief definitions to help with what I'm about to say:
id: the part of the mind in which innate instinctive impulses and primary processes are manifest. Think "lizard brain"
superego: the part of a person's mind that acts as a self-critical conscience, reflecting social standards learned from parents and teachers
ego: the part of the mind that mediates between the id, the superego, and reality and is responsible for reality testing and a sense of personal identity.
One way to think about our tendency to operate from socialized narratives is that we have a hyperactive superego. When our superego is overly active, it can drive our ego, the mediator, into a defense mechanism in order to relieve the tension between the desires of the id and the judgment of the superego. This is all in the name of preventing the id's raw animalistic desires from leading to the destruction of the self.
More on defense mechanisms here, if you're curious.
This seemingly bizarre state actually makes perfect sense if you consider adolescence. Adolescence is a stage in which the ego's ability to mediate is underdeveloped in respect to the unbridled desire of the id. As we begin to integrate into the complex social contracts of society, acting on unbridled selfish desire has a serious possibility to destroy us or set us back in irreconcilable ways. To protect us from this, the superego comes crashing down, driving the ego into a defensive posture against our own desires, our id.
As adults, this becomes a problem when your ego becomes developed enough to align those desires with society's rules, yet your superego keeps you trapped in id-suppressing defense mechanisms.
Or rather, an opportunistic reframe:
As adults we have the massive opportunity to self-actualize through our ego by stepping up and out of our defense mechanisms and using our new found power to align our id and superego, our own self-interest and that of society. We become capable of asserting our desires while peacefully co-existing with society around us. This is the essence of playing your game.
Resolving Conceptual Opposites: What leads and what follows?
One of the key elements of high level play in any domain is understanding how to resolve the tension of concepts which are seemingly opposed, but are mutually required for effective execution.
The analytic and the human.
The technical and the psychological.
The vision and the details.
In our initial attempts to resolve these opposites, we start to consider both ends in our decision-making process, but often fallback into our old ways and make decisions that only allow us to inhabit one end of the conceptual spectrum. Absent a mental model to resolve these conceptual opposites, we are incapable of nuanced and encompassing solutions. We inevitably operate from a place of “either or”.
One mental model for resolution is that of alignment. A question to help us embody this: in a given moment, which concept leads and which follows? Which concept would you like to use to make the primary decision, and which concept would you like to clean up the the details during execution?
Some examples that may add clarity:
In business: For decisions oriented around revenue and cashflow, you'll likely want to primarily make the decision based on the financial consequences and figure out how to do right by the human side after the strategic decision is made. Note, this is superior to only considering the analytic consequences: the decision is made by those parameters, but there is an explicit commitment to do right by the human side of things as an immediate followup.
On the other side, for HR and culture decisions, you likely want to make the primary decisions on the human side and figure out the cost & revenue implications on the backside. Set your vision based on what you want to do for your people, and figure out the financial-side in alignment with that as you go.In personal life: Consider if decisions should be made on logistics or your vision. Some matters are constrained by logistics: if you live in NYC and make a low salary, you'll likely need to make your housing decision predominantly via that frame. But if money is less of a concern and your home is a huge priority for you, make the decision with a vision & values-first approach and figure out how to clean up the financial implications afterwards.
Embedded in this practice is the ability to transcend the problem space where the concepts are opposites. As I googled for an image to match this concept, I was met with a quote by Carl Jung, a man whose ideas I tend to have a love affair with:
"If a union is to take place between opposites like spirit and matter, conscious and unconscious, bright and dark, and so on, it will happen in a third thing, which represents not a compromise but something new."
Here, Jung argues that the solution lies in the transcendence of the opposites. We must develop ourselves to the point where gain the perspective to see that these paradoxes need not be strict opposites, but that the opposition is a construct which we may resolve across a number of dimensions. This includes time, which is what I suggested above.
Memento Mori
The modern revival of stoicism has made Memento Mori, latin for "Remember that you have to die", a popular concept. I have nothing profound to add to the conversation, but I came across an article today that filled me with that supreme gratitude which only an acknowledgement of our mortality can:
Remember: it's never a mistake to tell your loved ones that you love and appreciate them, and that petty squabble you got in today will mean absolutely 0 when the end comes.
I love you all. Thanks for reading,
Justin