Four Reasons You Might Suck At Something
07:58am MST, 26 Jan 2007

As a teacher, there's one major question I keep trying to answer: why some people succeed so readily, and others have so much trouble, at improving the same skill. I think we can break it down into four reasons.

• You need to have the right criteria to evaluate success

  We see this difficulty a lot among teachers, for example. If you mistakenly believe that your primary goal is to transmit as much information as possible, you'll be a bad teacher. To be a good teacher, your goal must be to ensure that your students actually improve at the skill they're learning.

  We also see this a lot in business. There's the funny commercial that wins awards and that everyone loves... but which has no recall value and does nothing to sell the product. Or there's the PDA that offers ten new features that no one wants, and misses the one that people do need.

• You need to get enough feedback

  The key here isn't just a barrage of feedback, it's really the need for constant feedback. The longer the delay in getting feedback, the less useful it is. One of the secrets to my teaching methods is that I give students personal feedback more often than other instructors. Others are afraid of bruising a student's ego by making a direct comment, so they'll instead make general statements that are ignored by the people who most need them.

  In advertising, this is absolutely key. If you don't track your advertising efforts, they're almost worthless, since you'll rarely hit the best approach the first time.

  One last thing to remember is that while constant and sufficient feedback is important, too much is also a bad thing. To use the advertising example, if you try to tweak your ads too often, you'll be making changes to them before you actually see the full effect. So you might actually miss out on your best ad, because you changed it before it had enough time to succeed. As a guideline I usually say that you need to establish a statistical tendency before you use feedback to make a change in your methods.

• You need to get accurate enough feedback

  This is the hardest part, and accuracy is surprisingly as much an art as a science. Whether it's estimating customer satisfaction for your product, or evaluating how well students have learned a skill, it often takes a combination of knowing your industry, thinking outside the box, and doing a lot of testing.

• You need to know how to improve based on feedback

  This can be the hardest part, but you can essentially divide it into two parts:

  1. Try every small change that occurs to you, and use your feedback methods to determine what works; keep that.
  2. Model the champions. Find those who excel and do what they're doing.

  You have to do both. If you only model champions, you'll never innovate. It's even occurred to me personally to model a top-performer and then, after discussing it with him, to discover that some of the traits I was modeling were actually based on an "off-day," meaning I was modeling the wrong things! Similarly, you have to watch out for modeling someone who's great at personal sales but terrible at mass marketing. Make sure you're modeling the right skills from the right guy.

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