How to Use Feedback Loops for Skill Development

10,000 hours of practice? Yeah, they still matter, but they only pay off when each hour rides shotgun with immediate feedback. Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman told Inc. Magazine that relevance and real-time correction are the multipliers that turn long practice into fast mastery. If practice is water, feedback is the cup that keeps it from spilling out all over the place. When repetition runs on autopilot, your brain quietly holds on to every flaw. A crisp critique, whether from a coach, a peer, or an AI copilot, snaps you back into conscious control. It rewires the pattern before it hardens, and delivers the small win that keeps motivation rolling for the next rep. Practical ways to blend those hours with high-velocity feedback: 🏹 Set micro-targets for every session Name one measurable outcome before you start (trim thirty seconds off a 5K split, refactor a function to cut runtime by five percent, open a discovery call without filler words). End only after you check that metric. 🏹 Build a same-day feedback channel Pair each practice block with a critic who can respond within twenty-four hours: a mentor dropping Loom notes on your sales call, an AI pair-programmer flagging inefficient loops the moment you hit Save, or a training app overlaying bike-fit angles on video right after your ride. 🏹 Run a five-minute post-mortem Immediately jot what worked, what flopped, and the single tweak you will test next time. Reflection turns raw data into insight while the memory is still warm. 🏹 Track velocity over volume Count iterations per week, bugs squashed per hour, objections neutralized per call, or whatever. Share those numbers publicly so the team celebrates speed of improvement rather than brute hours logged. If 10,000 hours is tuition, feedback is the scholarship that lets you graduate early. Which feedback ritual shaved months off your learning curve? Share so we can tighten the loop together. Welcome to Tuesday, ya'll!

One of the most common questions I get asked, especially when I speak at tech events, is this: "How do I handle feedback and turn it into a tool for growth?" Feedback can feel tricky sometimes. I get it - you’re putting your work, your ideas, your skills out there, and then someone comes back and tells you it’s not quite right. It can sting, right? I’ve been there too. But here’s the thing - how you respond to feedback can either fuel your career growth or quietly hold you back. Let me explain. When you approach feedback with the wrong attitude, whether it’s defensiveness, dismissiveness, or even avoidance, you’re shutting the door to potential improvement. Imagine building a great product and ignoring feedback because, "It works fine for me!" It sounds ridiculous, but that’s exactly what a wrong attitude to feedback looks like. However, let me show you how I make feedback a tool for growth: 👉 I detach my ego from my work: I understand that sometimes comments on our work can get to us, but it’s a lot easier when I remind myself that my work or ideas are not me specifically. I consciously choose not to see feedback as an attack but as an opportunity to make my work better. 👉 I ask for clarification: Sometimes, people just want to talk or make vague comments, and I ensure that I filter things properly by asking the right questions. If the feedback isn’t clear, I ask for examples or specifics. I’ll say things like, “Can you show me what you mean?” or “What would you suggest as an improvement?” This helps me turn vague critiques into actionable insights. 👉 I create a feedback loop: After implementing feedback, I follow up by asking, “Does this solve the issue you pointed out?” This shows I’m proactive and allows me to openly communicate, making feedback even more effective. The right attitude to feedback can transform how you grow in your career. Use it as a tool to refine and elevate your work rather than something to fear. I hope this helps someone. See you in the future! Samuel Lasisi #linkedin #feedback #career #tech #uxdesign #uiuxdesign

The ₹31,000 crore company's founder, Kunal Shah, said he treats himself like software - here's what he meant: Most of us wait months to make big life changes. Kunal Shah updates himself every day, like releasing a new app version. His philosophy is brilliantly simple: You're an app with features (strengths) and bugs (weaknesses). Instead of seeking validation, seek the truth about what works. Research backs this approach. Studies show rapid feedback cycles lead to 40% faster skill development than traditional methods. Our brains adapt better to frequent small challenges than occasional big ones - exactly how software evolves through continuous updates. Here's how you can implement Kunal Shah's framework: 📍Run 2-week sprints: Pick one "bug" to fix. Maybe it's poor time management or communication gaps. Focus solely on debugging that issue for 14 days. 📍Create feedback loops: Apps crash, get reviews, then improve. Set up daily 5-minute reflections. Weekly check-ins with mentors. Track what actually changed, not what felt good. 📍Ship before perfect: Don't wait for the ideal solution. Launch your "beta version" - that new habit, skill, or behavior - at 70% ready. Iterate based on real results. 📍Document failures as data: When something doesn't work, treat it like a bug report, not a personal failure. Ask "what caused this?" not "what's wrong with me?" By following this approach, you'll fix problems faster, waste less energy on what doesn't work, and build momentum through small wins that compound into a massive transformation. Remember, your habits aren't a one-time installation - it's a product that needs constant updates. What's one area where you've been seeking validation instead of truth?

𝗠𝗲𝗮𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 I've been asked this at least 3 times in the last two months. "How do I know that my leaders are improving?" This is where we distinguish knowing from application. 10% of capability comes from learning from formal sources. 20% comes from networks and interactions. 70% comes from application to portfolios and projects. One thing that sets this all apart are data points. Even if I apply skills to my projects, how do I know I did it well? Most large companies have a 360-degree or leadership assessment process in place. So, I'll share my thought process for this in case you are attempting to develop this for your own organization. Step 1: Determine organizational strategy and business outcomes. This is necessary to align expectations of desired behaviors. This is where a Balanced Scorecard can come in handy. Step 2: Assess expectations of leaders. You'll then assess them across leadership behaviors for new, mid and even senior managers. Granularity of differences supports focus and clarity. Often, a list of pre-existing behaviors/competencies are used to make the exercise easier. Validated psychometric tools such as the 16PF help to anchor it to scientific rigor. Organizational psychologists like me conduct surveys to gather insights. Then, focus groups are used to drill down to details information. After that, we'll create categories basedon the information and produce working behavior-based definitions. Step 3: Prioritize the list Now, the leadership team decides which behaviors are more important by way of ratings. Step 4: Build the 360 We then build a 360-degree feedback survey questions. These questions are reviewed for validity. Step 5: Allocate the survey A system specializing in the 360 (there are many) can be used. Feedback Recipient selects 6 to 12 people to rate them. In organizations, to avoid selection bias, leaders of the feedback recipient can review and veto the people doing the rating. Then, the participant does the survey too (self-rating) Step 6: Debrief of survey Usually, participants need guidance from a trained coach who understands feedback requirements. This is to provide grounding and objective input. Often, 360 surveys tend to be met with resistance unless the coach is skilled in facilitating the reflection conversation. Step 7: Action Planning The participant then produces a set of actions for improvement. This plan and the priority of focus should be made known to the feedback givers. Step 8: Pulse Surveys After a designated time (within 6 to 12 month period) a validated pulse survey is set up for the observers to rate improvement in specific behaviors. Step 9: Continued Leadership Coaching, Mentoring and Peer Support A combination of these can be used to enhance development. Step 10: Final Comparison Survey Toward the end of the year, a comparison survey is done to see how the key areas have improved or not. ---

Learning just flipped from “search & memorize” to “coach & build.” This week, Sam Altman said students must get good at new AI tools. He’s right, and for designers, it changes how we learn, ship, and show proof of skill. Why this matters now: • Tools-first literacy: If you can orchestrate GPT-5, Gemini, or agents, you learn faster than peers who only study. • Assessment is shifting: The UK is piloting AI-assisted exam marking to speed and standardize grading—process and reasoning will matter more than rote answers. What changes for designers: Your AI stack becomes your skillset. Show how you learn on the fly: prompts, workflows, evaluations, and when you don’t automate. Portfolios need learning artifacts. Include a micro-tutor you built, like a GPT workflow that critiques UI states, and show the before and after. Process over polish. Share your critique loops, not just final screens—versions, reasoning, and tradeoffs. Daily drills beat weekend courses. 20 minutes a day with an AI coach is worth more than four hours on Sunday. Collaborative learning. Treat AI like a studio assistant: ask it to question your hierarchy, color, spacing, accessibility, and handoff. How to adapt this week: Pick one design weakness, like empty states. Build a quick AI coach to generate ten variants, then justify your choices. Post a five-image carousel: Prompt → Variants → Criteria → Final → Lessons. Repeat daily for seven days. Start measuring learning velocity, how quickly you can improves with AI feedback. #ai #learning

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗜𝗺𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗙𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗶𝗻 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 🗣️ Ever feel like your Learning and Development (L&D) programs are missing the mark? You're not alone. One of the biggest pitfalls in L&D is the lack of mechanisms for collecting and acting on employee feedback. Without this crucial component, your initiatives may fail to address the real needs and preferences of your team, leaving them disengaged and underprepared. 📌 And here's the kicker—if you ignore this, your L&D efforts risk becoming irrelevant, wasting valuable resources, and ultimately failing to develop the skills your workforce truly needs. But don't worry—there’s a straightforward fix: integrate feedback loops into your L&D programs. Here’s a clear plan to get started: 📝 Surveys and Questionnaires: Regularly distribute surveys and questionnaires to gather insights on what’s working and what isn’t. Keep them short and focused to maximize response rates and actionable feedback. 📝 Focus Groups: Organize small focus groups to dive deeper into specific issues. This setting allows for more detailed discussions and nuanced understanding of employee needs and preferences. 📝 Real-Time Polling: Use real-time polling tools during training sessions to gauge immediate reactions and make on-the-fly adjustments. This keeps the learning experience dynamic and responsive. 📝 One-on-One Interviews: Conduct one-on-one interviews with a diverse cross-section of employees to get a more personal and detailed perspective. This can uncover insights that broader surveys might miss. 📝 Anonymous Feedback Channels: Ensure there are anonymous ways for employees to provide feedback. This encourages honesty and helps identify issues that employees might be hesitant to discuss openly. 📝 Feedback Integration: Don’t just collect feedback—act on it. Regularly review the feedback and make necessary adjustments to your L&D programs. Communicate these changes to employees to show that their input is valued and acted upon. 📝 Continuous Monitoring: Use analytics tools to continuously monitor engagement and performance metrics. This provides ongoing data to help refine and improve your L&D initiatives. Integrating these feedback mechanisms will not only enhance the effectiveness of your L&D programs but also boost employee engagement and satisfaction. When employees see that their feedback leads to tangible changes, they are more likely to be invested in the learning process. Have any innovative ways to incorporate feedback into L&D? Drop your tips in the comments! ⬇️ #LearningAndDevelopment #EmployeeEngagement #ContinuousImprovement #FeedbackLoop #ProfessionalDevelopment #TrainingInnovation

Do you even upskill bro? To do anything effectively, we have to think in systems. Design your growth system like you’d design production software: - Cache what matters - Schedule with priority and retry logic - Loop + log for feedback and iteration - Prevent cold starts with defaults and prefetching - Auto-scale momentum with scoped wins If I were designing a system to upskill in my free time, here's how I'd architect it. 🧠 Cache Pick 1–2 learning themes per quarter, guided by business priorities or personal curiosity. (E.g., LLM architectures or AI-first UX patterns). Then fill the cache with pre-vetted, high-signal resources like: - 2 curated long-form articles per week - 1 deep-dive course per month   - 1 technical podcast for walks/workouts ⏱ Task Scheduler Run your days like a production workload: - Mornings: Deep work (build, write, think) - Midday: Meetings + async catch-up - Evenings (4x/week): 45 mins of scoped learning Each session has a fixed timeout and retry logic. Miss a day? Retry tomorrow.  🔁 Feedback Loop (with Logging) Every week, ask yourself: - What did I build with what I learned? - What felt hard — and why? - Where did I waste time? I log insights in Claude chat to keep a sort of versioned changelog of my brain. Over time, this builds up second-order insights I can reuse, remix, and refine. 🚫 Cold Start Prevention Decision fatigue = latency.  The fix: - Pre-approved learning queue - One “Up Next” tile on my phone - No new content until the current one is done Think of it as lazy loading (for your brain). ⚙️ Success Path Defaults Learning shouldn’t rely on motivation. It should run on smart defaults: - 20-minute micro-goals (“Finish Part 1 of X course”) - Revisit notes from 30 days ago (see what still sticks) - Share 1 finding weekly, internally or in public The best systems make the right thing the easy thing. —---------------- The engineers who grow fastest in 2026 won’t be grinding 16-hour days. They’ll be running elegant, intentional systems — compounding for 2–4 hours/week. What’s your system? #Upskilling #DeveloperHacks #Developers #DeveloperProductivity

Imagine standing at the edge of a cliff, blindfolded, That's what a career looks like without honest feedback. Most successful executives are playing a dangerous game of professional roulette, spinning without truly seeing their blind spots. Feedback isn't a weapon. It's your personal growth GPS. 📌 Why most leaders fail at feedback: They hear, but don't listen. They defend, instead of develop. They protect their ego over their potential. The real game-changing skill? Transforming feedback from a threat to your greatest ally. 📌 5 Mindset Shifts to Master Feedback: 1️. Perspective shift: - Feedback = Free Coaching. - Every critique is a potential breakthrough. - Your growth lives in uncomfortable spaces. 2️. Mental preparation: - Enter conversations with curiosity. - Check your defensiveness at the door. - Remember: Feedback is about behavior, not character. 3️. Strategic processing: - Pause before responding. - Ask clarifying questions. - Separate emotion from insight. 4️. Intentional action: - Don't just hear feedback. - Implement feedback. - Prove you're committed to evolution. 5️. Continuous improvement: - Track your progress. - Celebrate growth. - Build a feedback-positive culture. The most successful leaders don't just accept feedback. They actively seek it. Imagine a world where professionals view feedback as their secret weapon. Where vulnerability becomes strength. Where growth becomes inevitable. Are you ready to transform feedback from a feared conversation to your ultimate competitive advantage?

Obsess over the feedback loop. All the learning you need is in the feedback loop. Most people don’t fail because they lack talent. They fail because they lack a system for learning from failure. Every success story rests on a foundation of failures that were properly ↳ Analyzed ↳ Iterated On ↳ And Improved Most of us don’t hit these important marks. We move move past failure too quickly, avoiding the embarrassing discomfort of reflection. We take failures personally instead of treating them scientifically. We assume trying harder is the answer when we need to try harder to design a better approach. I focus on one core truth: Learning more from failure is how we ultimately win. Failure is a feedback loop, and if yours is broken, you won’t just fail, you’ll repeat your failures over and over. Here’s how to fix that. 👇🏼 1️⃣ Pause & Reflect ↳ Before you move forward, stop. ↳ What went wrong? ↳ What did you assume? ↳ What was unexpected? 2️⃣Capture Data ↳ Write everything down. Future-you needs this information. 3️⃣ Remove Your Ego ↳ This isn’t about you, it’s about the process. ↳ Failures are feedback, not character judgments. 4️⃣ Get External Input ↳ Find people ahead of you who will tell you the truth. ↳ No sugarcoating. ↳ No yes-people allowed. 5️⃣ Identify the Root Cause ↳ Surface-level problems aren’t the real issue. Dig deeper. ↳ What’s the pattern behind your failures? 6️⃣ Make One Small Change ↳ Not everything needs an overhaul. ↳ Start with one adjustment and test the impact. 7️⃣ Test & Observe ↳ Don’t make assumptions. Run your new approach. ↳ Measure the results, and see what actually works. 8️⃣ Iterate with Consistency ↳ One correction doesn’t fix everything. ↳ Keep adjusting, keep improving, keep refining. 9️⃣ Build a Culture of Learning ↳ Winners review their losses more than they celebrate their wins. Every failure contains data. Every mistake contains insight. Are you learning? If you’re not, you’re setting yourself up to fail the same way again. DO. FAIL. LEARN. GROW. WIN. REPEAT. FOREVER. What do your feedback loops like? Which of these ideas might be most helpful to your work? Drop a comment below to share your experience. 👇🏼 _____ 🔗 Subscribe to The Failure Blog via the link in my profile (💯🙏🏼) ➕ Follow me, John Brewton, for content that Helps (💯🙏🏼) ♻️ Repost to your networks, colleagues, and friends if you think this would help them (💯🙏🏼)

My most useful career growth tool is called the Magic Loop. I used it to reach VP at Amazon and to promote hundreds of people. Now thousands have used it and advanced in their careers. The question is, has AI made it useless? The answer is no. The Magic Loop is as useful as ever, perhaps even more so. But it isn’t the same. I have had to adapt the tool for an AI world, and in doing so, I have realized that implementing it will be imperative, as so many are facing AI-driven layoffs and career stagnation. Here is a short summary of how you can use the Magic Loop along with AI to continue growing your career through new and challenging circumstances. 1) Do your primary job well Use AI to increase your output, improve quality, and move faster. You can also use it to prepare for feedback conversations so you stay aligned with your manager on what great performance looks like. 2) Ask your manager how you can help Use AI to plan and rehearse this conversation. It can help you think through how to approach your manager so you come across as thoughtful and useful, not random. 3) Do what you are asked AI allows you to execute faster and take on a broader range of work. You can now contribute to tasks that may have been outside your skill set before, increasing your value and scope. 4) Ask again, with a career goal in mind Use AI to reflect on your progress, clarify your goals, and prepare to connect your ambitions to the needs of your team and business. 5) Repeat This is a loop, not a one-time action. Each cycle builds trust, expands your skills, and increases your value. AI will not replace this process; it will accelerate it. To read details about how to implement each of these steps and grow your career, read this week’s newsletter: https://buff.ly/0ppzRdu P.S. I would also like to hear from people, particularly those living and working outside the United States and for other companies than Amazon, who have applied the Magic Loop and gotten results. If you are willing to share your story with me, make a comment on this post or send me a direct message. I would really love to hear from you!