When good advice is wrong for you

We're taught that feedback is valuable because it helps us to see things we sometimes can't see ourselves. That's often true. Some of my most important insights about myself came from other people. Yet some feedback can be misleading because what looks like a flaw in our personality is actually intertwined with a cognitive strength.

For a long time, I was told in both my work and personal life that I was disorganized. This observation wasn't unreasonable. I lose things easily, forget details, and have a hard time staying focused on one thing for very long. So I took the feedback seriously.

I bought agendas and productivity apps. I colour-coded my calendar. I hired assistants. If there was a system designed to help people stay on top of things, I've probably tried it.

And a lot of it worked. When I held the systems tightly enough, I did become more organized, things stopped slipping. But there was another effect — in my most organized periods, I was also at my least generative.

All the time and energy spent managing the details took away from the space I needed for my Conceptual thinking. The "ideal state" was costing me the thing that created value in my work and meaning in my life.

The disorganization people kept pointing to wasn't a habit I had failed to fix. It was the tradeoff of my Conceptual mode of thinking: one that lives in ideas, connections and possibilities, and pays for that by losing track of where I left the keys.

Which is why that feedback was never as simple as it sounded. It assumed I could subtract the cost and keep the strength even when they came from the same place.

The most useful shift wasn't rejecting the feedback. It was being able to tell the difference between feedback I can act on freely, and the feedback that asks me to pay with the very thing that makes my thinking unique.

Soon I'll be sharing Modes with you all — a way to understand these tradeoffs in every type of thinker. It's almost ready, stay tuned.

Gregor