Leadership Without Excuses: How to Create Accountability and High-Performance (Instead of Just Talking About It)

CHAPTER 13TREAT MISTAKES AS INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL AND GIVE NEGATIVE FEEDBACK THAT DOESN’T FREAK PEOPLE OUT

There’s just one thing that makes it tough to receive negative feedback and learn from mistakes—and that’s human nature. As Nassim Taleb writes in Fooled by Randomness,¹ humans have a hard time controlling their response to negative information. For example, he says, people who check their stock portfolios once per day, on the whole, make less money than people who check their portfolios once per quarter. Why? Purely as a function of random volatility, the person who checks his or her portfolio more often will have more exposure to negative information. And repeated exposure to negative information is “emotionally draining” and leads to illogical ...