All applause without sincere feedback will waste your life. If your work is mediocre or not good enough for the results you want, you need to know right away. If your work is good enough to attract genuine applause, that’s great. However, you still need to understand why it worked, with a view to improve your performance. You must grow to a point whereby honest feedback matters more to you than the applause of the crowd. Genuine feedback will reveal how useful or useless your work is. There is no other way to make good progress.
The problem with applause is that without objective feedback, you won’t have results in the real world. If your college of fools nudges you on about how wonderful your ideas are. Such an applause would embolden you to go all out in pursuit of such ideas. After investing so much time, energy and resources towards the idea. You then realize that your projects have failed in the real world. With little or no patronage. Create an atmosphere where your close friends and family can go beyond an applause, and tell you the truth. Some of your brilliant ideas that are not good enough. Some ideas will be shaped further and become very good with honest feedback.
Proverbs 9:7-9 (T4T version) says, “If you rebuke someone who will not allow others to correct him, he will insult you. If you reprove/scold an evil man, he will hurt you. Do not rebuke someone who will not allow others to correct him/tell him what he has done is wrong. Because he will hate you for doing that. But if you rebuke a wise person, he will respect you. If you give instruction to wise people, they will become wiser. And if you teach righteous people, they will learn more”. Decide today that no matter what happens, you would never listen to your songs of praise coming from the college of fools. Commit to emulating the response of wise and righteous people to feedback. You need to come to a place of understanding that without feedback on your work, you will waste time, energy and resources. If you continue to avoid feedback, you will waste your life.
