Mike Rothenberg explains why seeking honest feedback from people you trust matters, and how he learned to sit with discomfort when hearing things that challenge your view of yourself. He shares how this practice helped him recognize his talent for spotting entrepreneurial potential in others.
Chapters
One thing that I started doing in earnest there, that I haven't stopped doing and hope to never stop doing, is I started asking everybody that I trusted really what they think and being relentlessly open to feedback. And one interesting thing about feedback is the first time you ask for it, even from somebody you really trust, is that they will tiptoe. If they're a good friend, they'll tiptoe because it's really hard to tell somebody go for the jugular the very first time because you're not really sure if they mean it. People are like, can you give me feedback? And you say, yeah, sure, your shoe's untied. And they're like, ok, what else? And then you have to kind of tease it out. And then finally when they say it, when you get to the thing that's really maybe different from your worldview at the time, but they say it in a loving way, they care about you and they're right, then that cognitive dissonance is the moment where you need to actually embrace that. And that is hard to do. But you have to say thank you. And so what I learned to do over those few months is to ask people in my life for advice on all kinds of things, personal and professional, and to say thank you and then really think about what mattered and resonated. And one of the things professionally I got advice from, including people who are professors, including people I'd worked from in the past and stuff is you should you have a good eye for entrepreneurs. One of the professors at Harvard said, how many of your friends that you were friends with at Stanford are Now entrepreneurs and CEOs of venture backed companies? He was trying to get data to help coach me. I said, More than 50, maybe 100. He said, that's not very normal to have made friends with people. And then they did that. And then he said, you may be an entrepreneur, talent scout, you may really like the kinds of things in people that help them do that. It.
