The most underrated skill that shapes our entire life

In this article, I want to share several stories about the friend from my life, as well as my own story.

We will examine the feedback factor, its impact, and consequences on our lives.

How immense they are.

...

Each of us probably has a childhood friend with whom we have been friends for years and have gone through various developmental stages together.

I have such a friend as well, with whom I've been for probably more than 10 years.

For a long time, until 2018, we moved forward together, even had joint projects.

I've always been involved in football and was used to receiving feedback.

My coach gave me a lot of feedback, often through yelling, but that's another story :)

In principle, I got used to listening to the opinions of mentors.

But my friend was always very closed off to feedback.

Initially, we went to football together, but he couldn't stand it for long because he felt the coach's treatment of him was unfair.

Then, our paths began to diverge slightly.

We both had big ambitions and goals in life.

My life's goal is a football academy in my hometown. His goal is to build a tennis academy.

I understood that it required a lot of money, and you have to keep progressing and not waste time on nonsense.

He understood this too.

But this key behavioral model (feedback) started to play an increasingly important role in our lives.

From 2020 to 2022, I was involved in investments (and so was he).

I failed miserably, and it was very strong feedback from the world that I was doing something wrong.

Then, thank God, I accepted this feedback and completely changed my life.

When we get bad results, it's always the world's feedback that we are doing something wrong. That's how the universe works, and the sooner we accept it, the better for us.

But he continued on this path, although it was clear that he would also fail sooner or later.

I always asked him why he wouldn't change his niche, do something that would allow him to utilize all his strengths.

He always replied that he wanted to achieve results here first, then do something else afterward.

Actually, you might think this is good. It's about resilience, discipline, faith in oneself. But no.

Every time he failed, not on such critical amounts as I did two years ago, but he failed.

Every time, the world gave feedback that he was wasting time.

But he confidently continued on.

In the end, I learned this lesson, and my life completely changed.

Thanks to always accepting feedback, I went through an entire IT career in 1.5 years.

On the 8th month, I got a job as a Mid-level developer, thanks to my soft skills and clear readiness to accept any feedback from the manager.

Now I am creating an IT agency and a personal brand. I help people understand what I went through in my life and to discover in them a readiness for feedback and constant growth.

I am only at the beginning of my journey, but I really like the dynamics of development.

At the same time, my friend...

• Experienced another hundredth failure.
• He rejected four of my offers to teach him in IT and help him.
• Only now, after so many years, he seems to have accepted reality and opened up to my proposal.

But a lot of time has passed, and he could have achieved much more than I because he is very talented. But he was closed off to the world...

Of course, he still has everything ahead of him, but life is not as long as we think, and you probably wouldn't want to spend 5 years of your life running from the truth, only to accept it eventually but having lost 5 years of time.

I hope this story was truly useful for you.

Feedback is about being open to the world, open to reality.

It's about admitting to yourself where you are now, what you can and cannot do, and where you are headed.

You saw an example of how feedback can lead to completely different results for two essentially the same people, me and my friend.

Don't think that feedback is a weakness. Weakness is not looking honestly into your eyes and not accepting who you are now.

It doesn't matter what you have now, what your results are. It's all a consequence of past thoughts, past actions, your openness to the world in the past.

What's important is now. What you are moving towards.

Better to be at the beginning of the path now, but be open to feedback and have a wild desire to develop, than to have some result but be closed off to the world.

The world is built in such a way that it can either help you or destroy you.

But the question is only about you. Are you open or closed to feedback?