When to tune out and ignore everyone
Whether you are a magician, restaurant owner, accountant, teacher, carpenter, or receptionist, you’ve been told it’s a good idea to seek constructive feedback.
That feedback may come from a client or customer, but it may also come from your colleagues or management.
"Listen to your audience"
What do we mean by that? We mean pay attention to how your words and actions are received by those for whom your work is intended. Are people happy with how you present yourself or your information? Are they nodding in agreement during the meeting, applauding at the end of the trick, or smiling as they leave your desk?
It’s true, we should listen to the audience: our clients, customers, friends, family, colleagues, and bosses. They often give us good clues about what we’re doing well, when we’re on the right track, and when we’re not. And we should seek out critical, constructive feedback from those in-the-know. It can make us better.
But not always.
Counterintuitively, doing great work sometimes requires tuning people out completely.
Tuning out
The best advice I received as a budding professional magician was from a veteran of the entertainment industry, a hero of mine:
“If you’re going to make it in this industry, you need to ignore all other magicians.”
What? How can that be? Don’t I need to learn from my peers, my audience, and those who’ve gone before me?
It took me years to understand what he meant: If you want to develop a true sense of self, where the work you do is recognized as being uniquely yours, you must occasionally put yourself in bubble. Isolate completely from outside input, opinions, and feedback. Only then will you find the courage required to dig deep and explore, unhinged and unencumbered by everyone else’s noise.
When you finally emerge from the bubble you can confidently say, “This is my work. This is who I am.”
Great to some or average to all
The question isn’t, Is it okay to tune out? The question is, When is it okay?
My suggestion: Tune out at the very beginning and the very end of every project. Start new work in a bubble, ignoring all outside influences and opinions. Then emerge, open your work up to feedback, accept it gracefully, and retreat back into the bubble. Take the feedback you believe will improve your work, and scrap the rest. Finish the project alone.
Don’t change something just because someone didn’t like it; not everyone will like it. In fact the better work you do - the more unique, genuine, and true it is - the more criticism you’re likely to receive.
For every audience of 100 people at my show there are at least 2-3 people who don’t like me or my work. If I listened to their feedback I would water down my show until I had 100 people who thought it was just okay, rather than 97 people who love it and 3 who hate it.
You can’t please everyone. So first, please yourself. Then please the people you care about most.
Ignore everyone else.
