Receive Feedback, Don't React to It
The Physics of Growth Receiving means metabolizing input on your own timeline.
The skill that separates good founders from reactive ones is simple to name and hard to practice: receiving feedback instead of reacting to it.
Reacting means hearing input and immediately acting on it or dismissing it. Receiving means metabolizing input, sitting with it, integrating what's useful and discarding the rest on your timeline. I learned this distinction the expensive way.
The Mistake
Early in my time at Kitchit, I had coffee with an investor who had built and sold multiple companies. He listened to my pitch, asked sharp questions and then told me exactly what I was doing wrong. He had a complete framework for how I should rebuild my go-to-market strategy.
I walked out of that meeting energized. Finally, someone who understood. I went back to the office and started implementing his advice immediately. Three weeks later, the changes had created chaos. His framework didn't account for constraints he didn't know about. We spent another month unwinding the damage.
I had reacted to feedback. I hadn't received it.
The Two Failure Modes
Founders make two opposite mistakes with feedback:
- Dismissing it: Your ego tells you that the person giving feedback doesn't understand your business. You file their input away and continue doing what you were doing. Every time you dismiss feedback as invalid, you shrink your view of reality.
- Treating it as Gospel: A mentor tells you how to do a better job. The certainty in their voice feels like relief. You implement what they said without filtering it through your context. This outsources your decisions to people who lack your context.
Both mistakes come from the same source: treating feedback as binary. The skill is neither.
What Receiving Looks Like
Instead of reacting, receive feedback and make it your own. Carefully distill the information. Clarify what you don't understand. Incorporate the takeaways into your decision-making process on your timeline.
Sometimes feedback from experts will prove untimely or irrelevant given the context you have and they lack. Other times, knowledge from feedback becomes a foundational pillar for your company. Turning external information into your actual knowledge is perhaps the most critical skill of an entrepreneur.
The Extraction Checklist
Before deciding what to do with input, ask:
- What problem did they identify? Focus here first. Solutions are less valuable than the problem they noticed.
- What evidence did they cite? Is this data, pattern, or intuition?
- What assumption are they making? About your market, your team, or your resources?
- What context do they lack? What constraints or dynamics don't they know about?
- Does this match any pattern? One data point is noise. Three is signal.
The 24-Hour Rule
The practical rule I developed: after any significant feedback conversation, wait 24 hours before deciding to act on or dismiss it. This sounds simple. It's remarkably hard.
Twenty-four hours creates space to process. What problem were they identifying? What context do they have that I lack? What context do I have that they lack? By the time 24 hours pass, the emotional charge has faded. What remains is information you can actually use.
The Bottom Line: Write the feedback down. Wait 24 hours. Then decide.
Brendan Marshall
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