In the book Ultralearning by Scott Young, he describes how Chris Rock would test new material at a New York comedy club. Gauging the audience's reaction would help Rock decide if a skit was worth keeping, modifying, or eliminating. Feedback is crucial when we are taking on tasks. Even subconsciously, we take feedback in numerous forms and use that information to modify our paths. Without it, we neither learn nor grow. How we take the feedback is just as crucial.

According to Young, there are three types of feedback.

Outcome Feedback

This is a very broad level of feedback with no specific details.If you make a pass at your wife but get rejected, it is feedback. There may be a generic "headache" response or something similar but there really is no way of knowing why the attempt failed. If you fail a lift, it could be because you're weak, because you're tired, or your diet, or...

What can we do with this type of feedback? We can eliminate the variables. If I'm failing to break 200 on squats I can assess my sleep quality, caloric intake or stress levels. Answering these questions for one failure does not give you the reason for the failure. It merely helps you identify potential issues. It's on you to find the correlations. For you spreadsheet nerds out there, you can run your analytics on this shit.

Informational Feedback

This is when you post a video of your failed BP to some forum and you get responses such as, "your forearm is angled" or "you're not driving through your legs." The fuck does that mean?

Informational feedback tells us what we're doing wrong, but not necessarily how to fix it. Is your forearm supposed to be angled? Which way? And how am I supposed to drive with my legs? Drive what?

Corrective Feedback

Remember those instances with your girl when you're getting intimate, you slide your hand into her panties. There's some nice juicy flow between the interacting of your fingers and her clit. You start rubbing around gently in little circular patterns, not on top but just to the side, just like she likes.

"Faster."

You increase your speed a little bit, moving a little faster but keeping that pattern consistent. Her eyes are closed but you hear her breadth become heavier. She lets out a little moan.

"Faster."

You go a little faster. Her hips are swaying up and down. That breath continues to deepen. She grabs onto you and squeezes. The hips start thrusting more rapidly.

Stop fapping fuckers.

That's corrective feedback. Corrective feedback doesn't just tell us what we're doing wrong, but how to fix it. "Your arm is angled; you need to be vertical from the bar to your elbow."

This type of feedback is obviously best for quick results. However, it's not necessarily best for learning. After all, if you're told exactly how to do something it removes the need for exploration which can be a whole hella fun.

How can we improve feedback?

Noise Cancellation

Don't assume any feedback you get will resolve your issue. This would be the noise that hides the signal.

"My wife won't sleep with me!"

"Lift!"

Are you going to change how you game your wife just because you're lifting? Or not? You need to filter through the noise to find the signal. And there is always signal.

Difficulty

"My wife won't sleep with me!"

"Did you try?"

We get it. You've been rejected countless times. Your ego is bruised. Your shattered. "I'm not going to take this abuse much longer," you mumble to yourself as you storm off to your cold shower.

It's easy to avoid difficult challenges. The more difficulty we face, the more it reveals not just the current situation of our lives but ourselves. If we see an attractive woman coming towards us we can ignore it and realize we're scared and have no interest in potentially being embarrassed in front of all zero people staring at you at that moment.

Or, you can watch and wait for her to make eye contact which she won't because she's off in her own world and doesn't give two shits about you but hey, at least you can blame the failed interaction on someone else, right?

Or, you can say hi, make eye contact, flash a smile, keep walking.

Or, say hi, make eye contact, flash a smile, stop her, make conversation, get her name.

Or, ...you get the point.

All of these scenarios offer invaluable feedback. The more difficult the scenario, the more valuable the feedback. Getting into these difficult scenarios allows you to make adjustments based on the feedback received and gain experience.

Metafeedback

Young describes this method as evaluating the overall success of your strategy. Let's go back to lifting. If I just failed my squats at 200 but I set a new PR on BP that very same night, then is it safe to say that my reason for failure is not due to diet or sleep or stress or nutrition but simply because I'm weak in the muscles needed for a 200lb squat?

Of course.

If I'm consistently failing to progress, this is metafeedback to my lifting strategy. Something has to change. Maybe you need to incorporate more rest time between your sets? Work on your overall strategy to find the best solution that fits you.

High-Intensity, Rapid Learning

Expose yourself as much as possible to that task you are trying to learn. We can't do this with lifting. But, we can apply it if we're trying to have better social skills with our wives or flirting with strange women or just meeting new people to improve your social circle. Just throw yourself into a situation, no fucks to give, and let it go.

Each attempt whether successful or not will be fresh in your mind with the next attempt. Maybe the one thing you thought was perfect the last attempt fails the next attempt. Regardless, each attempt will garner new information.

Faster...