(mellow music)
-: Rage.
No, I'm joking.
-: I hate when someone starts (Eva giggles)
with it's great, but,
and then they change everything.
Just tell me, I need to know where to be effective.
I need to know where I need to pay attention,
I need to know how much more time
I need to spend on something.
And it's so important to seek out true, honest feedback,
even from a career progression perspective.
Do not be afraid to go up and ask.
-: Stepping in the industry like, you wanna try
to get the most out of more experienced people.
You have to be humble a bit.
I mean, more than a bit, a lot.
(Marcel chuckles)
Yeah, these people...
Yeah, they know.
They know exactly what's happening.
Eva: You have to be super coachable
because at the end of the day,
it's just like doing a sport,
where you've got someone watching you, and critiquing you,
and giving you direction to help you perform better.
One phrase that Si and Ab,
I think Si mostly says is,
he'll read a sentence and he'll be like,
"This is just a bit tortured."
Tobi: Yeah. Eva: It's torturous.
And I'm like, yeah, okay, cool.
Tobi: Yeah. -: Let me fix it.
It's fi--
Like, and maybe 10 years ago I would've been like,
No bet, oh no. Tobi: Oh my God.
-: What I struggle the most is when I have a piece of work,
I treat it as my baby.
Even though, it might not be like the best baby I made,
(chuckling)
-: But, it's still my baby.
And if you criticize my baby,
you're criticizing me.
I get attacked.
-: It's not about taking it all personally, which is very
very easy to do, especially early on in your career.
But, once you kind of just like, say what you want,
I don't care.
It's like being bulletproof to feedback.
That's the dream.
And if you can achieve that, then you're solid.
-: You're allowed to challenge it,
if it really does go against what you're trying to achieve.
Cause, a lot of the time it won't be them
immediately overruling you or overriding you
and just saying like,
no, do it this way instead of your way.
A lot of the time, it might just be
they didn't understand your original vision
or your intentions.
And so, that's a way of clarifying it for both of you.
-: To me, I rarely push back my feedback, actually.
Most of the times, the relatively more negative feedback
about my work usually has to do
with something that I know I feel iffy about, which--
And I'm not sure of where I'm iffy about.
So, that piece of feedback is really important.
I also like to ask multiple opinions,
so that it gives me a more fair way of looking at it.
-: When you're creating, it's easy to be hard on yourself
and feel that things aren't quite right
but that's why it's so important to have the team.
-: I think that everyone should be able to feed back,
cause when you see something and you're like,
Oh, that's really cool.
Like, could you also try this?
You know that you are coming from a place of like,
I really like this. -: Yeah.
-: I think that you could also do this
on top of what you've already done
that's really great.
Communicating that and yeah,
I think being positive about it
creates a positive environment.
-: We've consciously adapted and changed
how we share feedback,
how we talk contextually about the journey to empower
you know, to ask those questions.
You know, we were saying, we ask questions
so that it's the person that is working on it
that starts to come up with the answers.
So, it becomes less feedback and more working session,
and building that kind of sense of conversation.
-: Writing things down is so important for life
but is specifically with feedback, putting it down on a bit
of paper and having like a checklist almost.
-: The amount of times that you come back and you're like,
yeah, I agree that,
yeah, yeah, I get what you're on about.
And I go back to my desk, I'm like, wait a minute, what is,
what have I just processed?
So, always make sure you understand feedback
because you could go back with a completely different idea
of what they're actually telling you.
Ben: Yeah.
-: To what you've processed.
-: It's about kind of probing,
looking into it and questioning what it means.
And sometimes if it comes in more of a cryptic way,
you have to kind of look into that
and extract what you think people mean by a certain thing.
-: Sometimes in emails, things can get sort of lost
in translation super easily.
So, jumping on a call and asking them to explain,
they then drop little nuggets of information
that it's you're not actually saying what you wanna say,
but now we know exactly what you are wanting to say.
-: Sometimes you can get feedback that's like,
I don't like blue.
And you can either go, okay, we'll just change it from blue.
Or you can go, why?
Why is it that blue doesn't work for you?
And then you understand the challenge,
our biggest competitor is blue.
We previously tried blue and the audience didn't like it.
Or, you know, and then you can build up an understanding of
where that feedback's coming from
and action it accordingly.
-: There's usually a pretty good reason behind it.
And if you can understand that,
you're able to make all these really positive adjustments
and stuff and you come back with something
that still is rooted in that like, original idea
that you had, like it's still your work.
You can still see yourself in it, but it's even stronger
because you've been able to use other people's expertise.
-: We're all trying to fight for the same thing.
We're all kind of going the same way.
I think that's actually kind of great.
It just, it might push us
and open us down a different avenue
that we possibly wouldn't have explored before
or just, you know, brings us back
from our kind of crazy world adventure that we've done.
-: Critique, feedback,
those words are really loaded.
Really all you're doing is having a conversation
about the context of where you are in the creative journey,
the value of what you've got, what might be missing,
what you want might wanna bring to the table,
what we might have missed.
Those types of things.
Just demystify the whole thing,
and don't see it as a kind of challenge to what you're doing
is literally the language with which what we do
is delivered.
-: I've always really liked actually the sort
of part of our industry where we collectively kind of
feedback on what each other's do with that common goal
of just doing, -: Right.
-: better work.
I've always sort of thought, you know,
if, you know,
if my wife gave me feedback
on the way I've done the washing up,
I wouldn't react to it in the same way that you guys
talk to me about my strategy.
I don't, I think it's so--
-: None of that emotional thing.
-: No, exactly.
But I think it's--
-: Washing's so important.
I think it's so healthy the way that we are able to
kind of just talk about each other's work,
and feedback on each other's work
with that common purpose of just making it better.
(light tone)