We all need people

We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.

Bill Gates

The meaning of the quote

In May 2013, Bill Gates told a TED audience that he has a bridge coach. If the coach only ever called his card play satisfactory, Gates said, he would have no hope of getting better.

At the time, more than 98% of American teachers got that one word, satisfactory, as their only feedback.

Gates opened the TED talk Teachers need real feedback with the quote. He and Melinda Gates had been shocked to learn how little useful feedback teachers received, and he argued that teachers deserve the same coaching athletes take for granted.

The idea reaches far past classrooms. You can’t see your own work the way other people see it. A singer hears her voice through the bones of her own skull, and a student who wrote an essay already knows what each sentence was meant to say. Someone else sees only what’s on the page.

Gates pointed to Shanghai, whose 15-year-olds had come first in the world in reading, math and science. Young teachers there watch master teachers at work, teachers meet in weekly study groups and every teacher has to observe colleagues and give them feedback.

The talk also showed Sarah Brown Wessling, a high school English teacher in Johnston, Iowa. She puts a camera at the back of her classroom and shares the recordings with other teachers so they can comment on her lessons.

“You can’t really dispute what you see on the video.”

Sarah Brown Wessling

A camera does what a good coach does. It shows you what happened instead of what you meant to happen.

The quote is about people willing to tell you the truth, and plenty of people aren’t. Friends often say “it’s fine” because they like you, which is the satisfactory problem all over again. The people worth asking know the skill and want you to improve.

Psychologist Adam Grant went looking for those people when his early lectures went badly. He started handing out his own feedback form asking how he could improve and went on to become one of the top-rated teachers at Wharton.

Action steps

You don’t need a foundation or a camera crew to build your own feedback system.

1. Pick a skill.
   Choose something you want to get better at this month, like a class presentation or your free throw.
2. Ask someone who knows it.
   A teacher, coach or older student who does the skill well will spot what a friend misses.
3. Ask a sharper question.
   “Was it good?” usually gets a polite yes. Ask “Where did you lose interest?” or “What would you change first?” and you’ll get something to fix.
4. Show them your next try.
   Make the change and go back to the same person. The second round shows you whether the change worked.

Gates has a coach for a card game. Your goals deserve at least as much help.

About the author

In 1972, 17-year-old Bill Gates invited local officials to his family’s home in Seattle to see his first product.

Traf-O-Data was a small computer he built with his school friend Paul Allen and a third partner, Paul Gilbert, to turn data from roadside traffic counters into charts.

During the demo, it failed. His father later wrote in the book Showing Up for Life that Bill ran into the kitchen shouting for his mother.

“Mom! Mom! Come and tell them that it worked!”

Bill Gates, as told by his father

Traf-O-Data never made much money. But to write its software before the machine was built, Allen had worked out how to imitate the Intel chip on a bigger computer. In 1975 the pair used the same trick to write a version of the BASIC programming language for the Altair 8800, a computer they had never seen. That program became the first product of their new company, Microsoft.

Gates dropped out of Harvard to run the company. Microsoft’s software ended up on most of the world’s personal computers, and Gates spent years as the richest person on earth.

In 2000 he and Melinda started the Gates Foundation, and in 2008 he stepped back from daily work at Microsoft to focus on it. The foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching project worked with 3,000 teachers to find out which kinds of feedback help them improve.

That project took him to the TED stage in 2013, 41 years after the failed kitchen demo, where he opened his talk with the quote. His memoir Source Code tells the Traf-O-Data story and the rest of his early years in his own words.

Resources

• Teachers need real feedback (YouTube)
• Source Code (Book)
• Thanks for the Feedback (Book)
• The joy of being wrong (Article)
• Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes (Article)
• Traf-O-Data (Wikipedia)