Imagine you attempt to make a gingerbread house for the first time. You mix the frosting that holds it together with a little too much water so it’s not as strong, and your walls don’t stick together as well. An experienced mentor points this out to you, correcting your error so you can build more effectively. You probably feel good about this – you’ve saved yourself a lot of time and headache and you appreciate the input from the knowledgable mentor.
Now imagine instead you mixed the frosting wrong the same way, but no one told you. For the next ten years you made your gingerbread houses that way – they don’t hold together very well and you have to spend a bunch of extra time holding walls together until they dry, using extra frosting, etc. Even still, the houses fall apart more frequently and look worse from the drippy frosting. Now that same person tells you that you’re putting too much water in the frosting. They use the exact same tone of voice and say the exact same words.
You’d be furious, wouldn’t you?
“I know what I’m doing! I’ve been making gingerbread houses for ten years, don’t come over here and tell me how to mix frosting! How dare you!”
This is why feedback needs to be frequent, everyone. Because if you don’t learn that you’re making a mistake early, you have a tendency to integrate that mistake into your identity. It’s the sunk cost fallacy – it’s easy to admit you made a mistake once, especially when you don’t think you’re very skilled at the task yet because you’re just starting out. It’s much, much harder to admit that we’ve been doing something the wrong way for a long time – wasting effort, losing opportunities, etc. Let someone make a mistake long enough, and you’ll never correct it.
The Opportunity Machine 