Interpreting Critical Feedback as a Creator: What I Learned from Hans Zimmer, Neil Gaiman, and Aaron Sorkin

How do top performers operate?

I am a big fan of Masterclass, the online teaching library where top performers in various industries share their approaches and lessons learned.

Over the last year, I’ve learned screenwriting from Aaron Sorkin, composing for film from Hans Zimmer, storytelling from Neil Gaiman, ball-handling from Stephen Curry, Italian cooking from Massimo Bottura, beatmaking from Timbaland, along with about a dozen other courses.

I’ve always been curious about how top performers operate and think, and having a window into all of these foreign arts seems to me like a miracle. When have we ever had the opportunity to learn from top performers at such a small (but not insignificant) investment? I’ve learned about how to work in a writer’s room (Shonda Rhimes), how to structure a cliffhanger scene (James Patterson), how to properly execute a killer crossover (Stephen Curry), how to do the perfect ollie (Tony Hawk), and how to sidechain my bassline (Timbaland).

Patterns of Thought at the Highest Levels

But in addition to learning the approaches of a particular trade, I have also been paying attention to patterns of thought or approach that several top performers share. What are the similarities of top performers in very different disciplines? I am keeping a running list of these concepts in order to study them more deeply. One of the first ones to surface for me was in how top performers respond to and utilize critical feedback.

Creative professionals like writers, composers, and artists invariably come to a point where they share drafts of their work with colleagues. This could be a writer sending a draft of their novel to a trusted first-reader such as an editor. For a screenwriter, it might be producers or network execs who are giving the notes. For a film composer, it might be sharing a draft version of a composition with the director.

When the film composer Hans Zimmer shared his two-part approach to interpreting critical feedback, it was so good that I took specific note of it. Then when I heard author Neil Gaiman (Sandman, Coraline, The Graveyard Book) say basically the same thing, with the same two parts, I thought, huh, there it is again. But when screenwriter Aaron Sorkin shared the very same two-part piece of wisdom, I knew that this was a concept that I had to ruminate on deeply. Let me share this wisdom with you, one part at a time.

Part 1: The Critical Feedback Is Always Right

What did Hans Zimmer, Neil Gaiman, and Aaron Sorkin all say? They said that when you get critical feedback, or “notes” from someone reviewing your creative work, whatever they told you was wrong with your work, they were right.

This was difficult for me to swallow. Are you sure? What if they don’t know what they are talking about? I immediately thought of excuses for why this might not be true. They don’t know the context behind why my work is the way it is. They didn’t read it or listen to it carefully enough to fully understand where I am coming from.

But the fact remains that if you intend to share your work with others, they have the right to react to it. If a passage of a story doesn’t work for them, then that is by definition true. It doesn’t work for them. If the music was too confusing or cheesy for them, that’s true as well. If they found the pace of the story to be too sluggish or over their heads, that’s true as well.

But then these top performers followed this difficult acknowledgement—that critical feedback is always right—with a complementary point that was a revelation for me, and immediately rang true with my experience.

Part 2: The Solutions they Suggest Are Almost Always Wrong

When reviewers give you “notes” or other constructive feedback, they don’t typically just tell you what’s wrong. Often a reviewer will also tell you how they think you should fix the problem they identified. This is where Zimmer, Gaiman, and Sorkin were again in agreement:

When people tell you how to solve the problems in your creative work, they are almost always wrong.

When a director tells a film composer that perhaps they could fix the lack of energy in a scene by adding more strings, they are probably wrong. When a producer tells a screenwriter that they should consider cutting 3 pages of dialogue to make the scene feel faster, they are probably wrong. When an editor says that shifting a story’s setting from London to New York City would capture the story’s theme better, they are probably wrong.

Reviewers identify problems. It’s the creator’s job to identify the solutions.

Reviewers Identify Problems, Creators Identify Solutions

So if you want to utilize feedback more effectively, perhaps you can evaluate critical feedback more like Hans Zimmer, Neil Gaiman, and Aaron Sorkin do. You can understand that while feedback can be emotionally difficult, it is an invaluable resource as well. Specifically, you can remember that the most important part of the feedback you are given is the help in identifying potential problem areas in your work. If your reviewers suggest solutions, you can take those with a grain of salt.

But if several people are having trouble with the same aspect of your work, you should take the responsibility for acknowledging the problem. You also must take the responsibility for finding the solution.

Here is the saying again, in full:

“When someone critiques your work, the critique is always right. But the solution they suggest to fix it is almost always wrong.”

So where in your creative workflow do you receive feedback?

What would happen if you received that feedback in terms of problems vs. suggested solutions, and took ownership for finding the solution?

How might you put this wisdom to work in your own career?

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