Post by Abir Mukherjee

Five Things This Year Taught Me (the Hard Way) — #4 For a long time, I thought I was open to feedback. This year taught me the difference between hearing feedback and actually accepting it. Lesson #4: I learned to build the capacity to accept feedback, not just invite it. When taking risks or making decisions, my instinct was to look for alignment. People who agreed. People who reassured me that my thinking made sense. It felt supportive, and I mistook that feeling for confidence. What I didn’t appreciate enough was how defenseless you feel when feedback arrives and you don’t yet have the tools to process it. Without a way to think through contradictions, regulate emotion, or hold competing perspectives, feedback feels like threat. Accepting feedback became easier when my toolkit expanded. When I had more ways to think about problems. More comfort sitting with paradox. More resilience to hold uncertainty without rushing to resolve it. Conversations changed when I stopped treating feedback as a verdict and started treating it as material, something to work with. When I allowed others to question my assumptions, surface tensions, or name what felt incomplete, without feeling the need to defend my narrative immediately. I also realized that feedback works best in environments where honest debate is possible. That tension, when held openly, often leads to better thinking than certainty ever does. Accepting feedback, I’ve learned, isn’t about humility alone. It’s about having enough mental and emotional tools to engage with it meaningfully. And building that capacity — slowly, imperfectly — has been one of the most useful shifts this year. This is the fourth of five lessons I’m writing down before the year ends.