Feedback Tolerance Predicts Your Trajectory Better Than Talent

By Steven Soares, Ph.D.

You have talent; at some point in your career it will stop being enough. Your intelligence, drive, technical understanding, communication skills, and confidence will continue to serve you. As the work becomes more complex, the problems harden over time, your decisions affect more people, and expectations become less explicit. The feedback becomes subtler, more consequential, and often more uncomfortable.

This is where careers begin to separate.

Some people continue improving because they remain open to correction. Others plateau because they become more invested in protecting what they already believe about themselves. The difference is not always talent. It is feedback tolerance.