Professional beginner.

I love learning new things. It used to be the best part of being a UX designer. Dipping into healthcare, retail, government. A new world every couple of years.

My brain still hungers for novelty. So I try things on the side. I recently started boxing.

I’m bad at it.

Group classes. A coach runs the room, calling combinations. We work bags, then pair up in the ring with mitts. Someone holds, someone throws. Then you switch.

The first few weeks I couldn’t remember a four-punch combo. My feet were wrong. My right hand kept dropping. The coach would walk over, fix one thing, walk away. Sometimes she’d stop me in the middle of a round, and slow things down.

Over twenty years into a career, I forgot what it feels like to be on the receiving end of feedback.

Not the soft kind designers give each other in critiques. The kind where someone watches you do a thing badly and tells you, in one sentence, what to change. No preamble. No feedback sandwich. No “have you considered.”

It works. Because the stakes are immediate. You’re about to throw the punch again. The coach isn’t trying to protect your feelings. She’s trying to make you less bad.

I give feedback for a living. I sit with designers and walk through their work. I’m careful. I’m thorough. I ask questions instead of giving answers.

In the gym, I get the version of feedback I almost never give. It’s faster, sticks better, and tells me exactly what to fix.

I’m not running design crits like boxing class. The work is different. But I am paying attention to how much of my “careful feedback” is actually careful. How much of it is me protecting myself from the discomfort of telling someone, in one sentence, what to change.

Being bad at something is useful. Being on the other side of feedback is more useful.