A legendary editor, believed in embracing authors' unique voices. His advice: Understand who someone truly is, envision their potential, and guide them towards it. Feedback, when given right, helps us all become who we're meant to be. 📚✨ #MaxPerkins #FeedbackMatters

Max Perkins was one of the most celebrated book editors of all time. He discovered Ernest Hemingway; he encouraged F. Scott Fitzgerald to write The Great Gatsby; he helped turn Thomas Wolfe's 1,114-page manuscript into a publishable book.

As an editor, he had learned to be a master of feedback. His approach, described in a lecture that he gave to a group of students in 1946, was "so simple." All his job entailed, from his perspective, was unleashing the innate and unique goodness within his authors.

“The process is so simple,” he said. “If you have Mark Twain, don’t try to make him into a Shakespeare or make a Shakespeare into a Mark Twain." Perkins embraced his authors as they were (fighting the publisher to keep swear words in Hemingway's books) and helped them to learn how to become even better (finding ways to cut Wolfe's epic length while maintaining the beauty of his prose.)

To give good feedback, we need to follow in Perkins' footsteps and look at how we can embrace who someone really is and help them to become more of themselves.

Here's a simple way to put this idea into practice. Before you give feedback, ask yourself these three questions.

It's this type of feedback that helps us to grow, to create new things, to leave a lasting impact. None of us can do great things on our own, and by generously sharing feedback with one another, we can all become who we are meant to be.