Criticism That Improves The Work

Leadership • Feedback • Craft

When the Work Isn’t Good Enough, Say So

Direct feedback is not about attacking people. At its best, it is about protecting the quality of the work, keeping a team on course, and giving capable people a clear path to improve.

There is a temptation in modern workplaces to make every piece of feedback softer, safer, and easier to hear. But sometimes clarity gets lost in the process. When the quality of the work matters, people need to know when what they have produced is simply not good enough.

The uncomfortable part is that saying this requires separating the work from the person. A poor piece of work does not necessarily mean that the person who produced it is poor at what they do. In fact, highly capable people may benefit the most from hearing clearly when something has missed the required standard.

Feedback should be about the work, not the ego

A blunt statement such as “your work is bad” can sound personal, but the useful idea underneath it is different: the work, in its current form, does not adequately serve the goal.

That distinction matters. Teams exist to accomplish something. Individuals are trusted with particular pieces of that larger puzzle. If one piece is weak, pretending otherwise does not protect the person who created it. It makes the whole team weaker.

The responsibility of a leader is not merely to make people feel comfortable with their work. It is to help them understand whether their work is good enough to support the goal.

Directness can be a form of respect

For someone who is genuinely capable and important to a project, vague criticism can actually be more frustrating than direct criticism. “Maybe we could revisit this” leaves room for interpretation. “This does not meet the standard we need, and here is why” creates clarity.

The key is to make the criticism specific. Explain what is wrong. Explain why it matters. Explain what needs to change. The goal is to leave very little ambiguity about the gap between the current work and the required outcome.

Be clear State plainly when the work does not meet the required standard.

Explain why Connect the problem to the team's objective rather than making it personal.

Point forward Make it possible for the person to understand how to get the work back on track.

Do not confuse criticism with a lack of confidence

One of the hardest parts of giving strong feedback is communicating two ideas at the same time: “I believe you are capable” and “what you have produced here is not good enough.”

Those statements are not contradictory. Confidence in someone's ability should not require pretending that every result is excellent.

In a strong working relationship, criticism of a particular outcome does not have to become a judgment about someone's overall ability. The standard can remain high precisely because the person is believed to be capable of meeting it.

The goal is success, not being right

There is another important part of good leadership: being willing to change your mind.

Having a strong opinion is useful when a decision needs to be made. Holding onto that opinion after the evidence changes is not. A leader can be decisive while still being intellectually flexible.

If someone presents convincing evidence that contradicts your position, changing your mind should not feel like defeat. The objective is not to win an argument. The objective is to arrive at the right outcome.

The strongest teams are not built around people who are always right. They are built around people who care more about getting to the right answer than about proving that their original answer was right.

A culture where the work can be challenged

This approach creates a demanding but potentially productive culture. People can challenge ideas, question decisions, and point out weaknesses without turning every disagreement into a personal conflict.

That requires trust. The person giving feedback must make it clear that the criticism is about the work. The person receiving it must be able to distinguish a challenge to the output from a rejection of their abilities.

When that distinction is maintained, direct feedback becomes less threatening. It becomes part of how the team works.

What good direct feedback looks like

Good direct feedback does not need to be cruel. It can be firm without being humiliating, specific without being hostile, and demanding without questioning someone's worth.

A useful pattern is simple: identify the gap, explain its consequence, and make the required improvement clear. Then give the person the opportunity to respond, provide evidence, challenge the assessment, and improve the work.

The standard should be high, but the conversation should remain open to evidence.

In the end, the work is what matters

People often try to protect relationships by softening difficult feedback. But protecting someone's feelings in the short term can sometimes mean withholding information they need to succeed.

There is a better balance: respect the person enough to be honest about the work, explain the criticism clearly, and remain willing to reconsider your own position when new evidence appears.

That is not about being harsh for the sake of being harsh. It is about creating an environment where capable people can hear the truth about their work, improve it, and keep the team moving toward the outcome that matters.

The Dhandha Mindset: Sell First, Learn Finance Second

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5 Key Takeaways

• Start selling early because real business acumen comes from handling rejection, persuasion, and understanding customers.
• Pair sales experience with finance knowledge to understand where margins, capital, and profit pools actually sit.
• Learn how industries make money through roles like equity analysis or investment banking.
• Entrepreneurship is built on exposure to customers and financial reality, not just big ideas or classroom theory.
• The Dhandha mindset combines sales instinct and financial discipline to build durable businesses.

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Entrepreneurship · Dhandha Mindset

Anupam Mittal’s ‘Dhandha’ Mindset: Why Young People Should Sell First and Learn Finance Second

By Insights Desk · October 8, 2025

Shaadi.com founder Anupam Mittal has a blunt message for young founders and professionals: if you want real business acumen, start by selling something. Then learn how industries actually make money. In a LinkedIn post dated October 8, 2025, he outlined what he calls a “Dhandha” mindset—a practical, street-level understanding of business that he believes cannot be learned in a classroom.

Dhandha is a Hindi term that loosely translates to business, trade, or livelihood. But Mittal uses it to describe something more specific: the combination of sales instinct and financial discipline that separates durable business builders from dreamers. His advice is simple on the surface, yet it challenges the way many young people think about careers and entrepreneurship.

Start selling early to build the Dhandha mindset

Mittal believes that business acumen begins with the ability to sell. He reflected on his own teenage experiments to make the point.

“At 13, I thought renting books would make me rich. At 16, I tried to build a sports club,” he wrote.

Most of those early ventures failed. But each one taught him something vital about persuasion, negotiation, and influence. Those experiences built his survival instincts and helped him understand people better. For Mittal, those lessons were more valuable than any theory-heavy business course.

“That’s why I tell young founders and professionals → start selling early,” he shared.

Whether it is a product, a project, or even selling yourself for a job, Mittal believes these experiences sharpen business instincts in ways no classroom can. The act of selling forces a person to read people, handle rejection, and understand what actually motivates a buyer.

This is not just about becoming a salesperson. It is about developing the core skill that underpins every business. Without sales, no venture survives. Mittal’s broader point is that young people often delay this education because they think selling is unpleasant or beneath them. In reality, it is the fastest way to learn how markets work.

Finance teaches where the real money is

But selling alone is not enough. To truly understand business, Mittal argues, one must learn how industries make money. He recommends that young professionals take up roles in finance, especially Equity Analysis or Investment Banking.

Equity Analysis involves studying companies and their financials to determine whether their stocks are worth buying. Investment Banking, on the other hand, helps companies raise money, manage mergers, and structure large financial deals. Both fields expose people to the inner workings of profit, capital, and industry structure.

“Finance strips away the romance of ‘disruption’ and shows you the raw truth — where margins lie, where capital flows, and where profit pools actually sit,” Mittal explained.

That sentence gets to the heart of his argument. Many entrepreneurs fall in love with buzzwords like disruption, innovation, or scale. Finance, however, forces them to look at hard numbers.

He believes that too many operators get caught up in their own stories and forget that every industry has its own economics. Understanding those fundamentals helps entrepreneurs stay grounded and build sustainable ventures. A business can have a great story, but if the underlying economics do not work, the story will eventually fall apart.

For Mittal, “Dhandha” is not something that can be taught in classrooms. It is shaped by real-world experience, the grind of selling, and the discipline of numbers. That is why he pairs the messy, people-driven skill of selling with the structured, numbers-driven skill of financial analysis. One teaches you how to create demand; the other teaches you how to capture value.

Why this matters for young founders and professionals

There is a common assumption that entrepreneurship is about having a big idea. Mittal’s framework pushes against that idea. He suggests that the foundation of entrepreneurship is not inspiration but exposure—exposure to customers through selling and exposure to financial reality through finance roles.

This has practical implications. A young person who spends a year selling products, services, or even ideas will learn how to communicate value. A young person who spends a year or two in equity analysis or investment banking will learn where value actually accumulates in an industry. Together, these experiences create a more complete business operator.

Mittal’s advice also offers a useful sequence. Selling comes first because it builds confidence and customer understanding. Finance comes second because it provides the analytical lens to see whether a business can actually make money. It is a simple roadmap, but one that many people skip because they want to start at the top.

“Sell something. Anything. Then spend a year or two learning how industries really make money.”

That line is both encouraging and demanding. It tells young people they do not need a perfect plan to begin. They just need to start selling and then commit to learning the financial side of business.

The bigger picture

What Mittal is describing is not a formal curriculum. It is a mindset built through action and reflection. The “Dhandha” mindset is about understanding the full cycle of business—from convincing a customer to pay, to understanding how profit flows through an industry, to building something that lasts.

For young founders, this means early sales experience is not a detour. It is a core part of entrepreneurial education. For professionals, a finance role is not just a job. It is a window into how industries are structured and where opportunities genuinely exist.

The combination of these two experiences can help reduce the failure rate of new ventures. Many startups fail not because they lack passion or ideas, but because they do not understand their customers or their economics. Mittal’s advice addresses both weaknesses directly.

In an ecosystem that often celebrates fundraising announcements and valuations, Mittal’s emphasis on selling and finance is a grounding reminder. Real business success comes from understanding people and numbers. Everything else—branding, technology, culture—is important, but it cannot substitute for the fundamentals.

Ultimately, the “Dhandha” mindset is about practical wisdom. It is earned, not taught. And according to one of India’s most experienced internet entrepreneurs, it starts with a very simple instruction: sell something, anything, and then learn how the money really moves.

A practical framework for young founders and professionals, drawn from Anupam Mittal’s October 8, 2025 LinkedIn post.

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Paranoia Built a $4.7 Trillion Giant. Jensen Huang Still Envies First-Time Founders

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5 Key Takeaways

• Jensen Huang runs Nvidia with a '30 days from going out of business' mindset to stay alert and avoid complacency.
• He envies first-time founders because having nothing to protect is a form of freedom.
• Huang advises founders to ask 'How hard can it be?' instead of overthinking obstacles, because anxiety prevents starting.
• Nvidia's early failure was fixed by learning on the spot—buying textbooks and relearning rather than relying on being right.
• Huang's message is to start before fear hardens, learn quickly when reality disagrees, and stay uncomfortable to survive.

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Nvidia’s Jensen Huang Built a $4.7 Trillion Company by Assuming Collapse—and Still Envies First-Time Founders

August 5, 2026

For 33 years, Jensen Huang has run Nvidia as though the company is 30 days from going out of business. That phrase has outlasted a botched Sega contract that nearly finished the company in 1996, the layoffs that followed, and an artificial intelligence boom that has pushed Nvidia’s market value to roughly $4.7 trillion. Yet when the 63-year-old CEO spoke at Y Combinator’s Startup School 2026 this week, he told the room he was “jealous” of the young founders sitting in front of him. He also called this “the single greatest time in history to start a company.”

Huang’s argument was not really about model capabilities or funding markets. It was about the distance between how hard a thing looks from the outside and how hard it actually turns out to be.

The 30-day mindset

Huang has kept that mindset since 1993, when he sketched out the original idea for Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in a Denny’s booth. The early years nearly proved his fear correct. Nvidia bet on the wrong graphics approach and was almost finished after a deal with Sega went bad. Layoffs followed.

Huang has said he works seven days a week and that the sense of vulnerability has never left him. He still runs one of the most valuable companies in the world as if disaster is one month away. That paranoia, however, has not made him pessimistic about other people’s chances. If anything, he sees the absence of certainty as an advantage for first-time founders.

What he told young founders

At Y Combinator, in conversation with YC chief executive Garry Tan, Huang offered a deliberately simple piece of advice. Instead of mapping every obstacle before starting, he suggested founders ask themselves one question: “How hard can it be?”

Imagining the full weight of a difficult project up front, he warned, curdles into anxiety. Anxiety then turns into not doing the thing at all. Better, he said, to let the suffering arrive in instalments. This is not a claim that any of it is easy. Huang has spent decades operating with the opposite instinct: assuming that trouble is closer than it appears. His point is that fear should not prevent the first step.

The setting mattered. Huang was speaking to people at the beginning of their journeys, not to established executives or investors. Those founders do not yet have much to protect, and Huang sees that as a form of freedom.

Learning on the spot

Huang’s confidence, by his own account, comes from a willingness to learn rather than a habit of being right. In Nvidia’s early years, the company made a wrong bet on graphics technology, and nobody inside the company knew how to correct it. Huang’s fix was practical and unglamorous.

He walked into a Fry’s electronics store with a few hundred dollars, bought three technology textbooks, and handed them to his engineers. He now describes the early Nvidia as a company that raised money and bought textbooks. The takeaway he offers is that the specific technology matters far less than the ability to face an uncomfortable reality and relearn on the spot.

That flexibility, rather than any single technical decision, helped Nvidia move from a struggling graphics chip company into the center of the AI economy. The company’s market value now sits at roughly $4.7 trillion.

Record applications, brutal odds

Plenty of people have already run Huang’s calculation for themselves. Americans filed 3.23 million business applications in the first half of 2026, a record. That is 12.1 percent more than the same stretch a year earlier, according to Inc.

The surge is happening in a sluggish economy, which echoes investor Kevin O’Leary’s point that downturns are often the best moment to start something. A correction forces a pivot early, while there is still little to lose. What an application does not capture is what comes after it.

Bureau of Labor Statistics data puts the five-year failure rate for new businesses at nearly half. That means the record wave of applications will produce both success stories and a great deal of loss. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has offered similar caution. His counsel is to “borrow before building”: spend time somewhere that already knows how to hire and interview, then go.

What this means for founders

Huang is proof of both halves of that equation. He envies founders with nothing yet to protect, and he still runs a $4.7 trillion company as though the thirty days started this morning. That may sound contradictory, but the two instincts reinforce each other. The fear of collapse keeps him alert. The decision to begin before anxiety hardens keeps new founders moving.

For people considering a startup, his message is less about guarantees than about motion. Ask how hard it can be, start before fear has time to settle, learn quickly when reality disagrees, and stay uncomfortable long enough to survive. That is not an easy formula, but it is the one Huang has lived by for more than three decades.

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