For a long time, I believed my understanding was the truth. I had my ideas about how things would work and kept repeating the same mistakes. My ideas came from the notion that because I Know, my results would be true.
The idea of improvement was over shadowed by the idea of me being right.
My first business exposed inconsistencies that I never stopped to examine. I kept repeating the same mistakes because I never corrected them.
I thought that my conviction was enough and would eventually make things better.
I believed what has made others winners will also make me a winner.
Since my mistakes were not acknowledged, they were never corrected. But the progress I expected never came.
It took me a long time to realize that repetition alone cannot improve what is never examined.
Repeating the same action without a way of measuring its outcome only reinforces existing patterns. If those patterns contain mistakes, repetition simply makes those mistakes more consistent.
My purpose was being right, and I thus never took any feedback.
The purpose of practice, I realized, was never repetition alone. It was to generate feedback. Feedback is reality responding to your effort.
It tells me my assumptions were not right and correction is required. It reveals the distance between what I intended and what actually happened.
Without feedback, I remained trapped inside my own perception. I could always explain why I thought something had worked.
Reality often had a different answer.
I first encountered Reality when the market rejected my illusion of knowledge. My first business collapsed in 9 months. Questions appeared about my abilities that seemed non existent before.
Initially, I saw this as regret and guilt. Later, I began seeing it differently.
Reality was not killing me, it was simply responding to me.
Reality was the objective response of the world to my actions, independent of my beliefs or intentions.
The same thing happens everywhere, the market responds to an investor, customers respond to an entrepreneur, performance responds to an athlete, results responds to a student.
Every skill had its own way of providing feedback. The challenge was not receiving it. The challenge was accepting it without becoming defensive.
I slowly realized that I had been treating feedback as judgment. Success made me feel, I had done it.
Failure made me question myself. Criticism felt judgmental.
But Feedback was never judging me. It was informing me. Its purpose was not to make me feel successful or unsuccessful. Its purpose was to help me understand.
That changed the questions I asked.
Instead of asking,
“Did I succeed?”
I began asking,
“What is this result teaching me?”
That single change altered the way I learned. Validation stopped me from asking questions. Understanding deepened the questions I was asking.
Failure was not something to avoid. Failure was the most honest teacher. It exposed assumptions I did not know I was making. It revealed weaknesses that confidence had hidden. It forced me back into reality.
Over time, I noticed something else.
Action was producing feedback, feedback was producing understanding & understanding was changing my future actions.
The structure I had been searching for was now complete:
Inquiry → Action → Feedback → Understanding.
Every cycle reduced assumptions. Every cycle increased clarity.
Knowledge told me what I expected to happen. Understanding explained what actually happened.
Knowledge could be borrowed. Understanding had to be earned. It emerged through observation.
Correction.
Iteration.
And repeated contact with reality.
No book could give it to me completely. No course could transfer it. Others could provide information. Only experience could transform that information into understanding.
Eventually, learning stopped feeling like the accumulation of knowledge.
It began feeling like the refinement of perception. I started noticing patterns earlier. I recognized mistakes sooner. I adjusted with greater precision.
This, I realized, was the hidden value of feedback. It was not merely improving my performance. It was improving the way I perceived reality.
And perhaps that is why feedback should never be feared or avoided.
It is Reality’s contribution to the learning process. Without it, Understanding remains incomplete.
Reality never argues. It simply keeps producing outcomes until our assumptions change.
— Kartikeya
Inquiry in Silence. Yoga in Practice.
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