Mel Brooks on dealing with feedback from your superiors

Advice from Mel Brooks:

“I’d learned one very simple trick: Say yes. Simply say yes. Like Joseph E. Levine, on “The Producers,” said, “The curly-haired guy—he’s funny looking. Fire him.” He wanted me to fire Gene Wilder. And I said, “Yes, he’s gone. I’m firing him.” I never did. But he forgot.

After the screening of “Blazing Saddles,” the head of Warner Bros. threw me into the manager’s office, gave me a legal pad and a pencil, and gave me maybe twenty notes. He would have changed “Blazing Saddles” from a daring, funny, crazy picture to a stultified, dull, dusty old Western. He said, “No farting.” I said, “It’s out”… You say yes, and you never do it.

That’s great advice for life. Don’t fight them. Don’t waste your time struggling with them and trying to make sense to them. They’ll never understand.”

I love this advice. I support it wholeheartedly.

This is not to say, of course, that you should ignore all feedback from your superiors. Just the dumb feedback. The stupid ideas.

And only if possible. Don’t go losing a good job just because your boss is a fool.

Also, here’s the Matthew Dicks addendum to Mel Brooks’ rule:

“The farther away a superior gets from doing your job (if they ever did your job at all), the more likely the feedback you will receive from that person will be dumb.”

It won’t always be dumb, of course. But the likelihood increases exponentially.

My former principal, Plato Karafelis, used to say, “I haven’t been a classroom teacher for twenty years. You know a lot more about teaching in today’s world than I ever could, so you tell me what’s best.”

Smart man. This isn’t to say he didn’t have anything to offer teachers in terms of their craft, but he also acknowledged his obvious limitations.

Not many managers or administrators in any line of work possess the wisdom, insight, and strength of ego to make such assertions. Most assume they still understand the nature of your work even if they haven’t done it in a decade or more, or they are too frightened or too weak to admit to their limitations.

The pandemic has only acerbated this reality in many fields. Anyone who had not taught students during the pandemic, for example. can kindly shut the hell up about teaching during and even after the pandemic, because they haven’t a clue about what the job is like anymore. I suspect that this is also true for many, many lines of work:

Lots of bosses thinking they understand the nature of work when they clearly do not.

And if they won’t shut up (as they probably should) and won’t listen (as they most certainly should), attempt to use Mel Brooks’ rule of saying yes then just doing the right, best thing instead.