This week's idea
From John Eales, former Wallabies captain:
"Drive fast and give good feedback."
Two words and a conjunction from the most decorated forward in Australian rugby history. Not what I expected. Exactly what I needed.
Useful takeaways
Speed is a competitive advantage. In agency life, clients pay a premium for it. In the AI era, there's no longer an excuse not to move fast. The slow lane isn't safe, it's just slow.
Feedback is the thing that makes speed useful. Moving fast without giving good feedback is just chaos with momentum. The two parts of the phrase are inseparable.
Good feedback requires presence. You can't give good feedback if you're not actually listening. Speed without attention is just noise.
Where people get this wrong
Most people hear "drive fast" and immediately default to the first part. They move quickly, aimlessly ship stuff, get it out the door. But they treat feedback as the admin at the end, not the thing that makes the speed worth anything.
The other trap is that people confuse giving feedback with talking. They're in the room. They're responding. They're filling the silence. But they're not actually responding to what's in front of them.
Good feedback isn't a quick reply. It's proof you were paying attention.
How I’ve applied it
We were in a quick-turnaround pitch for a brand I knew back to front. I'd used their products for years. A creative was walking me through his idea, trying to rationalise it, and I knew (or thought I knew) where he was going wrong.
Before he'd finished, I was already on the precipice of finishing his sentence for him.
He caught it. We're mates, so he said it plainly: "Ha, mate, you weren't even listening, you were just waiting to talk, weren't you?"
He was right. And the irony wasn't lost on me. The brief had come in fast, I'd moved fast, but my feedback would have been useless because I'd stopped paying attention the moment I thought I already had the answer.
Storytime
I met John Eales at the Marketing Academy bootcamp in February 2022. I was at the front, starstruck. As a rugby fiend, sitting a few metres from a man who captained the Wallabies to two World Cups felt absurd. There were plenty of big lines in his talk. Things that sounded like they'd been chiselled into stone.
But the thing I remember most clearly came towards the end. Not a centrepiece moment. Not the punchline. Just an offhand comment he dropped almost in passing.
"Drive fast and give good feedback."
The room went quiet for a second, and you could almost feel it land.
I held onto that for a while before I really understood it. Then someone gave me feedback that I wasn't always listening in meetings. That sometimes, I was waiting to talk rather than actually hearing what was being said.
That's when Eales' line clicked properly, for me anyway. Driving fast is the easy part. Most of us are already doing it, especially now. The hard part is staying present enough to give feedback that's actually worth something. That means being in the room -- not just physically, but actually there.
Since then, I've been trying to close the gap between my reaction speed and my attention quality. I don't always get it right. But I'm a better listener than I was at that bootcamp, and I'm pretty sure John Eales would approve.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
Murph