When I’m facing a challenge, I’ve learned to ask credible people to tell me about their experiences and give me feedback. I’ve left some of these conversations, though, feeling like I didn’t get what I was looking for. I was talking with a founder yesterday and this topic came up. He shared a great insight with me. When asking for input, he aims to leave the conversation with a single golden nugget. No to-do list or pages of takeaways. He’s looking for one insightful thing that he hadn’t considered before.

This clicked with me. It made perfect sense. We chatted about how he landed on this approach. He made some great points. One was that most people are likely to act on only one thing from a conversation (for a variety of reasons). I agree. And if you’re going to act on only one thing, why look for ten?

I began replaying conversations in my head that I had deemed somewhat unproductive. I was able to identify a single golden nugget in most of them. Some of those nuggets had already proved helpful in navigating challenging situations, but I hadn’t given those conversations the credit they deserved because my expectations for them hadn’t been realistic.

I love this founder’s approach to getting feedback. Early founders have a never-ending to-do list and they often talk with lots of people. How beneficial would it be to learn one thing or get one idea from most if not all these conversations? When you leave a conversation, ask yourself: what’s the golden nugget?