On Criticism
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
I started writing online twelve years ago. Here are some things I wish I’d been told then.
When you start, you will have paper-thin skin. My first six months on Twitter were nothing but me getting dunked on relentlessly. I was tweeting about businesses that I thought I knew well, only to get roasted by people that had been trading them for decades. But I couldn’t take the criticism. Everything was personal to me. I was the guy sitting in the corner of a room, face red, steam pouring off his head, both thumbs angrily pounding out swear-laden rejoinders.
There is no other way to get over this except for reps, experience and shifting your mindset.
You cannot accomplish anything meaningful in life until you learn to deal with criticism. All great goals come hand-in-hand with the possibility of failing in public, and that requires thick skin. Bezos once said if you absolutely can’t tolerate critics, don’t do anything new or interesting. What he doesn’t tell you is that everyone’s a critic. Maybe not everyone, but 99% of everyone.
Think of it in Rooseveltian terms: there are men in the arena and there are critics. It’s binary. Every person you will ever deal with is either one or the other.
As you put yourself out there in public and start absorbing criticism, you will notice that you never receive criticism from men in the arena. Why? They’re too busy doing shit! When you’re building, you don’t have time to sit around, kick rocks and throw barbs at people.
Some people hate themselves and are confused about it. The Internet is full of angry individuals who sit around and troll all day, and once you end up with tens of thousands of followers, you’re guaranteed to have someone who tosses insults your way.
You can be a wonderful person who does every single thing right, and there will still be someone out there who hates your guts. Life gets easier once you accept this fact.
Forget the critics, ignore them and don’t lose sight of your goals: you are here to link with other people who are trying to create stuff, and to help the younger versions of yourself. Keep in mind that somewhere out there in the void is a twenty-one-year-old you who is completely clueless on how life works. What would you tell your twenty-one-year-old self? Put it all out there, homeboy, because you never know if someone out there has a wound in the shape of your words.
Critics have never entered the arena. They never will. Their opinions aren’t worth buffalo shit on a nickel. It was Denzel Washington who said that you’ll never be criticized by someone who is doing more than you; you’ll always be criticized by someone doing less. This is why you ignore the one-off replies from life’s version of Non-Playable Characters and get comfortable muting and blocking all those ignorant crabs in a bucket who who are there solely to waste your time.
It is amazing how a grown-ass man will wear a block as if he’s proud of it. “Check it out! This guy blocked me!” Wow, cool. Go show it to your wife’s boyfriend.
Finally, here is what I’d call The Three Rules of Criticism:
1. Don’t take criticism from people you’d never go to for advice. This is the golden rule.
2. Accept criticism from people you want to be, who have either successfully done what you want to do or who failed in their quest to do what you’re trying to do.
3. Ignore just about everyone else.
“Bullfight critics ranked in rows
Crowd the enormous plaza full,
But there is only one who knows,
And he is the man who fights the bull.”
**EDIT: 1/7/2025**
I wrote most of the above in 2021 before nixing it from Blind Spots. Felt like okay content but wrong channel and it disrupted the narrative arc. I gave it a light edit and posted it here. But sitting down and re-reading today, I actually don’t agree with a fair amount of that sentiment. It’s too subjective and can be too easily co-opted by the ignorant and closed-minded as “I won’t take criticism from people I don’t like.”
The correct approach to criticism is “focus on the message, not the messenger.” Read all the comments, read all the replies, read everything and value it on its own merits.
There are only two possibilities for each comment someone makes about you. It’s either true or it’s false. If it’s false, don’t worry about it, if it’s true, then fix it.
Who the commenter is doesn’t matter, nor does the tone of the comment. It might be an angry anonymous troll account who has never had anything nice to say to anyone. But if they are correct in pointing out a flaw of yours, then who cares?
I think about it this way.
Let’s say you weigh 100 pounds soaking wet. If someone comes at you aggressively and says that you’re a “fat fucking disgusting slob,” are you going to care? No, because it’s not true. You’re going to laugh it off or ignore it.
Now let’s say you weigh 400 pounds instead. Someone calls you those same words. What happens? You are going to be in your feelings heavy, you’ll react with anger, lash out and probably say something like who the hell is this guy to be talking about me like that, how much does he weigh, fuck him, he’s a troll, and so on. We really, really don’t like the truth. But if you’re an objective thinker, you’ll read that comment - aggressive as it is - internalize it as true, and get to work on fixing it. Really, the guy did you a favor by bringing a flaw of yours to your attention. You owe him a thank you.
It is a natural human reaction, the whole “who is HE to talk to me like that,” but it’s one you have to short-circuit. It’s meaningless and it does nothing for you.
Never, never, never get defensive. What they say is either true or it’s false, and if it’s true, go fix it. No, there is no middle ground. If you are 99% perfect and 1% flawed, and they point out your flaws, you still have work to do. It only takes a single cloud to block out the sun.
There is an art to making use of your enemies, as described by Baltasar Gracian: “You should learn to seize things not by the blade, which cuts, but by the handle, which saves you from harm: especially is this the rule with the doings of your enemies. A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends. Their ill-will often levels mountains of difficulties which one would otherwise not face.”
Once you adopt this mindset you will realize that there is no such thing as bad or useless criticism. Keep doing what you do and let the critics keep chirping from the cheap seats. It can only make you better.
Never stop putting up shots,
GB
