“When you’re different, sometimes you don’t see the millions of people who accept you for what you are. All you notice is the person who doesn’t.”-Jodi Piccult, Change of Heart
Unfortunately it’s true. When you are working on the thing you love, the big idea you want to cultivate, critics will appear. People will call you a dreamer. They will call you a useless risk-taker. And they will call you worse. All of a sudden, there are pundits all around you telling you and others where you are missing the boat or what you are doing wrong.
This noise is very distracting. Whatever gets your focus gets bigger because you are giving it more and more energy. While all the time, the focus on the people your big idea will help is getting smaller and smaller. This also means their voice of appreciation and innovation of improvement for your big idea is getting lower and lower in volume.
“Some people have been unkind. If I say I want to grow as an actress, they look at my figure. If I say I want to develop, to learn my craft, they laugh. Somehow they don’t expect me to be serious about my work.”- Marilyn Munroe, Actress
Critics are going to laugh. They are going to make fun of you. They are going to expect you to quit on your idea and go do what they would do. Whatever that is. They will exact a tremendous amount of social pressure on you to conform to what they perceive to be normal. Galileo’s discovery of the telescope and explorations of our galaxy met with massive criticism and intense attacks, only to be vindicated later as a pioneer.
“Some people insist that ‘mediocre’ is better than ‘best.’ They delight in clipping wings because they themselves can’t fly. They despise brains because they have none.”- Robert A. Heinlein, Have Space Suit Will Travel
The thing to remember is: critics move on. Sooner or later, your work and it’s results speak for themselves. The critics will then find someone else to criticize and hassle.
Be more focused in the direction of your work. Be more resilient than the critics. Be more patient than the critics.
Pay no attention to the critics, they will eventually move on and so will you.
Comments