Responding to Vitriol
It is difficult to think objectively when one is faced with critique from audiences, friends, and mentors.
The common response would be to take offense and to reject critique entirely. The obvious answer is to accept it and try and integrate it. The truly differentiated response would be to take from it what is useful regarding your own behavior, and at minimum understand it as simply data on who is doing the critiquing. You can easily do this anytime you face critique.
I found this especially interesting and useful in the period of dating right before I met my wife. There had been this inner commitment to go ahead and treat every date as a potential future wife, regardless of compatibility, with the goal in mind of becoming a supreme candidate for opportunity when it did finally find me. Many people work in the opposite way– slacking off until opportunity makes itself obvious, “cleaning up” their act just in time. But this is never successful. What you routinely are is also what you become.
And in so I was often faced with strange reactions from dates who weren’t used to being treated in any sort of way other than as some sort of prey. I remember one in particular who’d refused to let me pay for a dinner, insisting I’d use it as a way to lord over her some sort of future obligation. This perplexed me. Had I done something wrong, behaving in some way to imply that this was how she would be treated if we were to go on a second, third, fourth date? I remember going home, praying, seeking out if there were some part of me– a predatory part– which was obvious to others and not to me. I remember being short on answers. So much time in the year beforehand had been spent earnestly trying to embody honesty, humility, idealism, and it appeared (at least in the case of her critique) something may have still been hidden within me, totally imperceptible to my own conscience.
And then I met my wife not a few weeks later. And what did she have to say about me? The complete opposite of what I’d heard from that previous date– she told me I was quite unlike any guy she’d ever met. That I was kind, discerning, and humble. And so what did this reveal to me?
If you are genuinely in the pursuit of wisdom, you will come to a state where you value critique from outsiders. You want to know how you can be better, how you’re perceived, and how you’ve fallen into self-willed delusion. Your ability to absorb critique is an immense advantage in a world dominated by fragile egoism. And yet, sometimes your humble willingness to believe everything everyone tells you about yourself can leave you more confused than if you would’ve listened to yourself to begin with, trusting your own judgment, and understanding that sometimes critique is valuable for what it says about you, and other times for of what it says of your critic.
