Ignoring Negative Criticism

In his book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” Dave Carnegie said that humans hate negative criticism.

At that time, I thought it was just emotional stuffs.

However, negative criticism does not only hurt emotionally but can also hurt your interests realistically.

Most of negative criticisms are not true. Even if it’s true, it’s not worth paying attention to.

John Maxwell said that we should spend at least 70% of our time on our strengths and only 5% on our weaknesses. Negative criticism puts too much of our attention on what we’re weak at.

If somebody tells David Beckham, a great soccer player, that he’s such an idiot because he can’t play golf, do you think David should pay attention to that and learn golf instead?

We probably cannot improve too much the points that we’re weak at anyway. Moreover, by allocating resources to improve our weakness we’re taking away resources that could have gone to improve our strength.

However, the world is full with so many people that would rain down negative criticism to their neighbors.

These acts are often justified by strange fairy tales. For example, the purpose of school is to create a whole well-balanced new human being.

Implicit in the idea of “whole” and “balanced” is, of course, the idea you should improve your weakness.

If it doesn’t serve you to listen or pay attention to negative criticism, why are people uttering it?

Envy.

Many people, out of envy bigotry do not want you to be successful. They want to stop you from being successful.

Imagine if a male makes a lot of money and attracts many females, the other males will not get any and would go extinct, right? Hence, so many males have strong preferences to prevent you from getting rich.

They come up with various ways to trick or force you from the one “all right” path you have chosen to success.
One way to do it is through frivolous negative criticism.

Ignoring criticism will not become a straightforward silver bullet. However, it would work quite well and a good advice enough for an article.