I read this article last week on Mashable after seeing it in the Tweetstream from Dayle Major: Tim Ferriss: 7 Great Principles for Dealing with Haters.
Tim Feriss has seven great principles designed to help you understand and handle criticism in a proactive way, some of them based around interesting quotes:
1. It doesn’t matter how many people don’t get it. What matters is how many people do.
2. 10% of people will find a way to take anything personally. Expect it.
3. “Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity.” (Colin Powell)
4. “If you are really effective at what you do, 95% of the things said about you will be negative.” (Scott Boras)
5. “If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” (Epictetus)
6. “Living well is the best revenge.” (George Herbert)
7. Keep calm and carry on.
See the full explanations for these principles here.
There are some great thoughts there, and some I really feel I need to take on board.
By the same token, however, I think that some of them already in fact guide some of the stuff I see in the ELT blogosphere (and some of this stuff is sometimes stuff I'm tempted to write myself, in my darker moods!), and that stuff is often pretty needlessly negative and inflammatory. I personally worry some of the advice here could me misread or deliberately misinterpreted, and super-charge some soapboxes!
What do you think?
:-)
