Transcription
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So I want to tell you about something that changed my life as a creative person. And it's a quote from Theodore Roosevelt. And it is completely, I mean, I know it sounds cheesy and cliché to think a quote can change your life, but sometimes when you hear something when you need to hear it and you're ready to to hear it, something shifts inside of you.
And so my story is that I'm I am a researcher and I never thought I would have a big public career. Um, and so I did a TED Talk that went very viral. And in the wake of that, I was kind of everywhere for a couple of months on every CNN.com, NPR, it was everywhere. And something I wasn't used to. And the marching orders from my therapist and my husband were, do not read the comments online. So I read all the comments online.
And so one morning I woke up and there were two or three new articles out and I started reading the comments and they were devastating. Um, they weren't about my work, they were about me. They were super personal and they were the things that creative people play in their mind and then give up doing what they really want to do. Like if I asked every single one of you, you would try what would you try if you knew people would never say this about you? What would that, what would this be? It were those were the comments that morning. Um, "Of course she embraces imperfection, what choice does she have? Look what, look how she looks." Um, "I feel sorry for her kids." Um, "Less research, more Botox." Um, just mean personal attacks. The things that really up until that moment had inspired me to stay very small in my life, in my career, just so I could avoid this. [Music] Things.
So I put it in and the Roosevelt comes up and a quote comes up and I read it. And this is what it says. It's a quote from a speech that he gave in the early 1900s at the Sorbonne. And a lot of people call the Man in the Arena speech. And this is the passage that changes my life. "It is not the critic who counts; it is not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done it better. The credit belongs to the person who's actually in the arena, whose face is marred with blood and sweat and dust; who at the best, in the end, knows the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, he fails daring greatly."
So the moment that I read that, I closed my laptop. And this is what shifted in me. Three huge things. First, I've spent the last 12 years studying vulnerability. And that quote was everything I know about vulnerability. It is not about winning, it's not about losing, it's about showing up and being seen.
The second thing, this is who I want to be. I want to create. I want to make things that didn't exist before I touched them. I want to show up and be seen in my work and in my life. And if you're going to show up and be seen, there is only one guarantee. And that is you will get your ass kicked. That is the guarantee. That's the only certainty you have if you're going to go in the arena and spend any time in there whatsoever, especially if you've committed to creating in your life, you will get your ass kicked. So you have to decide at that moment, I think for all of us, if courage is a value that we hold, this is a consequence you can't avoid. [Music] It.
The third thing, which really set me free and is kind of a new philosophy about criticism, which is this: If you're not in the arena also getting your ass kicked, I'm not interested in your feedback. If you have constructive information, feedback to give me, I want it. And I'm an academic, I'm hardwired for wrestling around with stuff like that. You say, "Hey, you forgot all this literature." "Hey, you should have done this." Or "Terrible sentence construction over here." Like, let's go, let's do it. I love that. But if you're in the cheap seats, not putting yourself on the line and just talking about how I could do it better, I'm in no way interested in your feedback. So I know about the sweaty creative.
And so what I want to do today is I want to talk very specifically about the [Music] arena. What the arena is. Right there, you can see it. The lights there. And the fear is this. I'm scared. A lot of self-doubt, comparison, anxiety, uncertainty. And so what do most people do when they're walking into the arena and those things are going to greet them up top? What do you do? You armor up, right? This is where I would imagine the old days that they got all their stuff on. But God, that stuff is heavy. And that stuff is suffocating. And the problem is when you armor up against vulnerability, you shut yourself off. And I've said this to audiences before, but I have never said it to an audience where it is more true than today. The second, when you armor up, you armor up in this hallway. You shut yourself off from everything that you do and that you love. Because vulnerability is certainly a part of fear and self-doubt and grief and uncertainty and shame. But it's also the birthplace of these. It's the birthplace of love, of belonging, of joy, trust, empathy, creativity, and innovation. Without vulnerability, you cannot [Music] create.
I used to think the best way to put your work out into the world is to make sure the critics are not in the arena. But you have no control over who's in the arena. And the best way I have found is to know that they're there. And to know exactly what they're going to say to you. Because each of you know the three seats that will always be taken when you walk into the arena when you share your work with someone. The three seats that will always be taken are shame, scarcity, and comparison. Shame, completely universal human emotion. We all have it. It's that gremlin that whispers, "You're not, you're not enough." Or if you're feeling pretty confident. So shame always has a seat. The other seat that's always taken is scarcity. "What am I doing that everyone? What am I doing that's original? Everyone else is doing this. 150 people are doing it who are better trained than I'm than I am. What am I contributing? Does this really matter?" The third seat, always comparison. How many of you ever struggle with comparison? Comparison is always there. The fourth seat, I left open for you. You got to know who's in the fourth seat. Is it a teacher? Is it a parent? Is it a shitty ex-coworker? [Music]
The thing is, I don't care what people think. I don't worry about the critics in the arena. Sends a huge red flag up for me. We're hardwired for connection. When we stop caring what people think, we lose our capacity for connection. When we become defined by what people think, we lose our capacity to be vulnerable. Not caring what people think is its own kind of hustle, trust me. So rather than locking these folks out from the arena, what I'm going to invite you to do is reserve seats for them. Which doesn't seem like a good thing to do. But I have 13,000 pieces of data. And I've done this work for 12 years. And what I have found. And what I have learned from these folks. And then try to apply it in my own life that has changed my life. Is to reserve a seat. To take the critics to lunch. And to simply say, when I'm trying to do something new and hard and original. And I'm trying to be creative. And I'm trying to innovate. To say, "I see you. I hear you. But I'm going to show up and do this anyway. And I've got a seat for you. And you're welcome to come. But I'm not interested in your feedback."
The other piece that's tough is to me, if you're going to spend your life in the arena, if you're going to spend your life showing up, really showing up, there's a couple things that you need. The first is a clarity of values. You have to, like, I know, like when I came out here, I knew I could screw this completely up. I could get booed off stage. Bad things could happen. But I don't have a choice. Because if courage is my value, I have to do this. Whether it's successful or not is irrelevant. So a real clarity of values is important. The other thing is, you got to have at least one person in your life who's willing to pick you up and dust you off and look at you when you fail. Which hopefully you will. Because if you're not failing, you're really not showing up. But who was willing to look at you when you fail and say, "Man, that sucked. Yeah, it was totally as bad as you thought. But you were brave. And let's get you cleaned up. And cuz you're going to go back in." And this is someone who loves you not despite your imperfections and vulnerabilities, but because of them. And they should have great seats in the arena. Like I forgot for five, 10, for a decade, I forgot to invite these people into my arena. I didn't want to belong to a club that would let me in. I forgot to invite people. Cuz I thought if you're, if you're my fan, if you're here supporting me, how important could you be? Like, I'm trying to win over the people who hate [Music] me.
The last part is, so I guess the real specific how-tos are this. The world keeps going whether you know it or not. The critics are in the arena whether you identify them and think about the messages that keep us small. They're there whether you do that or not. What I have found in my life and what I have found in my research, which fueled what I did in my life, um, is that the people who have the most courage, who are willing to show up and be the most vulnerable, are the ones who are very clear about who the critics are. The ones who reserve seats for them and say, "I hear you. I get it. I know where the messaging is coming from. I'm not, I'm not buying it anymore." So to get very clear. The last thing, which I think is the hardest, is this. One of these seats needs to be reserved for you. One of these seats needs to be reserved for [Music] me. I need. When we look up and we're putting an idea, our piece of art, our design forward, who do you think the biggest critic in the arena normally is? Yourself. And so definitely me. Like I have never watched either of those TED Talks because it's not in service of the work for me. And I try to do things that are only in service of my work. Because what would, what would it serve for me to watch it? I would sit there and go, "Oh my God, suck in your stomach. Oh my God, that's not what you were going to say." You know, we're so self-critical. And one of the things that I think happens, and I think this happens a lot, it happens in different professions, but I think I see it a lot with creatives, is there is an ideal of what you're supposed to be. And what a lot of us end up doing is we orphan the parts of ourselves that don't fit what that ideal is supposed to be. And what it leaves when we orphan all those parts of us is it just leaves the critic. And so reserved in this seat is this where we came from, how we started, the people who love us, the moments that make us who we are. And in that share should be this person, the person who believes in what we're doing and why we're doing it. And the person who says, "Yeah, it's so scary to show up. It feels dangerous to be seen. It's terrifying. But it is not as scary, dangerous, or terrifying as getting to the end of our lives and thinking, what if I would have shown up? What would have been [Music] different?" [Music]