Extract of amended video transcript:
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 I mean I know it sounds cheesy and cliche 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 hear it, something shifts inside of you.
So, my story is that I am a researcher, and I never thought I would have a big public career and so I did a TED Talk that went very viral. 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.
The marching orders from my therapist and my husband were “do not read the comments online”. So, I read all the comments online. So, one morning, I woke up and there were two or three new articles out and I started reading the comments. They were devastating. 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, “What would you try, if you knew people would never say this about you, what would this be?” Those were the comments that morning… “of course she embraces imperfection what choice does she have looking how she looks”, “I feel sorry for her kids”, “less research, more Botox”… 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 these things.
So I put it in, and Theodore 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, and a lot of people call it “The Man in the Arena” speech and this is the passage that changes my life…
“It’s not the critic who counts, it’s 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 butt 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 butt 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 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 butt kicked, I’m not interested in your feedback. If you have constructive information and feedback to give me, I want it. 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.