I’ve been thinking about critics. Mostly, I’m thinking about just how easy it is for someone to criticize, how impactful that criticism can be, without any sense of the critic’s credentials. Essentially: a critic can sink a ship even if he isn’t qualified to take the shot.
But what’s the value of the criticism? If you’re the ship, or your idea is the ship, how do you even know if the other person gets the bigger picture? It’s like asking an alien species to take a glance around an office building and determine what it is we humans are toiling on. Not all critics are without footing and base. That’s not my point. But I am stressing the notion that it’s easier for someone to take a shot at something they don’t understand.
Most of my critics don’t usually get where I’m going with things. It’s probably my fault to a great degree, because I’m not communicating in a way that makes sense, or I’m using shortcuts in my conversation. Sometimes, I see the vision of the thing I’m thinking so clearly that I think (often wrongly) that everyone else sees it just as clearly. Silly me, I know. But that’s one of the roots of criticisms leveled against me.
They’ll Never See It
I was listening to a humorous rendition of the Noah’s Ark Story on This American Life a week or so back, and I was thinking, “But how would they know?” If you lived next door to an old dude who started chopping down the trees between your hut and his, how would you know whether he was a visionary or a fruit?
It was either Michael Jordan or Colin Powell who wrote about the fact that when you’re coming up (in celebrity, in fame), your friends will inadvertently try to hold you down. They can’t see it, either. They see you as having a big head.
When we launched PodCamp, there were critics telling us that the local brain trust was good enough, and that a meetup would suffice. Some of those folks didn’t see that we felt this would be a larger platform for sharing knowledge, something that would have “legs.” Before we launched it, it didn’t make sense. Hell, try telling sponsors they really want to spend money with us, an unknown. Some of them got it (and we love them – Porter Novelli, Podcast Ready, Topaz, Talkshoe, Museum of Science, etc, etc) and plenty more didn’t.
But just because people don’t get it doesn’t mean it’s not real and not valuable.
Dreamer, Alchemist, or Visionary
Did you ever read any Neal Stephenson? I really dig him. For instance, when I read Quicksilver
When everyone’s a spiritualist, what does an alchemist resemble? When everyone’s an alchemist, what’s a physical scientist look like? When everyone’s a desktop app programmer, what does someone who sees a future on web-top look like?
So, how are you going to criticize what you don’t perceive?
Further, as someone possessed of vision, it becomes VERY important to stick to your guns. Vision versus crazy. It might be a fine line. But if you’re either, ride it out. And damn the critics. One thing is certain: “critic” and “vision” rarely coexist in a single entity.
(image credit: presidentservelan.)
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