“Sorry, guys. None of this is useful.” The Hum’s Guide to Dealing With Criticism
Our thoughts on receiving negative feedback, eating at restaurants by yourself, and the benefits of staying paranoid.
The Hum is open to any and all feedback, good and bad. We learn from everything we hear and we want to keep making our content better.
That sounds like a thing a company should say. It sounds really big of us.
But, the truth is, receiving negative feedback is really really freaking hard. And that’s because we give a lot of shits about this thing.
Here is some feedback we’ve received so far. Sources will remain anonymous but these are direct quotes.
“Sorry, guys. None of this is useful. It’s the same or worse than what one gets on Entrepreneur. Also…alot is just stupid. I think the issue is that you guys are just too young and inexperienced.”
“Personally, I dislike your frequent use of colloquialisms. I appreciate that is it a strategy which has worked for other influencers…but I think it does not help to strengthen your message while you are establishing yourselves…I work too much and have too little spare time to be spending it reading pieces about entrepreneurship.”
“Look, I’m not putting you or anyone down for trying to invent your own jobs. That’s totally laudable…But, you need to get down to first principles of business. You need to have a good or service people will actually spend money for…Gain some life experiences first…”
Some of that is pretty tough to swallow. And that’s the case because all of it has at least some element of truth. A lot of it is completely true.
Maybe nothing we write is helpful…
A lot of the stuff in our emails is definitely stupid. We have history lessons one day a week. What the hell…
We are absolutely too young and inexperienced…
Our colloquialisms might make our writing seem dumbed down…
People are busy. We’re asking them to give up their time to read an email…
Why would anyone with a job read about entrepreneurship…
We don’t practice a lot of business principles…
We don’t have much life experience…
To be fair, we have also received some positive feedback. (Thanks for that, fam. You’re the realest.) And, we have some data that is pretty encouraging. But, it’s pretty easy to let the negative comments outweigh some cool stuff people just trying to be nice said about you.
What I’m getting at is that running a business, or really any activity in which you’re betting on yourself, is a constant battle with self-doubt and that self-doubt makes you paranoid.
If you’ve ever told someone an insane business idea, applied for a job above your experience level, or asked out someone way out of your league — you know what I’m talking about. You can’t help but think of everything that could go wrong. It’s exceedingly difficult to keep your head down and stay confident.
I equate it to this. For one reason or another — traveling for work, everyone else already ate, you just want to — you go out to eat at a sit-down restaurant by yourself. At first, it can be an empowering feeling. You were confident enough to do this when other people wouldn’t. You deserve credit for that.
But soon, if you are like me, you grow extremely aware of the other people in the restaurant and what they might be thinking about you. You probably spend a lot of time with your face buried in your phone to avoid looking awkward. And you probably have a general level of discomfort throughout the entire experience.
That general level of discomfort, that constant self-doubt — that is what it is like to start a business, except with higher stakes and in front of a boatload more people.
But the more we operate at this level of constant stress, the more I think this is the right place to be. It is good to take stock in every piece of negative feedback you get. It is good to consistently question whether or not what you’re producing is valuable. It is good to be paranoid to the point that you force yourself to learn new things to keep improving.
This is going to be uncomfortable for a long time. And that’s okay. You are at your best when you are outside of your comfort zone.
Stay paranoid, people.
