In the icy wastes of Siberia, in an isolated cabin on the bank of a frozen river, lives the only person in the world who likes receiving criticism.
Apart from him, all nine billion running about on this planet simply hate it.
When a psychologist wants to know a person truly, one of the formative moments that teaches us what that human being is actually made of is the moment he stands facing negative feedback.
Criticism directed at us simply shatters us, even in small doses.
Our automatic tendency is to resist it, and to launch — no less automatically — into a speech explaining why we are right, and why we are fine, and why there is no possibility that we erred, and why the person who dared to criticise us is a contemptible wretch.
And that is a shame. A shame, because although we respond to criticism as though to a survival threat, it is precisely our instinctive resistance to criticism that endangers our ability to survive in the world, let alone to flourish.
Let us explain. Somebody said that life is a long process of learning, and he was right. If we think about it coldly and logically for a moment, when you learn, you move gradually from a state of not knowing to a state of knowing. The initial stage in learning is almost always a state of absence of knowledge, of ignorance, and even of blindness. And ignorant, blind, uninformed people are prone to errors.
You need to learn how to conduct relationships without wrecking them. How to cope financially with the world. How to raise tiny human beings into sane adults.
In all the central areas of life — parenthood, love, career — there is no preliminary training. You have to learn it on your own skin.
What does that mean practically?
It means that criticism is not an attack on your competence. It is the only delivery mechanism that exists for information you cannot generate yourself.
And here is the part that costs people decades: the instinct to defend is fastest precisely where the criticism is most accurate. The remarks that bounce off harmlessly are usually the wrong ones. The one that makes your face hot is the one carrying the cargo.