I have been asked how I come up with ideas for these emails. Coming up with ideas isn’t nearly as hard as coming up with ideas that will resonate with a diverse group of people. My mailing list is made up retirees, college students, married people, singles, entry level employees, corporate executives, blue collar, white collar - not exactly a group that responds to the same message, but hopefully I’ve found one this week.
The title comes from Theodore Roosevelt’s quote that begins with “It’s not the critic who counts.” If you’ve never read it, I urge you to do so. If ever a message has universal applicability, this one does.
To approach our potential, we have to get “in the arena.” We have to try. We can’t wait for conditions to be perfect, because the conditions will never be perfect. There will always be some degree of uncertainty and doubt, some chance of failure. But that’s okay, because it is the rare situation where failure is not an option.
What keeps most of us from daring greatly is fear, not so much of failure, but of ridicule. And who ridicules? The critic, the person who is not in the arena. Usually a person who personally hasn’t accomplished very much.
It is here that we can take a lesson from professional athletes. They understand that they won’t win every time, that they won’t complete every pass or get a hit every at bat. And yet the real pros learn what they can and come back the next day or the next week for another go at it.
What business, indeed life, needs most is creativity and innovation. But by their very definitions, they are different from the status quo, sometimes radically different, and thus subject to scorn by the critic. But as Albert Einstein said, “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”
Rejection is neither easy nor fun (being in sales, I know that all too well!), but what matters more than the rejection itself is the person doing the rejecting. If it’s the critic, the person on the sidelines, it can and should be dismissed out of hand. It doesn’t deserve our attention.
People we know and respect will not ridicule us. They may criticize our idea, but they won’t demean us personally. They may criticize our idea because it’s not that good, or maybe they’ll point out some aspect that we overlooked. That’s not rejection at all and shouldn’t be taken as such.
As a society and as a world, we have problems whose solutions require creativity and innovation. Quite possibly, the technologies required to sustain nine billion people on this planet don’t exist yet. We need the best and the brightest who are in the arena working towards those solutions to ignore the doomsday critics who say it can’t be done.
And we need to get in the arena in the area in which we work. It is only by doing so, by daring greatly, that we can make a difference. And by doing so, we will make a difference not only in our world, but in the world.