Concept
The arena
The arena, from Theodore Roosevelt's 1910 speech 'Citizenship in a Republic' and Brené Brown's reading of it in Daring Greatly, is where the person actually doing the thing stands: marred by dust and sweat, erring and coming short.
Brown uses the passage as a filter for criticism. When you are doing anything that matters you will be criticised, and most of it will come from people who are not doing it. The move is not to ignore all feedback but to weigh it by whether its source is in the arena: a colleague who also presents, a founder who also failed, a parent also raising a teenager. Their criticism is worth listening to because it cost them something to earn. Commentary from the seats (the relative who has never started anything, the anonymous account, the colleague who always knows how it should have been done) is cheap by definition. The frame also answers the inner critic, which is the cheapest seat of all, since it has never once done the thing it is criticising. Ben Horowitz's 'nobody cares' is the founder's version: the seats are not even watching most of the time.
A real-life example
A first-time novelist in Istanbul gets two reactions in the same week: a three-line review from an anonymous account calling the book 'amateurish', and a long email from a writer whose own first novel was rejected eleven times, pointing out that the middle third drags. She reads the first once. She prints the second and rewrites the middle third.
How to use it
- 1When criticised, ask whether the source is in the arena, doing the thing and getting hit.
- 2Give weight to arena voices and none to the cheap seats, including the inner critic.
- 3Find people also in the arena and ask them for the feedback that costs something.