The Criticism Filter

Why Your Harshest Critics Are Often Your Worst Advisors

Three years ago, I made one of the biggest decisions of my life: I left my job, moved abroad, and started building a business online. It was scary, uncertain, and completely outside my comfort zone.

The criticism started almost immediately. My friend who I've known for 20+ years kept telling me I'd made a mistake. My family would regularly ask when I was coming home, insisting I must be unhappy just because I wasn't getting big results yet. The message was clear: I was being reckless, unrealistic, and should give up this foolish dream.

At first, it used to make me doubt myself. These were people I loved and trusted. They'd known me for decades. Maybe they could see something I couldn't. Maybe I was being naive about what was possible.

But then I started paying attention to their lives. None of them were living the life I wanted. None of them had ever taken the kind of risks I was taking. None of them had ever built anything from scratch or stepped outside their comfort zones in any meaningful way.

And that's when it hit me: I was letting people who'd never pursued their dreams convince me to abandon mine.

This is the criticism trap most of us fall into. We treat all feedback as equally valid, regardless of who's giving it. We let people who've never done what we're trying to do convince us we're doing it wrong. We give the same weight to criticism from someone stuck in their own patterns as we do to advice from someone who's actually achieved what we're working toward.