TJ Walker discusses how to handle criticism, especially online reviews. He describes a student who gave two stars without comments and never did the homework, arguing that feedback from people who didn't engage with the material isn't worth taking seriously. He advises creators to look for specific, actionable points in criticism and ignore reviews from people seeking pandering.
Chapters
Nobody likes criticism of their speaking or their presentations. But how do you interpret criticism? Hey, I'm like anybody else. I don't love it when people criticize me, but I always try to learn. I always try to listen and look at it with a fresh set of eyes because I'm not perfect, believe me. I make mistakes and I get feedback all the time that I then incorporate to make my next presentation or my next online course even better. So I always look carefully at criticism. And sometimes, frankly, I give more attention to the low reviews, the bad reviews, than the good ones, especially if the good one is just five stars and no commentary. Of course, I read any specific comments, good or bad, if it gives detail. So I was struck by one of my students, online students, earlier today, who gave a review of my course on public speaking for engineers. Now, he gave it a two, and I'll call him Jeff Bombast. We'll change his name. Jeff gave me a two star rating. Now that's an incredibly low rating. It's a one to five scale. And I thought, okay, well, maybe I really made some blunders. Maybe some of the videos were wrong. Maybe something dropped out. Let me take a look at his review. Well, it turned out that Jeff didn't leave any comments. He didn't leave any criticism, any suggestions, nothing specific. I then went back into the records and I saw that Jeff did 0 percentage of the homework assignments. Because in that class, like all my classes, I ask you to not just watch videos of me, but take what you've learned, apply it to what you want to do, record yourself giving a presentation and put it on YouTube or some other service and put up a link so we can take a look at it, check it out together. He did 0 of the homework. As far as I can tell, there's no evidence that he even got through much of the course. So in this particular case, I'm inclined to think there's not really much I can get out of his review or critique. What I think happened, and this can happen to all of you from time to time, is people have certain preconceived ideas of what they want. And even if you are the expert, even if you know what will really help them, they don't want to hear it. It happens in all fields. You can be a doctor specializing in helping the obese, and you may have someone who comes in who just wants to be told, here, eat this magic pill. Don't eat healthier, don't exercise. Just take this magic pill. And if you don't, tell them take this magic pill they're going to give you a nasty review on Yelp or sue for malpractice. That can happen. That's kind of how I feel in this situation where the student didn't try, didn't do the most fundamental aspects of what I asked them to do for homework. As far as I could tell didn't even get through much of the course and just left a very negative review. But fear not, this will happen to all of you. If you write books, do courses, give speeches you're simply not going to appeal to everyone. What I hope you do and what I try to do is don't get all upset when there's a negative review but look at it. Try to learn if there is specific criticism that can help you improve that's great. If it just seems like someone who wants to be pandered to don't worry about it because presumably you're not and I'm not in the pandering business.
