“When someone gives you criticism, it’s telling you as much about who they are as what you’ve made.”

Rick Rubin

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My note

I came across Rick Rubin saying this in an interview with Jay Shetty.

I loved it because it almost drills the right mindset into how one should think approach critique or feedback on one’s work.

There is useful and not-so-useful critique and feedback. This shouldn’t result in you blocking yourself from all feedback to protect yourself from getting hurt. Feedback can help you improve, so you might as well be open to it.

Here’s why. When someone criticises your work, their feedback is shaped and communicated based on their personal tastes, experiences, biases, perspectives, and values. The takeaway is that criticism is not an objective truth—it’s a perspective.

Keep that in mind and go ahead and extract only the parts that are useful to help you or your work grow. Disregard the parts (or the whole, if that be the case!) that are not useful.

There is no reason for you to be emotionally burdened here. Take criticism and feedback with the approach I like to call The Orange Method: Eat the fruit and discard the peel. You don’t throw the orange away just because of its peel, do you?

I hope this little insight helps you grow in whatever it is you are pursuing, creative or otherwise.