فصل 21

Part Six How to Keep from Worrying About Criticism

Chapter 21 - Do This and Criticism Can’t Hurt You

I once interviewed Major-General Smedley Butler-old “Gimlet-Eye”. Old “Hell-Devil” Butler! Remember him? The most colorful, swashbuckling general who ever commanded the United States Marines.

He told me that when he was young, he was desperately eager to be popular, wanted to make a good impression on everyone. In those days the slightest criticism smarted and stung. But he confessed that thirty years in the Marines had toughened his hide. “I have been berated and insulted,” he said, “and denounced as a yellow dog, a snake, and a skunk. I have been cursed by the experts. I have been called every possible combination of unprintable cuss words in the English language. Bother me? Huh! When I hear someone cussing me now, I never turn my head to see who is talking.”

Maybe old “Gimlet-Eye” Butler was too indifferent to criticism; but one thing is sure: most of us take the little jibes and javelins that are hurled at us far too seriously. I remember the time, years ago, when a reporter from the New York Sun attended a demonstration meeting of my adult-education classes and lampooned me and my work. Was I burned up? I took it as a personal insult. I telephoned Gill Hodges, the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Sun, and practically demanded that he print an article stating the facts, instead of ridicule. I was determined to make the punishment fit the crime.

I am ashamed now of the way I acted. I realize now that half the people who bought the paper never saw that article. Half of those who read it regarded it as a source of innocent merriment. Half of those who gloated over it forgot all about it in a few weeks.

I realize now that people are not thinking about you and me or caring what is said about us. They are thinking about themselves, before breakfast, after breakfast, and right on until ten minutes past midnight. They would be a thousand times more concerned about a slight headache of their own than they would about the news of your death or mine.

Even if you and I are lied about, ridiculed, double-crossed, knifed in the back, and sold down the river by one out of every six of our most intimate friends, let’s not indulge in an orgy of self-pity. Instead, let’s remind ourselves that that’s precisely what happened to Jesus. One of His twelve most intimate friends turned traitor for a bribe that would amount, in our modern money, to about nineteen dollars. Another one of His twelve most intimate friends openly deserted Jesus the moment He got into trouble, and declared three times that he didn’t even know Jesus and he swore as he said it. One out of six! That is what happened to Jesus. Why should you and I expect a better score?

I discovered years ago that although I couldn’t keep people from criticizing me unjustly, I could do something infinitely more important: I could determine whether I would let the unjust condemnation disturb me.

Let’s be clear about this: I am not advocating ignoring all criticism. Far from it. I am talking about ignoring only unjust criticism. I once asked Eleanor Roosevelt how she handled unjust criticism and Allah knows she’s had a lot of it. She probably has more ardent friends and more violent enemies than any other woman who ever lived in the White House.

She told me that as a young girl she was almost morbidly shy, afraid of what people might say. She was so afraid of criticism that one day she asked her aunt, Theodore Roosevelt’s sister for advice. She said: “Auntie Bye, I want to do so and so. But I’m afraid of being criticized.”

Teddy Roosevelt’s sister looked her in the eye and said: “Never be bothered by what people say, as long as you know in your heart you are right.” Eleanor Roosevelt told me that—that bit of advice proved to be her Rock of Gibraltar years later, when she was in the White House. She told me that the only way we can avoid all criticism is to be like a Dresden-china figure and stay on a shelf. “Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you’ll be criticized, anyway. You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.” That is her advice.

When the late Matthew C. Brush, was president of the American International Corporation at 40 Wall Street, I asked him if he was ever sensitive to criticism; and he replied: “Yes, I was very sensitive to it in my early days. I was eager then to have all the employees in the organization think I was perfect. If they didn’t, it worried me. I would try to please first one person who had been sounding off against me; but the very thing I did to patch it up with him would make someone else mad. Then when I tried to fix it up with this person, I would stir up a couple of other bumble-bees. I finally discovered that the more I tried to pacify and to smooth over injured feelings in order to escape personal criticism, the more certain I was to increase my enemies. So finally I said to myself: ‘If you get your head above the crowd, you’re going to be criticized. So get used to the idea.’ That helped me tremendously. From that time on I made it a rule to do the very best I could and then put up my old umbrella and let the rain of criticism drain off me instead of running down my neck.”

Deems Taylor went a bit further: he let the rain of criticism run down his neck and had a good laugh over it in public. When he was giving his comments during the intermission of the Sunday afternoon radio concerts of the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, one woman wrote him a letter calling him “a liar, a traitor, a snake and a moron”.

On the following week’s broadcast, Mr. Taylor read this letter over the radio to millions of listeners. In his book, Of Men & Music, he tells us that a few days later he received another letter from the same lady, “expressing her unaltered opinion that I was still a liar, a traitor, a snake and a moron. I have a suspicion,” adds Mr. Taylor, “that she didn’t care for that talk.” We can’t keep from admiring a man who takes criticism like that. We admire his serenity, his unshaken poise, and his sense of humor.

When Charles Schwab was addressing the student body at Princeton, he confessed that one of the most important lessons he had ever learned was taught to him by an old German who worked in Schwab’s steel mill. The old German got involved in a hot wartime argument with the other steelworkers, and they tossed him into the river. “When he came into my office,” Mr. Schwab said, “covered with mud and water, I asked him what he had said to the men who had thrown him into the river, and he replied: ‘I just laughed.’ “

Mr. Schwab declared that he had adopted that old German’s words as his motto: “Just laugh.”

That motto is especially good when you are the victim of unjust criticism. You can answer the man who answers you back, but what can you say to the man who “just laughs?”

Lincoln might have broken under the strain of the Civil War if he hadn’t learned the folly of trying to answer all his savage critics. He finally said: “If I were to try to read, much less to answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how, the very best I can; and I mean to keep on doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, then what is said against me won’t matter. If the end brings me out wrong, then ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.”

When you and I are unjustly criticized, let’s remember Rule 2: Do the very best yon can: and then put up your old umbrella and keep the rain of criticism from running down the back of your neck.