Mark McGuinness - Resilience: Facing Down Rejection (16 page)

5. Join a group (or start one)

Find a class, workshop, or discussion group, where like-minded enthusiasts gather to sharpen each other’s minds. (Remember
MeetUp.com
is a good place to look for these.)

If there isn’t a group like this in your area, start one. It could be as informal as a monthly meeting in the pub, or as ambitious as weekly screenings of Kurosawa’s entire film catalogue. Maybe everyone has to write something every week, or one person has to give a presentation to kick off the discussion.

And make sure most people in the room know more than you do. If you feel slightly intimidated by others’ knowledge, but excited to learn from them, you’ll know you’re in the right place.

6. Contribute to a forum

Search on the web for forums. Other places to look include groups on social networks such as Facebook or LinkedIn. If you’re lucky, you’ll strike gold—a busy, well established community hosting daily in-depth discussions on topics that fascinate you, populated by friendly obsessives who seem to spend several hours a day on the site. Welcome to your virtual village.

Start off by reading through the discussion threads to tune into the conversation, then introduce yourself and join in. If you’ve found a good forum, it is a marvelous opportunity to share your thinking, debate topics, and examine your own assumptions in a respectful and supportive atmosphere. (Just beware of spending all day on there.)

7. Start a blog

If you really want to work out what you really think about a topic, and put your ideas out there to see what the world makes of them, there’s nothing quite like blogging. Knowing that anyone could drop by your site and leave a comment, or write a counter-argument on their own site is a great way to focus your mind. It forces you to consider other people’s opinions, and how they relate to your own. It’s a great confidence-booster when readers let you know they appreciate your words.

One of the great benefits of blogging is the way it exposes you to potential criticism and inoculates you to it. Don’t let the fear put you off. Before I started my first blog, I had visions of snarky commenters and condescending uber-bloggers tearing my ideas to shreds. But I really wanted to try. And I’ve been overwhelmed by how much positive, supportive, and enthusiastic feedback I’ve received. Experiencing such a great response online has encouraged me to speak up and put my ideas out there in other places.

8. Benchmark against the best

Sometimes even excellence can be pretty mediocre.

Right now, in your field, there are people who are revered as stars. People hang on their every word, and their projects are launched with great fanfare. But are they
really
that good? Does their work
really
stack up against the best that has ever been done? Or are they merely the best of the current crop? Could it be that there are other contemporaries who don’t attract the same notice, yet whose work may be even better than the ones whose names are on everybody’s lips? Unless you have a finely developed critical judgment of your own, it’s hard to tell.

The same goes for your own work.

One of the dangers of being ‘pretty good’ at something is complacency. If you’re better than everyone else around you, where’s your incentive to improve?

• If you’re the star player on the team, isn’t it time you found a better team?
  
• If you can run your department with your eyes closed, isn’t it time you looked for a challenge that keeps you awake at night?
  
• If your writing is good enough to be published, is it good enough to be published (and read) in 500 years’ time?
  
• If you’ve had a hit record, how would you feel about playing it to the music legend who is your hero, and hearing their honest opinion of it?
  

Whether evaluating other people’s work or your own, it makes a big difference what you take as your benchmark. If you measure the work against local or contemporary standards, it’s a lot easier to be impressed (by others) or proud (of yourself). But if you’re a basketball player it’s sobering to compare your stats to those of Michael Jordan. A Man Booker Prize may be nice, but how does your novel stack up against Tolstoy? It’s great to have a thriving business, but how does yours compare to Richard Branson’s?

If those sound like unfair comparisons, what does that tell you about the assumptions you’re making? Or about the kind of ceiling you are placing on your ambition? What difference would it make if you challenged those assumptions, smashed the ceiling, and aimed higher?

Look at a piece of work that’s currently in vogue, and measure it against the very highest standards (including ‘greats’ from the past):

• Does it have the same ambition?
  
• The same technical demands?
  
• The same level of execution?
  
• Comparable originality?
  
• Similar impact?
  

Do the same with your own work from time to time.

33. Criteria i—What game are you playing?

One of my enduring memories of school is the outdoor playground—a huge tarmac space under a gunmetal sky, with pupils in black and gray uniforms running in all directions.

The only colors I remember are the criss-crossed markings for different sports—tennis, badminton, football (the soccer kind), basketball, netball—painted on the tarmac. They were all overlaid on top of each other, which would have been horrendously confusing, if they hadn’t been different colors—yellow for tennis, red for football, orange for basketball, and so on.

We didn’t give it a second thought at the time, but the first thing we had to do before we started playing was to adjust our vision to the markings of that particular game. Like a Magic Eye illusion, if you were playing football, those red lines had to pop out at you. Your ability to play to them was critical once the game started. It made all the difference to how hard you hit a pass, whether it was worth sprinting to keep the ball in play, and whether the goalie had handled the ball outside the area. Play to the wrong line for an instant and you could lose the game.

Even within the markings of individual sports there were variations, such as the different boundaries for singles and doubles tennis. In football, it was usually agreed that the goalkeeper wasn’t allowed to leave the penalty area—but were outfield players allowed to
enter
it? And were we playing the rule that meant attackers were only allowed to shoot once they had crossed a certain line? These questions had to be settled before the whistle blew to start the game.

Obviously there would have been chaos and arguments if one team started playing basketball while the other began playing football. The players would have had different goals in mind, and their strategies and tactics would have been completely out of sync. Fair play to one team would be an obvious foul to the other. If you’re going to play together, you need to agree on the rules of the game you’re playing.

This is blindingly obvious when it comes to sports. But in other spheres, it’s amazing how often human beings start collaborating, competing, and judging each other
without any clear agreement about exactly what game they are playing, what the rules are, and what success or failure looks like
. Everyone is playing a different game, so it’s no wonder there are arguments, disappointments, and recriminations.

Whenever you work on a project or compete for an opportunity, one of the first things you need to know is:
what are the criteria for success?

Criteria are like the markings on the playground—reference points that mark out the field of endeavor, indicating what is and isn’t acceptable, and how success is defined. They don’t predetermine the outcome, but they narrow the options.

Once you understand how criteria work, a lot of confusing and frustrating conversations will make more sense. And it will be a lot easier to understand and deal with the criticism that comes your way.

In poetry, for example, for the last hundred years or so there has been an ongoing debate about the merits of traditional verse forms (with regular meter, rhyme, and so on) versus ‘free verse’ (with no established patterns for such things). One well-known criticism of free verse is that it’s ‘like playing tennis with the net down,’ that is, too easy to be worth doing. On the other hand, some advocates of free verse describe formal verse as a ‘straitjacket’ that constricts poets’ freedom of expression.

With our ‘criteria goggles’ on, we can see that ‘difficulty’ is a positive criterion for some traditionalists, whereas ‘freedom’ is more appealing to those on the free verse side (as the name suggests). So it’s perfectly possible for two poetry enthusiasts to have a completely different assessment of the merits of a poet’s work, depending which side of the fence they are on.

Personally I enjoy both types, even if my own verse tends towards traditional forms. And it’s not just an academic distinction. If I’m in a workshop and someone criticizes my sonnet for using an ‘old-fashioned’ verse form, then I know they aren’t interested in the game I’m playing, and we’ll have to agree to disagree. But if they make suggestions about my handling of the form, and point out some ways I could improve on it, I’ll be interested in their critique.

Supposing Max, an engineer, goes for a job interview. Before the interview, he spends a lot of time boning up on his technical knowledge, anxious to demonstrate how much he knows. During the interview he talks at length about the technical parameters of a proposed project. In his enthusiasm he even contradicts one of the interviewers and argues that they are going about things the wrong way. He’s confident that he’s won the argument and demonstrates his expertise. But he doesn’t realize the interviewers are keen to recruit a team player with excellent communication skills, who will put colleagues and clients at ease. Knowledge is an important criterion for them, but (as they said in the job spec) “the successful candidate will also have excellent communication skills.”

So whether you’re talking about poetry, a job interview, or any other kind of performance, the key questions to answer right at the beginning are:

• What game are we playing?
  
• What are the rules and conventions?
  
• What are the criteria for success?
  

You should also ask these questions whenever you’re on the receiving end of criticism. Knowing the critic’s criteria will help you decide how relevant and useful it is and what to do with it.

Depending on the context, you can get the answers to these questions in several ways…

Sometimes the critic will spell out their criteria. They’ll say things like:

• “Needs to work on her technical skills.” (Criterion: technical ability.)
  
• “A promising plot, spoiled by wooden characterization and stilted dialogue.”
  
(Criteria: well-structured plot, convincing characterization and realistic dialogue.)

• “Great vision, but the numbers don’t add up.” (Criterion: value for money or profitability.)
  
• “The team was well-organized in defense, but they lacked the attacking flair to create opportunities.” (Criteria: organization; creativity.)
  

If you’re in communication with the critic, you can ask them or challenge them to spell out their criteria.

If they don’t spell them out, or if you don’t have the chance to ask, you may be able to reverse-engineer their criteria, by looking at the kind of work or people they have approved in the past.

If you are pushing the boundaries of conceptual art installations, and you receive a withering critique from a specialist in 18th century landscape paintings, you probably shouldn’t lose too much sleep. You may even take it as a compliment!

Once you’ve established a critic’s criteria, you know what game they are playing. But is that the game
you
want to play? Or are you trying to do something entirely different? Your answers will tell you a lot about the kind of opportunities you should pursue, and the kind of critics you should pay attention to along the way.

Your next steps:

1. Next time someone criticizes you or your work, start by trying to identify their criteria.

Do they spell the criteria out?
If so, go to step 3
.

Or is their criticism vague and general?
If so, clarify it at step 2
.

2. If they give you vague or general feedback, and you get the opportunity, ask for clarification:

• What specifically did you do or not do that led to their negative judgment?
  
• What specific behaviors were they looking for that you did not demonstrate?
  
• What specific characteristics of the work failed to meet their approval?
  

3. Once you understand their criteria, ask yourself whether you share them? Is this a game you want to play?

If so, the next chapter will help you get better at playing it.

If not and it’s FYI criticism: what kind of game do you want to play? Who is playing that game? Look for fellow performers as well as critics and gatekeepers who share your criteria, and look for opportunities to connect with them.

If not, and it’s action criticism, you need to negotiate with the critic—see
Chapter 37
.

34. Criteria ii—How good are you?

Once you find a game worth playing, you naturally want to become a better player. This is where understanding criteria can give you a competitive edge. When you know the critical factors in evaluating performance, you can use these as springboards for improvement.

Criteria are most useful when they help you formulate
specific, concrete examples of what ‘better’ looks like
. Otherwise it’s like playing on a pitch with no markings or goals, where you are more likely to succeed by luck than judgment.

Here are some suggestions on how to clarify your criteria for success, at
basic
,
intermediate,
and
advanced
levels.