Taking Criticism Effectively

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary.
It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body.
It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.”
~ Winston Churchill

Criticism is crucial for personal improvement. It’s the most direct way to find out what you should improve on. However, accepting criticism can be emotionally challenging. Afterall, we’re only human, who wants to hear bad stuff about ourselves?

It’s hard to not take it personally. Our instinctive reaction is to become defensive and we shut out potentially helpful and life-enhancing tips. By doing this, we miss out on what could supercharge our improvement.

So how can you take criticism without getting self-conscious and defensive?

Answer: An effective way to accept criticism is to externalize it.

When you externalize criticism, you escape the defensiveness trap. You stop being self-conscious and take criticism objectively, which lets you reap the benefits of the helpful tips that the criticism contains.

Dysfunctional Math

A defining characteristic of our age is the unusual math. Today's unprecedented numbers and figures are matched with graphs increasingly exponential in nature--especially the hyper-exponential, purely vertical Profusion Curve. What makes this disconcerting is that plotting the math into the future leads to dysfunction in nearly all directions. Simply stated, the math no longer works in a variety of critical settings.

This math problem arises inevitably from the process of progress. Progress always gives us more and more of everything faster and faster. In the past, when more is what we needed, it was glorious to receive such profusion almost automatically. Now, however, progress is mathematically uncontrollable and volatile. Modern progress has a math problem, and in many ways it will dominate our future. When history decided to explode, it chose to do so on our generational shift.

Following is a representative list to help illustrate this profound mathematical growth. It's important to realize that this is but a partial list and that any single number is not the problem. It's only when all the dots are connected through integration that the true picture of dysfunction comes into view.