Quick note before the idea: my conversation with Aaron Stupple went up on RareErth Podcast today, and this newsletter is the first place I’m mentioning it. Nothing on social yet. You’re hearing it here first because that’s the order it should go in.
Now, the idea.
When Aaron’s book, The Sovereign Child, came out, the reviews got brutal. One was literally titled “why I hated this book so much.”
Most authors go quiet at that point, or get defensive.
Aaron did neither.
He went online and answered his critics, one by one, calmly.
I asked him where that comes from, and his answer rearranged how I think about criticism.
Your critics are doing work for you. For free.
Think about what a critic actually is: someone spending their own time and energy hunting for the flaw in your thing.
That’s a service.
You’d pay a consultant good money for exactly that. The critic does it for the price of their own irritation.
There’s a theory of how knowledge grows, from the philosopher Karl Popper, and it runs on the same engine as evolution.
A giraffe doesn’t decide to grow a longer neck. There’s random variation, and the environment picks the winners. The necks that reach the leaves stick around.
Knowledge works the same way. You make a guess (Popper called it a conjecture). Reality shoots down the bad ones (he called that refutation). Whatever survives, you keep, until something sharper comes along and kills that too.
So criticism isn’t the enemy of your idea.
Criticism is the selection pressure.
It’s what makes an idea stronger, or puts the weak version out of its misery.
Aaron told me The Sovereign Child basically got written by arguing with strangers on an app. The same argument, over and over, with a new twist each time. By the end, he had the whole thing worked out. His critics co-wrote the book. They just never sent an invoice.
Now I owe you some honesty. Earlier this year I wrote the exact opposite of this piece. “Your Smart Friends Are Killing Your Best Ideas.” I still believe every word of it. The difference is timing.
A brand-new idea is a butterfly.
Fragile, barely flying.
You don’t hand a butterfly to the wolves; you protect it.
But a finished idea, one you’ve shipped, published, put your name on, wants the opposite. Throw that one to the wolves and let them find what’s weak.
Shield the butterfly. Feed the wolves.
Next time someone comes at your work, snarky, rude, unfair, try the reframe before the flinch. Somewhere in that mess is a free consultant.
My full conversation with Aaron Stupple, doctor, father of five, and author of The Sovereign Child (written with Logan Chipkin), is live now on RareErth.
Listen here: A Doctor, Five Kids, and No Rules: What Critical Rationalism Does to a Household
That’s it for this week.
Manoj
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