Christopher Lochhead: evaluation

Transcript context

…The other thing I noticed as I was browsing your website, and it was hilarious because you have all these testimonials of your book and podcast and you have a lot of negative reviews, like "Off-putting, or, "Very disappointing," or, "Absolute crap." I'm curious why you chose to do that as your website testimonial wall. Well, and I believe, I'd have to check with Steve Osler, the founder and publisher of Podcast Magazine, but I believe I'm the only podcaster in history to run a full page ad in Podcast Magazine with just negative quotes in it. So a couple reasons. Number one, can we all just have a sense of humor about this stuff? So it's my way, and the name of our team, yet we're sort of a company, but we're more of a band, is Category Pirates. I mean, clearly if you're called Category Pirates, you're probably trying to have a little bit of fun with this stuff. And so part of it is just trying to have a sense of humor with people. The second piece of it is, for a lot of entrepreneurs, marketers, creators, innovators of any kind, we live in this fear that when we launch our thing, whatever our thing is, that we will be criticized by the world and that we will be made fun of. And if you've ever authored a book or done a podcast or done anything, built a product, a software product, built any kind of a product that you feel is part of you, and most innovators, creators, software developers, artists, of course entrepreneurs, feel that way because they put themselves into this stuff. And when somebody criticizes us, many of us are devastated. And I have been in the past too. I'm a person just like anybody else. And what I realized is, fuck them. Anybody who's trying to do anything exponential, anybody who's trying to break and take new ground, anybody who's trying to radically innovate, anybody who's trying to design and dominate new categories of the way we live, work and play, gets criticized. Picasso was called stupid. The Beatles were called terrible. Elvis was called terrible. I just wrote recently a little bit about hip-hop. I was listening to Rick Rubin on Barry Weiss's podcast, excellent episode. Excellent. She does a great job with him. And he was talking about how ridiculed hip-hop was in the beginning and it got banned. And it's the number one category of music in America today. Anyway, so that's also part of it, is to just sort of say, "Hey, look, this is some of the shit people have said about our work and my work, and I'm going to just put it on display, because this is going to happen to all of us." And then I guess, Lenny, the third reason is in the creator world, broadly, there's a lot of people who are breaking their arms patting themselves on the back. And look, I understand why we have to tell people about why they should pay attention to us, and so we use our credentials or our awards or our downloads or our books, I understand that, and I do a little bit of that too. However, come on, let's just not take ourselves so seriously. Amazing. I could definitely use more of that skill of not taking negative feedback as seriously. And I love the idea of just embracing it and showing people what people don't like.…

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