Criticism. Is it bad or a good thing?

Hey! Long time no see!

In the past few months, there has been so much going on in my environment: new connections, new opportunities, and so much more. Today, I want to write about criticism.

Last Friday I was at a big entrepreneurship festival. I was a participant in it and presented a solution to the commission, which had A LOT of criticism for us (which wasn't bad. It's just some good criticism). Me and my business partner didn't take it personally, but I saw other teams take it a bit too personally. Sometimes it seemed like they wanted to extract enthusiasm from you, but there's the catch!

Most of the time, commission gives you some good, awakening criticism, that SHOULD (even if it sounds the other way around) motivate you to make a better product and decisions. Every time someone gives you some criticism that could help you, you should write it down and then read it a few times, and then rate it. I don't mean just rate if it's good or bad sounding. Sometimes good criticism sounds awful. So, by rating, I mean by doing some research. For example: you make some app to help cyclist clubs with something and people say that other clubs have a better solution and your product isn't needed in the market. Okay, it sounds bad, it says that your product is bad (or not)! Let's look at it from a different perspective.

They say that your product isn't relevant and you're making some knockoff. You write it down and then start investigating. Maybe you skipped some steps when making a product and there are some scenarios now - your product is actually irrelevant; Your product needs some adjustments; the Person just talks about things that don't exist. Okay, so you do some research and indeed there's some product in the market already. At this point, you of course need to conduct market research better, but it's not about it. So, you should investigate this product, how maybe yours is different from it and what features this product lacks that you could add. You got some new ideas, which could make your solution better in the end and that awful-sounding criticism now made your product even better.

What I mean by this newsletter, is that there's always criticism and you shouldn't always take it personally. You need to look at it, not from a direct perspective. You need to look through a prism, where you can see not just bad things, but opportunities to get better.

It's a matter of attitude whether criticism will bring you down or just help you to reach even higher.

Hope my newsletter made you more keen on achieving your goals! Have a good day (or evening)!