Why You Should Love Your Critics

I grew up as “the fat kid.” I’m sure some people saw me as more than that (like my mom), but that’s how I saw myself. From the time I was 8 years old until my senior year in high school I was obese. I’ve had my share of tough moments in my life, but growing up fat was the most difficult—hands down. It’s something I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Every day I would dread going to school knowing that it was only a matter of time before one of my adorable schoolmates referred to me as fat boy, tub o’ lard, porky pig, or the ever popular “fat ass.”

Though I’m not completely sure why I started to gain weight at age 8, it just happened to coincide with my alcoholic father having an affair, and my parent’s subsequent divorce. It doesn’t take a clinical psychologist to piece together what was going on with me at the time: fear of abandonment, instability, breakdown of the family unit, comfort through eating, yada yada--you get the picture. My mom was also forced to work two jobs to support my older sister and I, so I was like a fat McCauley Culkin. Home alone and eating everything in sight.

The first thing that being an obese child does, aside from obliterating your self esteem, is that it gives you an intense fear of criticism. You sort of feel like an open wound walking around just waiting for someone to come up and dump more salt on you. The reason that an eating addiction can be more difficult to deal with than other addictions (like drinking, smoking, gambling, drugs) is because it’s the one addiction that you can’t hide. You could have a severe drinking problem, but if you’re just stopping by Super Fresh for groceries, who would know? To the contrary, everyone knows when you have an eating problem. No matter how many times you’ve fantasized about it, you can’t escape your own body.


From an early age I tried to avoid criticism at all costs, and while it was impossible to avoid completely, I did develop numerous strategies to dodge the barrage of insults. Taking a page from the “if you can’t beat em, join em” book, I started to deflect some of their taunts by picking fun at myself before they would have a chance to. This diffused most of the negative energy directed my way, and took some of their fun out of teasing me, but it did nothing for my own self-esteem. It’s one thing to let people insult you, but believing what they say and reaffirming it yourself over and over again is like carving your fate in stone. Sooner or later we all become exactly what we think we are.

Fortunately for me, I lost a lot of weight between my junior and senior years in high school. This greatly improved my self-esteem, but a lot of damage had been done. I still found it difficult to speak my mind for fear of “rocking the boat,” and I tried to avoid situations that caused conflict. At the same time, I had the growing urge to be a singer, songwriter, and performer. As I’m sure you can imagine, this is the wrong field to go into if you are afraid of criticism. In fact, you have to be prepared to take much more than the average person, because wherever there is art, there are critics. Ultimately, criticism will play a huge role in determining your level of success; though it is not the criticism itself but how you choose to process it that becomes the determining factor.



The first year or two in Laughing Colors (my rock band) were sort of a drunken bliss for me. We played a few times a week, surrounded by a group of friends who always told us how great we were--insulated from the opinion of the masses. As we grew in popularity I noticed a strange thing starting to occur: the more people liked us, the more people thought we sucked. How could this be? In my mind we kept getting better and better, and the crowds that came to see us were growing exponentially—so where was this hostility coming from? This was one of my first lessons on criticism: the level of criticism you are experiencing is usually in direct proportion to the amount of success you’re enjoying. Of course there are exceptions, but I’ve seen this little formula work in my life time and time again, and I’ve come to view the periods where I’m receiving very little criticism as a clue that I must not be accomplishing very much.


Don’t misunderstand me. This doesn’t mean that it’s time to saddle up and head out to intentionally piss people off. I still prefer to avoid conflict. I’ve just learned that criticism is a natural bi-product of progress and success, and that when someone says “you’re wrong” or “you suck” then I’m usually on the right track.
Think about it, you don’t need to be a controversial person to attract criticism, all you have to do is open your mouth and speak your mind. If you told a crowd of 100 randomly selected people your inner most thoughts on politics, religion, and the world in general, I bet 75 of them would think you were a complete idiot. You’d be lucky if you got 50 of them to agree with you on any one topic. That’s how much opinions vary, and that’s how easy it is to draw criticism. So the first step to overcoming your fear of criticism is: share your opinion, take some criticism, shake it off and move on. See? That didn’t hurt too much, did it?






I am by no means immune to criticism, nor am I immune to fear. I just don’t let them stop me in my tracks the way I used to. I can still vividly remember Laughing Colors first in-print album review. It was for our second album “What’s So Funny?”, and it was reviewed by the only Maryland music magazine worth reading--Music Monthly. They called us up to let us know it was going to be reviewed in the new issue, so as soon as it came out we ran out to the nearest news stand to see what kind of awesome things they wrote about us. All of my friends from high school thought we were the shit, so conquering the rest of the world was a mere formality, right? Bwahahahahahaha!!!


I’m sure I’ve probably given it away at this point, but our album, our precious new baby, got a scathing review in Music Monthly. I specifically remember them saying that the full length LP had enough decent songs to make “a good EP,” but no more than that. They called some of the songwriting “immature” and said that the entire album was “disjointed” and “directionless.” I was devastated. Not “tragedy in the family” devastated, but definitely in the “my hot girlfriend slept with another guy” range. I mean, who did these people think they were—Rolling f-ing Stone?!!! What right did they have to tell us that our album was “disjointed!?” (Probably the same right they had to tell us we were going to be the next Pearl Jam--which we would have agreed with enthusiastically while calling them geniuses.)


The rest of the band was not happy, but I was fuming. I thought about writing Music Monthly a nasty letter and letting them know exactly how I felt. After careful consideration I determined that writing them a letter would be stupid and petty. Then I got another bright idea: I would write it under an assumed name so they wouldn’t know it was from me! As if that was somehow less stupid and petty. Luckily my reasonable mind prevailed for the time being and I opted not to write them. But I knew the guy who wrote the review, and God help him if he ever showed up to another Laughing Colors show.


I imagined myself up onstage at Hammerjacks in front of a capacity crowd, when I spot him sauntering in through the front door through a haze of cigarette smoke and bobbing mullets. With a sharp wave of my hand the band stops playing on a dime, and the crowd who was just jamming along seconds earlier turns and looks in his direction, as complete silence befalls the room. “Seize him!” I yell while pointing directly at him, and he turns to run out of the club with urine cascading down the front of his stone washed jeans. The mob, who are now somehow equipped with torches, chase him into the parking lot like he’s the Hunchback of Notre Dame, until finally he succumbs to the angry throng. “Who’s disjointed now?” I cackle under my breath.




Fortunately this remained a fantasy. Time went by, and as the sting of being lauded by Music Monthly gradually subsided I learned some great lessons from that review. James Davies (better known as Jimi Haha, the lead singer of Jimmie’s Chicken Shack) was very helpful in his advice by reminding me of the quotation of one Andy Warhol, who said “I don’t read my press, I weigh it.” For an artist this is key. Bad press is one thing, but the death knell is to not be talked about at all. It should be noted that Jimmie’s Chicken Shack received a glowing review of their debut album “Chicken Scratch” in the same issue of Music Monthly. Instead of letting that bother me, I decided that a healthy level of jealousy is great inspiration. I’ve told Jimi on more than one occasion that they made us a much better band by setting the bar higher than we would have done ourselves.


As a band, we didn’t say much about the review to each other, we just went back to work. We were young and hungry and still growing as musicians and songwriters. I remember reading the review over again some months later, but this time from a different perspective. The knee jerk reaction is to get defensive when someone criticizes you, but if you can come from a place of peace and strength and not take it too personally, you might find some golden nuggets of advice. Maybe Music Monthly had some good points? Maybe we needed to mature as songwriters and define our sound and direction. This was about the time that our new drummer, and my hero, Will Dorsey joined the band. Finally Laughing Colors had “a sound,” and everything started to click for us after that.


When we released our next EP “Depth,” Music Monthly loved it--and they gave us an even better review for our follow up LP “The Pattern Seed.” We got a lot more great press from these albums, and to my knowledge, never received a poor review for either one. In retrospect, I look at that first Music Monthly review as very honest and pretty accurate. I don’t think we were so influenced by that one review that it changed how we played, but we definitely took some of the key points to heart. If you try, you can turn almost any criticism into good advice--just rephrase it. If someone calls you immature, maybe it’s time to work on you maturity. If someone calls you directionless, maybe it’s time to get some direction. If the criticism doesn’t fit you, then forget it and move on. Usually criticism stings the most when you know deep down that it’s true. If it’s not, why worry about it?










Today I have learned that any worthwhile undertaking will draw criticism. There’s just no way to avoid it. It would be like going surfing and trying to avoid the waves. Your only choice is to learn how to surf. I’ve also come to see criticism as a sign that good things are on the way—you can’t have spring without the pollen. Sure, it would be great if the whole world loved what we did, said, wrote and sang—but that’s just not possible. As long as I am getting a favorable review from the only critic that really matters (me), then I am no longer “directionless.” Learn to love, embrace, and even thank your critics. They are the first sign of your success.