How to Be Wrong in Public
The skill nobody teaches you (and why most creators never learn it)
Someone told me my work was worse than the last thing I’d made. They asked if I’d let an AI write it.
They were right.
Not about the AI—but about the quality. I’d deviated from my instincts, tried to replicate something that had worked instead of trusting the new direction, and produced something that read as hollow. A stranger on the internet saw it immediately. And instead of defending myself, I thanked them for holding me to a higher standard.
This is not a story about how gracious and evolved I am. This is a story about a skill I’ve had to learn the hard way: how to receive criticism without either crumbling or calcifying.
Most creators never learn this. They fall into one of two failure modes:
Crumbling: Every negative comment is devastating. You internalize criticism as proof of your fundamental inadequacy. You stop sharing work, or you share it only in spaces where praise is guaranteed and challenge is forbidden.
Calcifying: Every negative comment is dismissed as jealousy, trolling, or bad faith. You build elaborate frameworks to explain why no criticism could ever be valid. You stop learning because you’ve made yourself immune to feedback.
Both are responses to the same fear. One surrenders to it. One builds a fortress against it. Neither produces work that survives contact with the world.
Here’s the thing: the ability to distinguish signal from noise isn’t inherited. It’s learned. And if you want to make things that matter, you have to learn it—because the alternative is staying exactly as skilled as you are right now, forever.
What Receiving Criticism Actually Looks Like
Let me be specific about what happened.
I’d written something I was proud of. It landed well—people responded, the engagement was strong, the muse had been with me. So when I had the opportunity to write a follow-up, I thought I knew what I was doing.
I didn’t trust my gut. Friends had encouraged a particular direction, and instead of following my own instincts toward something new, I tried to reverse-engineer what had worked the first time. The result was competent. It was also hollow. I could feel it while writing, but I pushed through anyway.
Then a commenter showed up and said, plainly: Is this the version AI wrote for you, and the other one is the version you wrote yourself? The other one is better than this.
Here’s what that felt like: a punch to the chest. Oooof.
The instinct—immediate, visceral—was to defend. To explain context. To point out that they didn’t understand the constraints, the encouragement I’d received, the reasons I’d made those choices.
But I didn’t. Because underneath the sting, I recognized something: they were pointing at something I already knew.
I’d had doubts. I’d felt the hollowness while writing. I’d pushed through anyway because I wanted to deliver, because people were waiting, because I didn’t want to admit the new direction wasn’t working. The commenter didn’t create my doubt—they confirmed it.
So I said: You’re right. The first one was where my heart was. I wasn’t as proud of this one but I was encouraged to go a direction that didn’t fit, and I should have trusted my gut. Thanks for the feedback—and for holding me to a higher standard.
That’s it. No groveling. No self-flagellation. No defensive explanations. Just: you identified something real, I already suspected it, thank you for saying it out loud.
What I didn’t do:
Pretend it didn’t sting (it did)
Defend the work I knew was weaker
Dismiss them as a hater or a troll
Demand they provide “constructive” alternatives
Explain why their opinion was invalid
What I did:
Sat with the discomfort long enough to ask: is there signal here?
Recognized that the answer was yes
Responded to the signal, not the sting
The commenter wasn’t being kind. They weren’t offering a critique sandwich or softening the blow. They just said what they saw. And because I’d separated the message from the delivery, I could hear what they were actually telling me: you’re capable of better, and this wasn’t it.
That’s information. That’s useful. That’s the kind of feedback that makes you better if you let it—and makes you brittle if you don’t.
When 'Protecting Yourself' Becomes a Trap
Recently I watched a comment thread unfold that crystallized everything wrong with how creators handle criticism.
Someone had left a negative comment on a post. Not a detailed critique—just a blunt statement of discontent. I don’t like this. I’m tired of this type of content.
The responses were immediate and predictable:
“I’m tired of people who have nothing better to do than troll the comment section and share their unsolicited negative opinions.”
“Unless you know this critic personally and know exactly what his intentions were—maybe there’s deeper intentions less ethical, like ‘I’m tired of other people having the success I’m dreaming about.’ Jealousy comes in many forms, always disguised as innocent honest criticism.”
Here’s the problem with that second response: it’s unfalsifiable.
If any critique can be dismissed as hidden jealousy, then no feedback is ever actionable and no one learns anything. That’s not wisdom—it’s a defense mechanism dressed as insight. It’s building a fortress where criticism can never reach you, and then mistaking that fortress for strength.
I pushed back. I pointed out that the original commenter wasn’t a troll—a troll is a storm with no purpose, just mindless destruction. A critic, even a blunt one, is more like a lookout’s cry in thick fog: “Breakers ahead!” The sound is jarring. It’s not what you want to hear. It means the chart you’re sailing by might be wrong. But that voice isn’t a troll. It’s information.
The response I got back? More fortress-building. More insistence that negativity itself is the problem, that creators shouldn’t have to hear things that make them uncomfortable, that the mere act of disliking something publicly is a form of harassment.
And here’s what I said, which I stand by:
Sometimes consumers don’t owe creators constructive effort. Sometimes “I don’t like this” is actually enough. Expecting consumers to articulate how you can do a better job isn’t really their job. They’re telling you their experience. What you do with that information is up to you.
I’m not saying every criticism needs to be actioned. I’m saying it shouldn’t be taken personally—and I know that’s hard for some people. But once you can separate your worth as a creator from feedback that doesn’t make you sing, you’ve developed an invaluable filtering skill that will ultimately always serve to improve your work.
The alternative is grim: creators who can only tolerate glowing praise signal to everyone watching that they’re never going to take anything seriously except validation. They will never make work that challenges anyone—including themselves.
The Jealousy Defense: Why It Feels Like Wisdom but Functions as a Cage
Let me be direct about the “jealousy” framework, because it’s seductive and it’s poison.
The logic goes like this: anyone who criticizes your work is secretly envious of your success. Their negativity is really about their own inadequacy, their own unfulfilled ambitions, their own bitterness at watching you thrive. Therefore, you can safely dismiss anything they say.
This feels like wisdom because it contains a grain of truth. Some critics are motivated by jealousy. Some negative comments are bad faith. The internet is full of people who tear down what they can’t build.
But here’s the trap: if you adopt this framework completely, you’ve made yourself unteachable.
You’ve constructed a mental model where:
Positive feedback = valid, accurate, trustworthy
Negative feedback = jealousy, trolling, bad faith
This isn’t discernment. It’s a filter that only lets through what you already want to hear. And the scariest part? You’ll never know what you’re missing. You’ll never know which piece of criticism contained the insight that could have leveled you up, because you dismissed it before it could land.
I remember this argument. I remember it from the playground.
“You’re just jealous!” is what children say when they haven’t yet developed the cognitive tools to evaluate criticism. It’s a defense mechanism for brains still forming self-identity, still learning how to filter signal from noise. Kids say it because they genuinely can’t distinguish between “this person is being mean” and “this person is pointing at something real.” They lack the developmental architecture to separate their ego from their output.
So when a man twice my age deployed this exact framework—on a months-dead comment thread, on an obscure Substack peddling generic “how to make money selling advice” advice that clearly no one was reading for the actual content—I’ll admit I was genuinely perplexed. Not offended. Perplexed.
This is a grown adult. Someone who presumably has decades of life experience, professional setbacks, creative failures, and hard-won lessons behind him. And his response to the mildest criticism was indistinguishable from a seven-year-old on a swing set.
That’s not wisdom accumulated over a lifetime. That’s arrested development preserved in amber. Somewhere along the way, he stopped learning—and he built a framework to ensure he’d never have to start again.
Signal vs. Noise: What Filtering Actually Looks Like
So if calcifying is wrong, and crumbling is wrong, what’s the actual skill?
Filtering is not the same as immunizing.
Filtering means: I receive the feedback. I feel whatever I feel about it. And then I ask a single question: Is there signal here?
Not “do I like hearing this.” Not “was this delivered kindly.” Not “does this person have the credentials to criticize me.” Just: Is there signal here?
Sometimes the answer is no. Sometimes someone is genuinely just being an asshole, or projecting their own frustrations, or fundamentally misunderstanding what you’re trying to do. In those cases, you note it and move on. You don’t need to respond. You don’t need to defend. You just... let it pass.
But sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes the rudest, bluntest, least constructive comment is pointing at something real. And if you’ve built a fortress against all negativity, you’ll never know. You’ll dismiss the signal along with the noise and wonder why your work never improves.
The skill is learning to sit in the discomfort long enough to evaluate honestly. It’s developing the ability to ask “is this true?” before you ask “do I like this?” It’s recognizing that your emotional response to criticism is not the same as the criticism’s validity.
That skill is learned, not inherited. And the only way to learn it is by practicing—by receiving criticism, feeling the sting, and choosing to evaluate before you react.
The Skill Nobody Teaches You
Here’s the principle: criticism arrives as feeling before it arrives as information.
The sting comes first. Always. You cannot skip it, suppress it, or pretend your way around it. Someone says your work is worse than last time, or that they’re tired of what you’re making, or that you’ve lost whatever spark you used to have—and it lands in your chest before it lands in your brain.
That’s fine. That’s human. The skill isn’t eliminating the feeling.
The skill is creating a delay between the sting and your response. Long enough to ask: Is there signal here? Long enough to separate the messenger from the message. Long enough to recognize when your gut already knew what the critic is telling you.
This is what you can practice:
Receive the hit. Don’t pretend it doesn’t sting. That’s dishonest and it doesn’t work anyway.
Wait. Not forever. Just long enough to ask one question.
Ask: Is there signal here? Not “do I like hearing this?” Not “was this delivered with appropriate kindness?” Just: is this pointing at something real?
Respond to the signal, ignore the noise. If there’s signal, acknowledge it—to yourself, and if appropriate, to the critic. If there’s no signal, let it pass. You don’t need to defend. You don’t need to explain. You just move on.
That’s it. That’s the whole skill. It sounds simple because it is simple. It’s just not easy.
The people who never learn this—who crumble at every critique or calcify against all feedback—will plateau. They’ll make the same mistakes forever because they’ve closed off the only channel through which improvement arrives. They’ll mistake their fragility for sensitivity, or their fortress for strength, and they’ll never understand why their work stops resonating.
The people who do learn it will keep getting better. Not because criticism feels good—it never does—but because they’ve learned to extract value from discomfort. They’ve learned that the chart they’re sailing by might be wrong, and that the lookout’s cry is information, not attack.
The soul of your work becomes incandescent the more you value it. And part of valuing it is being willing to hear when it’s not working—even when that hearing comes from a stranger with no obligation to be kind.
Maybe this is an ideology. But it’s definitely a pattern I’ve recognized: creators who can take the most scathing criticism and actually turn their own work over in their head, deciding whether it’s valuable without becoming defensive or instantly dismissive, are the ones who create things that worm into people’s heads and get repeated and shared for the right reasons.
The skill is learned, not inherited.
Start practicing.
If you want more craft breakdowns and hard-won lessons from the creative trenches, subscribe. I post every other Tuesday or more.
Fair winds,
—D. S. Black
P.S. If you found this useful, you might also like my breakdown of why compelling beats likeable in character design, or my essay on the psychological labor of writing complex antagonists.
