Or maybe you have tunnel vision and all you can hear is your parent screaming, “Get up! Shake it off!” Or maybe people have started booing and jeering. Maybe the crowd has gone silent, the way it does at football games or my daughter’s field hockey matches when the players on the field take a knee because someone is hurt. In Rising Strong, Brene Brown comments on Roosevelt’s speech, focusing on one particular part: “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.” She writes. So much advantage in life comes from being willing to look like an idiot over the short term. But given the choices, it’s obvious which is better.
Sure, it’s not always fun or comfortable. Choosing to run onto the field and play means we might look like a fool in front of thousands but offers us the chance to do something worthwhile. The cost of this comfort is that we never really do anything. We rarely look like a fool in the comfort of the masses. We can either sit in the stands with the crowd shouting at the people on the field doing the work, or we can jump down from the stand and onto the field. But as an adult, I know that’s not really what I want.Įvery day we make a choice. I grew up thinking that avoiding criticism was good. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat. It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better.
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