Stop Judging People’s Creative Achievements
By: Inti Tupac
Tags: Empathy, Arts And Entertainment, Life Lessons, Self-awareness, Self Improvement

Before you judge someone about their creative/athletics achievements, think for a moment how difficult is to do each of these things and what skills or knowledge they had to have to do what they did, to be where they are.

“Judging a person does not define who they are. It defines who you are.” -Wayne Dyer

The internet has built a whole race of life/sports/art judges who make their careers based on criticizing actresses, musicians, athletes, photographers, etc., without even having a small amount of consideration towards their efforts.

But is not only them but all of us also do, when we spread fiercely our dislike for something in a conversation or on social media.

I am here to present to you a different approach to this kind of situations.

The Empathy Exercise Model

Whenever you see or listen to something or someone you dislike (particularly in a creative or sports situation)and you are about to curse that person for doing whatever they did, or the way did it, remember the following example:

Situation: A top tier footballer has a bad performance.

You think: I am allowed to condemn them since they are playing in a top tier team and don’t deserve to be there if they are this bad.

Who you are: Are you a top tier footballer? probably not, because of MANY reasons.

Could I do it better? Probably not, because of MANY reasons.

What empathy will allow you to see: To be there, they had to at least sacrifice a few of the following things:

Time with friends and/or formal education to be able to go to practice(minimum since puberty)

Going to the pub as you and your friends do

Living away from their houses if they had to move to the club’s academy.

And the list goes on.

Other examples

If you don’t like football -or you still call it soccer- this concept is transferable to any sport or creative activity, let’s say music.

They had to at least work on their voice for several hours, or sit down to write lyrics for days, or learn keys and notes to build something that you -who are completely illiterate about music theory- would consider a bad song.

The same logic applies to actors, overcoming stage fright, learning how to convey feelings, memorizing crazy amount of lines.

Even those who are clearly hired for their bodies had to spend lots of time training and sacrifice god knows how many beers and fries to be there (makes me sad for them just thinking about those fries).

Note: I exclude politics because they actually work for you, and have to prove their worth.

The curious thing about this exercise is that even those hateful content creators that live off reacting ironically to an artist’s work had to spend some effort too.

Believe me, I tried YouTube and I can tell you it is hard to write, produce, edit and promote your channel day in and day out, week after week for years to build some following, so even they deserve to be cut some slack with empathy.

Channeling feelings

I am not saying you can’t dislike things, it is part of the human nature to do so, I am a suggesting a different way to channel those negative feelings into a positive mindset by doing the following:

Think of all that person had to go through to be where they are, reverse-engineer their effort, to lessen your emotions of hatred or inadequacy that you feel towards them.

Instead, use those feelings to understand why do you dislike that situation so much and what part of it affects you to that point of hatred.

For example, I highly dislike when lyrics are extremely rude just for the sake of it. Instead of throwing hatred on the artists, I turn the bad vibes into a self-awareness exercise, focusing on why I don´t like that kind of lyrics and what happened in my education to make me feel that way.

Sometimes it even triggers in me the curiosity to learn more about that person, or even better, sparks in me the idea of learning new skills from what I dislike.

Recently I started learning music theory(amongst other reasons) due to the realization that there needed to be some musical logic explanation to how J-Balvin could release hit after hit.

Would you be able to do it?

“Most people who are criticizing and judging haven’t even tried what you failed at.” -David Goggins

How can I criticize a movie if I haven’t written a screenplay in my life? How can I judge that rapper if I have never had the quality of thinking fast enough to rhyme those many words?

Don’t criticize people’s way of doing things if you can’t even do them yourself.

But even if you could do each and every one of these things, wouldn't it be better if we could live assuming good intentions and thinking positively?

I can’t think of anyone who does poor quality products on purpose.

To finish, as a general approach in life I recommend you to try to avoid sharing what you don’t like and instead, broadcast and recommend what you do enjoy and why.

Key Takeaways

Next time you experience something or someone you don’t like, ask yourself:

What are the things they had to sacrifice to be there?

Why does it make me feel that way?

What can I learn about and for myself out of this situation?

Be empathetic, it will change the way you see life.