On Brené Brown, Theodore Roosevelt, and why the critic's voice doesn't count.
I've been sitting with something Brené Brown talks about in her work on vulnerability and courage — specifically, the moment she discovered a Theodore Roosevelt quote that, by her own account, changed her life.
The quote is from Roosevelt's 1910 speech "Citizenship in a Republic," and it reads, in part:
"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 them better. 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... and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly."
— Theodore Roosevelt, "Citizenship in a Republic," 1910. Featured prominently in Brené Brown's Daring Greatly (2012) and her conversations with Oprah Winfrey.
Brown has built much of her research around what this quote points to: that vulnerability — the willingness to be seen, to try, to possibly fail publicly — is not weakness. It is, in fact, the whole game. And the people in the cheap seats, the ones offering criticism from a position of perfect safety, have forfeited their right to define what counts as success or failure for those who are actually in it.
This is worth sitting with if you're someone who creates, who leads, who tries things that might not work. The internal critic — the one that sounds suspiciously like every external voice that ever told you to be careful — is occupying the cheap seats. It has never been in the arena. It doesn't know what it costs to show up.
Brown puts it plainly in her own words: you can have courage or you can have comfort, but you cannot have both. The arena is uncomfortable by design. The dust and the sweat and the blood aren't signs that something is going wrong. They're proof that you're in it.
That's the only place anything real gets made.
References: Oprah.com — Brené Brown interviewed by Oprah: Daring Greatly · Brené Brown, Daring Greatly (Avery, 2012) · Theodore Roosevelt, "Citizenship in a Republic" speech, Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910.