As someone who used to avidly read and devour these personal development sites/books to "better myself", it took me a few years and occasional personal disappointment to realize that the only thing you need is to do the best you can each day and you'll learn all these lessons on your own. You improve because you're doing your best, and you accept yourself because you know you did the best you could at the time (even if that was failing).
No amount of reading and thinking about becoming better will teach you these self-development lessons, only by DOING and FAILING will you learn.
So if you're an entrepreneur that feels you have a laundry list of weaknesses to improve upon (as I did), mentally tear it up, focus on your strengths and just do the best you can each day. There's no problem getting some occassional guidance to work on an identified weakness, but following these sites that love to churn out self-improvement articles only wastes time you could be doing and learning.
I think the list of weaknesses serves a purpose. It makes one pay more attention to improvement in those areas. If one ONLY focuses on strengths, weaknesses can be ignored, leading to less improvement.
Praise of my site makes my day, and any random troll's "you are teh sux" crushes me. I'm working on getting a thicker skin, but it's hard.
The advice in the article is pretty good, though, and it highlights the main issue that negative criticism usually contains the most helpful information.
Praise keeps you going, while criticism keeps you on the right track.
The important differentiator is this: why are you so reliant on the opinions of others to keep afloat?
This was a problem I had for a long time. A part of it, I think, was that I didn't really feel like I was contributing anything new - and, in fact, I wasn't. Once I started pruning myself, revising things, focusing on really creating meaningful stuff, then I found that I didn't care so much about comments: I started to make things for the sake of those things rather than for personal vanity.
I think that's a big part of things too. Criticism can get you on the right track. Once you're there, if you don't leave the track criticism stops mattering. I don't know if it's a matter of thick skin - I'm a fairly sensitive person in many ways. It's more a matter of your realizing that some critics are wrong, and ignoring them to continue what you do best.
Sometime back I read that MBA students in HongKong were told to go to the nearest street corner and beg alms from the pedestrians for 1 hour. To develop thick skin among students this seems a ingenious way to include in their curriculum.
No amount of reading and thinking about becoming better will teach you these self-development lessons, only by DOING and FAILING will you learn.
So if you're an entrepreneur that feels you have a laundry list of weaknesses to improve upon (as I did), mentally tear it up, focus on your strengths and just do the best you can each day. There's no problem getting some occassional guidance to work on an identified weakness, but following these sites that love to churn out self-improvement articles only wastes time you could be doing and learning.