Michael Levin

That's an opportunity to hone your craft, to get better at what you're doing, to learn, to find your mistakes like that's great.

If they are telling you what you ought to be studying, how you ought to approach things, what is the right way to think about things?

You should probably ignore most of that.

And the reason I make that distinction is that a lot of really, really successful people are very well calibrated on their own ideas and their own field and their own sort of area.

And they know exactly what works and what doesn't and what's good and what's bad.

But they're not calibrated on your ideas.

And so the things they will say, oh, you know, this is a dumb idea, don't do this, and you shouldn't do that, that stuff is generally worse than useless.

It can be very demoralizing and really limiting.

And so...

so what i say to people is read very broadly work really hard know what you're talking about take all specific criticism as a as a um as an opportunity to improve what you're doing and then completely ignore everything else because i just tell you from like from from my own experience um most of what i consider to be interesting and useful things that we've done very smart people have said this is a terrible idea don't don't don't do that don't you know just um

Yeah, I think we just don't know.

We have no idea beyond our own, like at best, we know what we ought to be doing.

We very rarely know what anybody else should be doing.

Yeah.

You have to, and this is kind of hard to describe and fuzzy, but I'm a firm believer that you have to build up your own intuition.

Yeah.

So over time, right, you have to take your own risks that seem like they make sense to you and then learn from that and build up so that you can trust your own gut about what's a good idea, even when and then sometimes you'll make mistakes and they'll turn out to be a dead end.

And that's fine.

That's that's science.

But but, you know, what I tell my students is is life is hard and science is hard and you're going to sweat and bleed and everything.