Matthew McConaughey Spent a Weekend in the Desert Reading 20 Years of Bad Reviews: Some Were Right
Matthew McConaughey has an Oscar, an estimated net worth of $200 million, and an extensive 20-year catalog of reviews, both good and bad. Despite his obvious professional success, he collected all the worst things ever written about him, went to the desert for a weekend, and read them all.
“I took them like a big book… not all the positives, the negatives – and I sat down with them,” McConaughey said in a recent interview with the Build or Break podcast.
“That’s all I took, and I spent two days looking at them, and it was hard.”
And this difficult experience taught him that there are two types of criticism and only one is worth listening to.
“Some of the reviews, what I learned is, from the first sentence, this person is attacking me. It doesn’t matter if they’ve seen the movie or not. They just don’t like me. They were going to write a negative review,” McConaughey explained.
However, not all the bad reviews were meant to harm him. Some were still critical, but really useful.
“I was like, ‘This person is right.’ In fact, they are my fans and they didn’t get from my performance what I hoped they would get. Where did I fail in my success? This, according to him, is constructive criticism.
“They were reviewing the work and critiquing it objectively. They applauded some things, but they also applauded some things that highlighted my shortcomings.”
His next question was simple: what can I get from this?
“Some people will write bad things about you or wish you the worst no matter what, because they just don’t like you from afar, don’t like your success or whatever,” he added. “Some are very good critics or write constructively about your mistakes, and you can learn from them.”
And it’s a lesson you can apply across all disciplines. No matter how good you are, there is always room to learn more. But first, you need to separate real feedback from noise.
Taking criticism is still a job interview test today – and one CEO says candidates who ‘feel offended’ aren’t a good fit.
McConaughey’s team said Fortune the trip to the West Texas desert near Marfa took place around 2018 or 2019, while he was writing Green light. At that time, he had been in the industry for over two decades, since his breakthrough in 1993 in Dazed and confusedwith major successes like Interstellar And True Detective already behind him.
And he’s not the only big name who continues to take feedback.
Ozark actor Jason Bateman said in an interview with Squire This past year, he also reads all the reviews of his TV shows and movies, because they shape the way he presents himself to the people on the other side of the big screen who pay to see him perform.
“I make these projects for public consumption, so what the public thinks about them matters to me,” he said.
And at the top of the business world, you can’t rest on your laurels either.
Despite growing a $5.5 trillion company from scratch, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is still hard on himself. After more than three decades working his way up the ranks, he still works seven days a week and says he’s “still in a state of anxiety” that Nvidia could go under. “No one suffers as much as me,” Huang said recently in conversation with the Korean Society. “To do something incredible, you have to suffer. It’s not a walk in the park. If it’s a walk in the park, anyone can do it.”
He even admitted that he’s “still working to become a good CEO.”
And he is no gentler with his staff. The billionaire boss says he criticizes everything that is shown to him. “You can’t show me something without me criticizing you,” he told AIIC Correspondents Podcast.
Huang said he thinks feedback works best when it’s provided immediately and with improvement (not punishment) in mind.
“Just like a Taiwanese parent, once feedback is given, you start to like the person again,” Huang said. “And so, I always critique everyone’s work so that I can help them improve.”
Ralph Lauren CEO Patrice Louvet doesn’t believe in the sugar-coating comments either. “Sometimes people need to be hit with a two-by-four blow to the forehead because it doesn’t always register properly,” he told LinkedIn. It works podcast.
This French Fortune 500 executive said addressing weaknesses as early as possible can help businesses (and careers) thrive.
One CEO thinks the ability to take feedback is so important that he tests it in the interview room.
Gagan Biyani, CEO of education platform Maven and co-founder of Udemy, began giving live critiques to candidates during interviews, sometimes in front of a full panel. He calls this the “most revealing part” of the process, and it’s often what decides whether they get the job.
“If this is their nightmare, (the) candidate freezes, or even gets offended.” Biyani added that this immediately underlines that they are “not a good fit” for the company. “If it’s exciting, they’re more likely to join.” »
Gn entert
