Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Listening to haters
Dana White welcomes the haters. They lay out what they think is wrong with his business and how it falls short, and they keep him on his game. He knows what is real in their criticism and what is just noise.
Blocking the media
The people he blocks out are the media that cover his sport. Every one of them is out of his feed, because what he is thinking about and what comes next is something they could never know. The UFC has done things that were never done before, which is why it has never had real competitors.
Hardcore fans only
Anyone with a phone can call themselves an expert now, and he has no interest in hearing from people starting a podcast or a website about his business. Hardcore fans are who he wants to hear from, whether they hate the product or love it. After enough years, it is easy to tell who is who.
Does criticism actually improve performance?
A 1996 meta-analysis by Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi in Psychological Bulletin pooled 607 effect sizes from feedback studies. On average, feedback improved performance. In more than a third of the cases, though, it made performance worse. The effect depended on whether the feedback pointed at the task or at the person receiving it.
Why do critics' words stick so hard?
Psychologist Roy Baumeister and colleagues reviewed research across many areas in a 2001 paper in the Review of General Psychology titled Bad Is Stronger Than Good. They found that negative events, feedback, and information tend to have more impact than positive ones of equal size. The pattern appeared in areas as different as relationships, learning, and memory. The authors traced it to the survival value of noticing threats.
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