Matthew McConaughey has an Oscar, an estimated $200 million net worth and a hefty catalog of 20 years’ worth of reviews—good and bad. Despite his clear career success, he collated all the worst things ever written about him, went to the desert for a weekend, and read every one.
“I took them on as a thick book… not all the positive, the negative ones—and I sat with them,” McConaughey said in a recent interview with Build or Break.
“It’s all I took, and I spent two days looking at them, and it was hard.”
And he learned from the tough experience that there are two kinds of critics—and only one is worth listening to.
“Some of the reviews, what I learned is that, from the very first sentence, this person has it out for me. It didn’t matter if they saw the movie or not. They just don’t like me. They were going to write a negative review,” McConaughey explained.
Not every bad review was out to get him, though. Some were still critical, but actually useful.
“I was like, ‘This person got a point.’ They’re actually a fan of mine, and they didn’t get from my performance what I was actually hoping they would’ve got. Where did I fail in achievement?” That he says is constructive criticism.
“They were looking at the work and objectively criticizing it. Applauded some things, but also applauded some things that shined a light on where I came up short.”
His next question was simple: What can I learn from that?
“Some are going to write bad 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 what have you,” he added. “Some are really good critics or write constructively about what you did wrong—and you can learn from it.”
And it’s a lesson you can carry into every discipline. No matter how good you are, there’s always room to learn more. But first, you have to separate the feedback that’s real from the noise.
Taking criticism is even now a job interview test—and one CEO says candidates who ‘get offended’ aren’t a fit
McConaughey’s team told Fortune the trip to the West Texas desert near Marfa came around 2018 or 2019, while he was writing Greenlights. By then, he’d been in the business for more than two decades, since his 1993 breakout in Dazed and Confused, with major hits like Interstellar and True Detective already behind him.
And he’s hardly the only big name who keeps taking feedback on board.
Ozark actor Jason Bateman said in an interview with Esquire last year that he also reads all the reviews for his television shows and movies because they shape how he shows up for the people on the other side of the silver screen who are paying to see him play.
“I am doing these projects for public consumption, so it matters to me what the public thinks about them,” he said.
And at the top of the business world, there’s no resting on your laurels either.
Despite growing a $5.5 trillion company from the ground up, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is still hard on himself. After more than 3 decades of climbing to the top, he still works seven days a week and says he’s “always in a state of anxiety” that Nvidia could go under. “Nobody suffers better than I can,” Huang recently said in conversation with the Korea Society. “In order to do something incredible, you have to suffer. It’s not a walk in the park. If it’s a walk in the park, anybody could do it.”
He’s even admitted he’s “still working on being a good CEO.”
And he’s no softer on his staff. The billionaire boss says he criticizes everything they show him. “You can’t show me something without me giving you some criticism,” he told CNA.
Huang said he believes feedback works best when delivered immediately, and with improvement (not punishment) in mind.
“Just like a Taiwanese parent, once the feedback is given, you’re back to loving the person again,” Huang said. “And so, I’m always critical of everybody’s work so that I can help them be better.”
Ralph Lauren CEO Patrice Louvet doesn’t believe in sugar-coating feedback either. “Sometimes people need to be hit by a 2×4 across the forehead, because it doesn’t always register right,” he told LinkedIn’s This is Working podcast.
The French-born Fortune 500 exec said that addressing weaknesses sooner rather than later can help businesses—and careers—thrive.
One CEO thinks the ability to take feedback on board is so important that he’s testing for it in the interview room.
Gagan Biyani, the CEO of the education platform Maven and a cofounder of Udemy, has started giving candidates critiques live in the interview, sometimes in front of a full panel. He calls it the “most telling part” of the process, and it’s often what decides whether they get the job.
“If this is their nightmare, [the] candidate freezes up or even gets offended,” Biyani added it highlights straight away that they are ‘not a fit’ for the company. “If this is exciting, they are more likely to join.”