How to Stop Caring What People Think

A comedian who has died on stage in eleven countries says the single most useful thing he ever learned was that an audience is not a jury. A jury decides what you are. An audience decides what it wants tonight, in this room, at this hour, after this much wine, and its verdict expires the moment the doors open. He spent four years treating every silence as a statement about his worth, and he says those four years contained no useful information at all — only pain that felt like feedback.

The turn came when he started recording sets and listening back the following week. What he had experienced as a devastating room reads, on tape, as a mild room. What he remembered as brutal heckling turns out to be one man saying something incoherent about a train. Memory, he found, does not store an audience's response; it stores your own fear with the audience's face painted on it. He now trusts the recording and not the feeling, and he says this one substitution did more than a decade of self-belief exercises.

His second observation is arithmetic. In a room of two hundred, perhaps six people have a strong opinion of him and roughly none will think about him tomorrow. This is not modesty; it is capacity. Everybody in that room is carrying their own evening — a diagnosis, a row in the car, a job they are worried about — and they simply do not have the surplus attention to convict a stranger. The vanity in caring what people think is the assumption that they are thinking.

Where he departs from the usual advice is that he does not believe you should stop caring altogether. A comic who genuinely does not care becomes unwatchable within a year: contemptuous, indulgent, playing to himself. Caring is the mechanism by which you stay in relationship with the people in front of you. The distinction he draws is between caring what people think and caring what people need — the first is about your standing, the second is about their evening, and only one of them makes the work better.

He has a practical filter for whose opinion enters. Three names, written down, revisited yearly. If a person is not on the list, their view is weather: real, worth noticing, not something to be argued with. The list is short because it has entry requirements — they must have seen you at your worst, they must want something for you rather than from you, and they must be willing to say the thing that costs them your goodwill. Most people who dominate our internal audience fail all three tests and were never even auditioned.

The last thing he says is the hardest. Almost everyone who wants to stop caring what people think actually wants a guarantee of being liked, delivered in advance, so they can proceed without risk. That is not available and never has been. What is available is a smaller, stranger freedom: doing the work, being disliked by some proportion of the room, surviving it, and discovering — usually with mild disappointment — that the catastrophe you organised your whole personality to avoid takes about ninety seconds to get over.