Live to be criticized?

Here's an interesting bit from Seth Godin's latest book, Tribes. Tribes is a book on leadership, and on page 48, Seth says this:

"The lesson here is this: if I had written a boring book, there'd be no criticism. No conversation. The products and services that get talked about are the ones worth talking about....[ask yourself] 'If I get criticized for this, will I suffer any measurable impact? ....' If the only side effect of the criticism is that you will feel bad about the criticism, then you have to copare that bad feeling with the benefits you'll get from actually doing something worth doing....Feeling bad wears off."

If we spend our time worrying about what other people think about what we're doing, instead of doing what we're passionate about, we lose the chance (or at least delay the chance) to do something amazing. Write the novel of your heart (write it well, of course--we're not talking about the kind of criticism that comes with doing things poorly, I think), write an opera. Create art, poetry, an organization that feeds the hungry and clothes the poor. The people who 'get it' are the ones you want to have 'get it', but there won't be anything worth getting if you don't move.