Wu Zetian
How did the chancellor lose this man
Recruiting from the pamphlet attacking you
New Book of Tang, Biographies of Men of Letters
A document tearing you to pieces is put in front of you. This is about what she said at the cruellest line in it.
What actually happened?
Xu Jingye rose against her, and Luo Binwang wrote the proclamation: an attack running from her private life to her usurpation, in the most vicious terms available. She laughed her way through it. Then she came to the earth on the late emperor's grave is not yet dry, and where have you put the orphan entrusted to you — and stopped laughing, and asked who wrote this. Luo Binwang, they said. How did the chancellor come to lose this man? It was a document abusing her, and what she took from it was the writer.
Handle the content and the stance separately
A passage carries two things at once: what it says, and which side the speaker is on. Almost everyone rejects both the moment they feel the hostility. She assessed the quality first and dealt with the position second. That order decides how much you can learn from an opponent.
A competitor's public teardown of your product usually contains its real weaknesses. Refusing to read it because of the source throws away the most honest review you get.
The line that hurts most is the most accurate
Where she stopped was the one sentence in the whole piece she could not answer. An attacker looking to hurt you goes hunting for the truest thing available, so hostile text often carries more information per line than friendly feedback, which is padded with politeness.
The furious one-star review is usually far more specific than the five-star one. How uncomfortable something is to read often tracks how much it tells you.
She sent the blame back to her own system
Her response was not that the man was vile but that the chancellor had failed. The problem was assigned to her own machinery for finding talent. Few people manage this step: facing an able person who has gone to the other side, the first move is to audit yourself.
When a key person leaves for a competitor, asking why our own assessment never spotted them is more useful than discussing their ingratitude.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: someone is attacking you or your work, in public and hard.
Ask first: setting the stance aside, which sentence in it is hardest to refute?
Where it goes wrong: rejecting the whole thing because of who wrote it; treating talent going to a rival as their failing and never auditing your own machinery.
Lines to keep
The grave earth is not yet dry; where is the orphan entrusted?
The line you cannot answer is the one worth keeping.
Same situation, other people are asking
They tore into me in public. Do I even read it?Someone attacked me in public · all 1 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.