Emily Oster on being wrong and changing your mind

So do you think, if you have a thick skin, do you think you always had that or is it something you acquired over time? Maybe talk to me about the first time you ever got, or the first time you remember, or you ever got criticized in a really public way.

Was your reaction to it different than what it would be now?

Many things in this, but I think probably the first really public thing was in my first book.

Expecting Better.

In Expecting Better, which is about pregnancy, and I talked about drinking during pregnancy, and I went through data and et cetera.

Some people were very upset about that.

Yes.

And that was kind of the first time I really had a lot of incoming that was very – And it was hard.

It was much harder than it is now.

And I have sort of over time kind of figured out both for my own emotional stability but also in terms of like how – just thinking about how to adapt to that kind of criticism and thinking about which are the pieces, again, that you should take and which are the pieces that you should not.

But I'm like totally different in how I react to this than I once did.

And what do

you – I mean – I definitely agree.

I mean, I've been criticized a bit myself and you do get used to, but there's a question there, which is like, are you just, what you said, like, how do you get something out of it? So you could, there's kind of a balance, right? You have to, thick skin doesn't always mean ignore everything.

It means take in what you need and discard what you don't.

So how do you, how did you develop that? Like, did you do it consciously? Did it just happen over time?

Let me sort of separate.

I think there's two pieces of this.

One is the piece of like when people are yelling at you, how do you not feel bad? How do you not like just spend all the day being like, oh, my God, I feel like garbage.

Why is everyone yelling at me? And I think that is a very – like that is just practice.

Like it's just practice, practice, practice and realizing, OK, they're going to forget this tomorrow.

Like this is going to come up again.

Like I'm just going to let it go.

And then there's the second piece, which is how do I take from this noise the right signal? And that is something I have worked more consciously on how do I, what are the things I need to put in place so I can understand when we need to, when I need to say something different, when I need to edit something and when I can sort of let it go.

And so that's much more of a skill.