The Man Outside the Arena

The view from the cheap seats

One of the best written bits of prose people have the fortune to stumble upon is Teddy Roosevelt’s Citizenship in a Republic speech, originally rendered to an audience in Sorbonne, France. It is better known as The Man in the Arena speech, taken from its most famous excerpt:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Most people, cognizant of this speech or not, live by this sentiment. It is the easiest thing in the world to criticize, to give an opinion, to express a thought. For many endeavors, a moment of self doubt or a decision made in fear can be the difference between success and failure. It makes all the sense in the world, then, to ignore the noise from the cheap seats, from people who have no skin in the game and whose identities are effectively anonymous.

Ask a million different people what will happen in the future and you’ll get a million different opinions. A few of them are bound to be right. Once the endeavor is done, those who predicted correctly will bray and beam, while those who were wrong will fade into the shadows, silent until the time comes when one of their opinions comes due. It is insufferable when people criticize with the benefit of hindsight. But it is much more shameful to opine beforehand and become invisible once proven wrong. In sports, there’s a well known saying: the apology needs to be as loud as the disrespect. It rarely is.

It’s Hard to Give Good Advice

I once wrote a post about how to give good advice. I spent ~1700 words saying something to the effect of “to actually give good advice that is followed by the intended recipient of that advice is extremely rare and dependent on a lot of factors that are largely out of your control”. Many of those factors are directly related to the principles outlined in The Man in the Arena. Namely, who are you to give me advice?

Non-rich people will sneer at rich people giving financial advice. Chronically single people will sneer at attractive people when they give dating advice. Really, if we’re being honest, people will just sneer at other people giving advice. This is a common pattern that I’ve noticed on the internet:

1. An undesirable situation exists

2. A person gives advice on how to improve that situation.

3. Another person says this advice won’t work for a certain segment of the population and therefore this advice is bad.

People criticizing advice can be exceptionally pedantic. The advice must be 100% applicable in 100% of situations for 100% of people in order to be good advice. The result is either extremely generic advice that isn’t tailored for any one person and therefore platitudinous, or good advice that is specific to a certain situation isn’t rendered because people don’t like dealing with nitpickers who are more concerned with finding the one situation in which the advice isn’t applicable rather than contributing something meaningful.

And even if you do give genuinely good advice, there’s a very good chance it gets ignored because you’re not the right person to give the advice. An ugly person does not want advice from an attractive person about dating. A poor person does not want advice from a rich person about money. A fat person does not want advice from a fit person about dieting. Even if the advice given is valid and specific to their circumstances.

Oftentimes, the person receiving advice needs to know that the person giving advice understands and has been in the situation the advisee is in. Because it just feels terrible when you’re accepting advice or help from somebody “above” you. People will go through impressive lengths to ignore or deride good advice given from an unacceptable advice giver. And the list of unacceptable advice givers is exponentially longer than the list of acceptable advice givers.

Taking Good Advice is a Skill

There’s a lot of good advice out there. Advice that, if you act upon it, will improve your life for the better. There’s a lot of good advice that people already know that will improve their lives that they simply have not acted upon. Whether it’s inertia, fear of the unknown (or failure, or of putting in a lot of effort for not a lot of reward), or whatever it is, the fact of the matter is we’re leaving a lot on the table when it comes to bettering our lives.

You already know some of the platitudes. Save and invest money (the sooner the better, the more consistently the better). Eat healthy and exercise regularly. Say yes to more social events if the alternative is just rotting in bed, doomscrolling on your phone. These are all things that we intuitively understand is good advice, but taking it is another matter.

Maybe you’re happy with your life, or at least satisfied. Maybe you don’t think many changes need to be made, and it’s perfectly valid to continue as is. Maybe you don’t have the mental space to try something new. It’s just easier to scroll through your social media feed.

Even when you do decide to act, you still need to act upon the right advice in the right way. If you’re following bad advice, you’re more likely to have a negative outcome. If you’re following good advice poorly, same thing happens. In sports, coaches will talk about how “coachable” certain players can be. How well do they respond to feedback and criticism? Do they internalize it and use it to improve their game? It’s not enough to have good advice. You need to be able to follow good advice as well.

The Best Laid Plans

Dave Ramsey is a polarizing figure online. To some, he’s a shill who advocates for rigid, suboptimal personal finance strategies in a strident, uncompromising manner and unnecessarily interjects Christian and conservative morals into his material. To others, he’s the one who was able to help them become debt free.

I think what a lot of Dave Ramsey detractors don’t get is that Dave Ramsey is not saying “everybody needs to follow my advice to the letter and this is the only way to do personal finance”. Dave Ramsey knows who his target audience is: religious working class people who have very little knowledge about personal finance and are drowning in debt.

I’ve listened to his radio program at times, and there have been many emotional testimonials from people who actually followed his advice and became much better off as a result of it. Even when the advice is rationally suboptimal. For example, Ramsey advocates paying down debt using the “snowball” method, which means attack the smaller debt amounts first, regardless of the interest rate.

Personal finance experts would say that it’s much better to attack debt using the “avalanche” method, which is to pay down the debt with the highest interest rate first. If you’re only factoring in the math, there is zero doubt that the avalanche method is better for paying down debt. But if you’re factoring in the psychological aspect, the snowball method can be much more effective. It’s very emotionally satisfying to close out a debt account. And for the financial novice, seeing their smallest debt account close might just be motivating enough for them to tackle the rest of their debt.

If you have the perfect plan that you are unable to follow, then it’s not a good plan. You need to account for the human element, with all our capability for self doubt, laziness, skepticism, and nihilism baked into the plan’s margins. If you don’t, you’ll just have a great plan that has a low success rate when people are actually trying to follow it. Know your audience, know their limits, and give your advice with that in mind.

Ad Hominem Omni Tempore

Most well read people, if they recognize the The Man in the Arena excerpt from Teddy’s speech, probably have not bothered to read the entire speech, which is quite long (nearly 9000 words), and very much a product of the time where attention spans were much, much longer and people had more time on their hands to do things like attend and listen to super long speeches.

But later in that speech, which is about a citizen’s responsibility within the society that he (and, again, as a product of his time, it is very much a man) lives in, he says this:

Character must show itself in the man's performance both of the duty he owes himself and of the duty he owes the state. The man's foremast duty is owed to himself and his family; and he can do this duty only by earning money, by providing what is essential to material well-being; it is only after this has been done that he can hope to build a higher superstructure on the solid material foundation; it is only after this has been done that he can help in his movements for the general well-being. He must pull his own weight first, and only after this can his surplus strength be of use to the general public.

In a more modern vernacular, put your oxygen mask on first. But once having done that, it is your duty to help others. The problem is by the time you get your shit together, to other people, in the vast majority of the time to the vast majority of the people, you are now the man outside of the arena.

Remember what I said about people hating advice given by people in a better situation? Even if you’ve been in the arena in the past, you are not in the arena now. And when you’re in the arena, the last thing you want to hear is somebody outside the arena telling you what’s what, even when they’re right.

One of the most impactful reads I’ve ever come across was 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person. In it, the last harsh truth is this:

Everything Inside You Will Fight Improvement

The human mind is a miracle, and you will never see it spring more beautifully into action than when it is fighting against evidence that it needs to change. Your psyche is equipped with layer after layer of defense mechanisms designed to shoot down anything that might keep things from staying exactly where they are -- ask any addict. So even now, some of you reading this are feeling your brain bombard you with knee-jerk reasons to reject it.

It’s a much longer read, but I strongly encourage everybody to read the entire thing.

The main point, however, is that to a person floundering in life, anybody giving them support and advice are simply men outside the arena. Their opinions, however well meaning and intentioned are to be disregarded because they don’t know what it’s like. They don’t have skin in the game. They’re not on the ground right now, knee deep in the shit with you.

In classical debate, an ad hominem attack is a logical fallacy. Instead of attacking the argument, you’re attacking the person making the argument. But in the real world, ad hominem attacks work all the time. So people keep using them, precisely because the ad hominem attack is a nod to fundamental human behavior: we are not rational debate bots, but emotional, irrational people who are constantly making choices with imperfect information and varying degrees of anxiety and coping mechanisms.

There are few things more maddening than seeing a younger version of you making the same mistake you did at that age. And yet, if you were to tell them the mistake you made and the mistake they’re making and what they/you should have done instead, chances are they will listen politely and then continue on making the same mistake in the exact same way.

For many people, experience is oftentimes the only teacher they’ll listen to. And like a wise parent, sometimes you need to see your precious children fail, in the exact way you predicted, and then help them pick up the pieces in order for them to have a slightly better chance of listening to you in the future. And the only reason why they might be more inclined to do so is because, in that moment, you were in the arena with them.