The Man Outside the Arena - by Jay Sun
The Unabashed Observer
SubscribeSign in
The Man Outside the Arena<br>The view from the cheap seats
Jay Sun<br>Aug 19, 2026
10
Share
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:<br>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.<br>Thanks for reading The Unabashed Observer! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Subscribe
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.<br>It’s Hard to Give Good Advice<br>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?<br>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:<br>An undesirable situation exists
A person gives advice on how to improve that situation.
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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>Taking Good Advice is a Skill<br>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...