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In ‘The Call to Courage,’ Brené Brown has the best rule for dealing with people on social media

By Madeline Fry Schultz

Brené Brown became a national self-help guru when her TED Talk “The Power of Vulnerability” went viral almost nine years ago.

In it, Brown argues that we can’t find connection if we don’t open up. The 20-minute clip quickly resonated with millions of viewers: It’s one of the top-viewed TED talks ever, and it has been watched more than 35 million times.

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Now her Netflix special, out last month, is introducing Brown’s studies on shame and vulnerability to a new generation of viewers, and her lessons are more timely than ever.

In “The Call to Courage,” Brown expands on former President Theodore Roosevelt’s famous passage “The Man in the Arena.” Even though Roosevelt gave the speech in 1910, its content applies today, especially to social media. In a speech at the Sorbonne, Roosevelt said:

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.


Brown agrees that it’s not the critic who counts. People like to say that they don’t care what anyone thinks, but that’s not true, she says. Our brains are programmed so that we all care what people think, and that’s actually a good thing.

We should care, instead, about what some people think: “people who love you, not despite your imperfection and vulnerability, but because of your imperfection and vulnerability.” So how does this apply to social media? People tend to start fights with Twitter trolls and years old Facebook friends because they think those people are worth arguing with, but they almost never are. The only person worth engaging with is the one whose opinion matters. Brown says:

There are millions of cheap seats in the world today, filled with people who will never once step foot in that arena. They will never once put themselves out there, but they will make it a full-time job to hurl criticism and judgment and really hateful things toward us, and we have got to get out of the habit of catching them and dissecting, and, you know, holding them close to our hearts. We gotta let ‘em drop on the floor. Don’t grab that hurtful stuff from the cheap seats and pull it close. Don’t pull it anywhere near your heart. Just let it fall to the ground. You don’t have to stomp it or kick it. You just gotta step over it and keep going. You can’t take criticism and feedback from people who are not being brave with their lives.


After she gave her talk on vulnerability years ago, Brown was flooded with critical comments online, insults like, “Of course she embraces imperfection. What choice would you have if you look like her?” But after eating a spoonful of peanut butter and watching an episode of “Downton Abbey,” she says, she was ready to move on.

It is never the critics with their insults aimed to provoke who count. It’s not the Twitter or Facebook trolls. It’s the people we trust. The opinions of millions of random people online don’t mean anything in comparison to the advice of one trusted friend.

As social media has expanded over the last decade, Brown’s message is even more important today.

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