One of the mistakes I see leaders make—especially as they start to scale—is overreacting to criticism as if it’s the enemy on their path to success.
Early on, silence feels like safety. Later, silence usually means irrelevance.
If you’re doing anything meaningful at scale, people will have opinions. They’ll question your decisions, your pace, your motives. That’s not a failure of leadership—it’s a byproduct of visibility. You’ve created enough momentum that your actions now affect other people’s assumptions, incentives, or comfort.
The real skill isn’t avoiding criticism. It’s learning to categorize it.
Some criticism is useful. It’s specific. It points to execution risk, culture drift, misalignment, or reputational exposure. It comes from people who understand the game and have something at stake. That feedback is valuable, and ignoring it is expensive.
Most criticism, however, isn’t that.
It’s abstract. Emotional. Detached from outcomes. Often it says more about the critic’s position than your performance. As you grow, more people will comment from the outside without understanding the tradeoffs you’re managing. That’s structural, not personal.
At senior levels, you don’t have the luxury of responding to everything. Attention is finite. Every hour spent managing perception is an hour not spent building leverage in the business.
There’s another reality most people don’t like to admit: disciplined execution makes some people uncomfortable. Consistency exposes inconsistency. High standards expose shortcuts. Momentum exposes stagnation. When you raise the bar, you implicitly remind others of where they chose not to.
That’s where a lot of noise comes from.
This doesn’t mean becoming arrogant or dismissive. It means staying grounded in outcomes. Results are the only neutral arbiter. Over time, execution answers questions better than explanations ever will.
The leaders who scale well don’t chase approval. They build systems that produce results, teams that can operate without constant reassurance, and decision frameworks that hold up under pressure. They listen carefully, decide deliberately, and move forward without needing consensus.
Criticism isn’t a milestone by itself. But when it shows up consistently, it often means you’ve crossed into territory where what you’re doing actually matters.
The job is simple, even if it’s not easy: extract signal, ignore noise, protect focus, and keep executing.
Everything else resolves itself over time.
Jas Mathur is CEO of Limitless X Holdings, a health, wellness and entertainment ecosystem. In 2025, he became CEO of Manny Pacquiao Promotions, partnering with eight-division world champion boxer Manny Pacquiao.
