# Wednesday Signals: 95% Loved It. Why Do the Outliers Still Get Inside My Head?
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I've been standing on stages for 33 years, and over that time the reaction to my keynotes has been overwhelmingly positive. If I had to put a rough number on the career-long pattern, I'd say somewhere around 95% positive. Sometimes higher, occasionally lower, but consistently and remarkably positive. A recent closing keynote at the 2026 Governance, Risk and Control Conference was a pretty good example. The audience gave me a 4.69 out of 5 speaker rating. More than 92% rated me positively, and more than 80% gave me the highest possible rating. Then there were the written comments. Here are ten of them: “Best session of conference!” “The closing keynote speaker was absolutely fantastic and honestly, the highlight of the conference!” “Beyond fantastic!! That was monumental. Thanks for the inspiration and the vision.” “An outstanding speaker who challenged my way of thinking and opened my eyes to new possibilities.” “Amazing energy and amazing insights.” “GREAT thought-provoking closing speaker! Took lots of notes, thank you!!” “What an amazing presentation with lots of information to take away and think about. It was eye-opening, thought provoking, and alarming at the same time.” “Thank you Jim! I could listen to you all day!” “Such a great presentation. It says all we need in this dynamic world and dynamic career space.” “I need his closing remarks uploaded here. This is to be read again and again. Full of wisdom.” Pretty wonderful feedback. You'd think I would simply read all of that, smile, conclude that the keynote went extremely well, and move on. Of course I didn't. Instead, my brain went straight to the outliers: the person who thought I was scolding the audience, the person who thought the keynote was too negative, the person who felt I didn't respect them, and the person who thought I didn't tell them anything new. They represented a tiny minority of the audience, yet for a little while they occupied more real estate in my head than everyone else combined. I've been doing this for 33 years, and apparently I've been doing that for 33 years too. I've written about this before Here's the strange part. This isn't a new realization. I went digging through my own archives and discovered that I've been wrestling with this issue, sometimes quite openly, for years. In April 2021, after almost three decades on stage, I wrote: “I've never handled that aspect well. I internalize any criticism. It's taken a long time to try to get over this.” I went further and admitted that, for a long time, I would obsess over session evaluations, particularly the people who gave me a negative rating. I'd cringe at the person who gave me two out of five or made some cutting remark about one of my predictions, while somehow moving past dozens of people who thought the keynote was terrific. I eventually wrote that I had learned to develop a thicker skin. Then I finished the thought with two wonderfully revealing words: “But still.” Five years later? But still. Apparently, some lessons take a while. A guy like me lives and dies on the evaluations Later in 2021, I wrote an entire article called The Future, and the People Who Hate It: What Happens When People Tune Out From What Comes Next? It began with a line that still rings true: “A guy like me lives and dies on the session evaluations, the after-keynote comments, the follow-up tweets or e-mails, and other feedback.” I described the peculiar mix that comes with this profession: glowing praise, mediocre reactions, an occasional burst of outright hostility, and every once in a while the extraordinary “you changed my life” type of comment. I also acknowledged something that should have been obvious from the longevity of my career. If the feedback hadn't been overwhelmingly positive, I wouldn't still be doing this 33 years later. Even so, I've always taken the negative comments seriously because I've viewed them as a way to improve. That instinct hasn't changed, and I don't want it to. The worst possible lesson I could take from a long, successful career would be: Ignore criticism. You know what you're doing. That's how people stop improving. It's how confidence turns into arrogance and how success eventually becomes complacency. I've written about that too. In 2023, I warned leaders about the danger of surrounding themselves only with praise. If everyone around you is constantly telling you how wonderful you are, you can lose touch with reality very quickly. I wrote that one of the most important skills anyone can develop is the ability to hear all the feedback, including the parts that hurt. And therein lies the dilemma I've never quite resolved: listen carefully to criticism, but don't let criticism distort reality. Those aren't contradictory ideas. Balancing them, though, is much harder than it sounds. The strange arithmetic of feedback Imagine 150 evaluations. Maybe 120 people give you the highest possible score, another 20 think you did a very good job, a handful are neutral, and three people absolutely despise you. Mathematically, the answer is obvious. It was a successful keynote. Emotionally, things don't work quite that way. The hundred people who loved it might write, “Fantastic!” or “Great keynote!” or “Very inspiring.” Then the person who hated it writes three paragraphs explaining what was wrong with your content, what was wrong with your style, what was wrong with your examples and perhaps, by the time they reach the end, what is wrong with you as a human being. Because that comment is longer, sharper and more emotionally charged, it somehow feels more important. One delighted sentence and one furious paragraph start to look like equal pieces of evidence. They're not. But our brains aren't always very good at statistics, particularly when the subject being evaluated is ourselves. Negative information has a way of sticking around. A compliment can make you feel good for a few minutes; a brutal criticism can take up residence for days. I've certainly allowed that to happen over the years. The outliers have always been there I found another post from 2019 in which I described watching a small percentage of an audience physically react to my message. Most people would be engaged, but a few would squirm in their seats or scowl at something I said. Then, among all the positive evaluations, one of those people would occasionally leave what I called a “scathing review.” At the time, I interpreted much of that as resistance to change. There was probably some truth in it, because a futurist has a peculiar job. I'm rarely hired to stand on stage and tell people that everything they currently believe is correct, that they should keep doing exactly what they're doing and that nothing important is going to change. That would be a pretty short keynote. I'm usually there because something is changing: technology, business models, careers, risk, markets, science, customer behaviour, skills or competition. Sometimes all of those things are changing at once. That means part of my job involves challenging assumptions, and most people enjoy that. Some absolutely do not. One person hears, “Your profession is going to change dramatically,” and thinks, Fascinating. What do I need to do?Another hears exactly the same message and interprets it as, Everything I've learned is becoming irrelevant. One person hears, “Your industry needs to move faster,” and thinks, We need to rethink some things. Another hears, This guy thinks we're idiots. Same keynote. Different ears. That doesn't make the second reaction invalid. Audiences are made up of human beings, and every person brings their own history, anxiety, assumptions, experience and expectations into the room. Perhaps I've spent too much of my career trying to solve something that can't actually be solved: how do you get every person in a large room to experience the same message in exactly the same way? You don't. Sometimes criticism is right There's another reason I can't simply dismiss the outliers: sometimes they're right. A couple of people thought I spoke too quickly. Fair enough. Someone wanted more Q&A. Useful. Someone else thought there was too much material for the time available. Worth considering. That's valuable feedback, and it's why I read this stuff. It's why I care, and why, after 33 years, I still prepare relentlessly and continually change what I'm doing. Criticism can be an extraordinary gift. The mistake is assuming that every criticism has equal weight. That's where I've struggled. Signal, friction and reaction I'm beginning to think there are three different kinds of negative feedback. The first is signal. It tells me that something is genuinely wrong. A statistic is incorrect, a story doesn't work, a section is confusing or an argument doesn't hold together. That's straightforward: fix it. The second is friction. The underlying idea might be sound, but something about the delivery made it harder to receive. I spoke too quickly, tried to cover too much material, didn't leave enough room for questions or used an example that distracted from the message. That's useful too: improve it. Then there's reaction. Someone simply doesn't like the message, the premise, the challenge, the style, or perhaps just doesn't like me. That reaction deserves to be understood and respected, but it doesn't automatically mean the keynote needs to be redesigned around it. That's the category I've had the hardest time processing because, if you're conscientious, every negative comment initially feels like signal. It isn't. Sometimes an outlier is telling you something important. Sometimes an outlier is simply an outlier. The other battle I've been having In May 2021, someone told me that some of my writing had become too focused on fear, worry and angst rather than inspiration. My reaction was essentially: guilty as charged. I wrote at the time that this reflected a battle that had always played out in my mind and in my work. How do you tell people the truth about the challenges coming at them while still leaving them with hope? How do you talk about disruption without becoming depressing? How do you shake people out of complacency without making them feel helpless? I admitted that it's easy for the balance to tilt too far one way or the other. I also noted that CEOs have sometimes specifically hired me to say the uncomfortable things they couldn't easily say themselves. That dilemma showed up again in the recent GRC comments. One person called the keynote “simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating.” Someone else described it as “eye-opening, thought provoking, and alarming at the same time.” I actually like both of those comments because they tell me the keynote created tension, and the future itself contains tension. Promise and peril. Opportunity and risk. Acceleration and uncertainty. If I remove all of the discomfort from that story, I'm probably not doing my job. The dangerous pursuit of the perfect evaluation That leads to a bigger question. What would I have to do to make absolutely certain that nobody ever gave me a negative evaluation? I'd have to become safer, less provocative, less challenging and less willing to make a bold prediction. I'd have to become reluctant to tell an audience something it might not want to hear, careful with every joke and cautious with every observation. Eventually, I'd arrive at the perfect keynote. Everyone would politely agree with everything. Nobody would be offended. Nobody would be challenged. And quite possibly, nobody would remember it. That's not what I want. I've always believed that part of my job is to make people think, and sometimes thinking is uncomfortable. The numbers are the numbers Which brings me back to the latest keynote. A 4.69 out of 5 rating. More than 92% positive. More than 80% giving me the highest possible rating. Across the measured session dimensions, roughly nine out of ten respondents were positive. Then there are the words people chose to leave behind: “Best session of conference.” “The highlight of the conference.” “That was monumental.” “I could listen to you all day.” Thirty-three years into this career, I should be able to look at that evidence and say, That went really well. And yet there's still a little part of my brain that says, Yes, but what about that guy? But still. Maybe that's why the outliers matter so much I've thought a lot about why I do this to myself, and I think part of the answer is quite simple: I care. I care whether the audience got value. I care whether the client got what they hired me to deliver. I care whether the research was right, whether the story worked and whether I did the job well. Maybe the day I completely stop caring about a bad evaluation is the day I should worry. But caring doesn't require surrendering all perspective. That's the part I'm still learning. You can listen carefully to criticism without letting it define you. You can acknowledge an error without deciding that the entire performance was a failure. You can improve something without rebuilding everything. And you can respect the outlier without pretending that the outlier represents the room. I've spent years giving myself this exact advice There's one final irony in all of this. I've spent years telling other people not to allow negativity to overwhelm the evidence of opportunity around them. In one old post, I wrote about the little war that goes on inside our heads between positive and negative thinking. I warned that if you focus too much on your failures, faults and flaws, you can lose sight of the good things that are actually happening around you. Apparently, I should read my own blog more often. Because that's exactly what can happen with keynote evaluations. One person says, “Best session of conference!”Another says, “Not a good use of time.” Somehow, the second person gets the penthouse suite inside my head. That's a ridiculous real-estate policy. Thirty-three years later I don't think I'm ever going to stop reading the evaluations, and I don't want to. They make me better. I also don't think I'll ever completely stop feeling a sting when someone really dislikes what I've done. Maybe I shouldn't. What I am trying to get better at is putting that criticism where it belongs: not ignoring it, not rationalizing it away and not becoming defensive, but also not allowing three voices to drown out 140. That's not learning. That's distortion. I've had 33 years of audiences telling me, overwhelmingly, that what I do works. I've also had 33 years of outliers. Both matter. They just don't matter equally. Perhaps that's the lesson I've been trying to learn since the beginning: listen to the criticism, fix what needs fixing, learn what needs learning, keep challenging yourself, and then look at the whole picture. 95% loved it. Maybe it's finally time I let the 95% into my head too.

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/09/wednesday-signals-95-loved-it-why-do-the-outliers-still-get-inside-my-head/