If you dare to be great in life, expect haters.
When miserable people see you betting on yourself and working toward your dreams, they’re going to be furious. They’ll downplay your achievements, nitpick everything you do, gossip behind your back, and tell anyone who’ll listen about your troubled past. They can see you’re headed for big things, and they’ll do everything they can to wreck your reputation and make you doubt yourself.
Never take their attacks personally, though, as hard as that might be. Their problem with you is a reflection of their own self-esteem. Your bold actions trigger their insecurities and act as a mirror that shows everything they don’t like about themselves. When you pursue your calling, you separate yourself from everybody who lacks the courage to be themselves and chooses to settle. They’d rather tear you down than do the hard work on themselves. People default to hating because it’s easier to be tough on others than on themselves.
The most painful thing you’ll learn about haters is that your biggest ones are usually your friends, family, and people you grew up around. The people you’d most expect to be happy about your growth. As soon as you start to change, you’ll find out that’s not the case. They’ll either scoff at your plans or withhold their support.
You see, the people who know you have seen many versions of you over the years. The worst version is the one they hold onto. Some even see themselves as better than you. When you begin to find yourself, an alarm goes off in their head, and they feel threatened that you may surpass them. Or they’re scared you’ll outgrow them and the friendship will end. Without meaning to, your progress stirs up all kinds of negative emotions in those around you.
If you’re a girl who just started a nail business, you might wonder why your friends and family can’t seem to like your posts. It can sting, especially when you see them regularly liking and commenting on everyone else’s page. They’ll even wish celebrities who don’t know they exist a happy birthday. But your post? They’ll look at it, zoom in, and make a conscious decision to keep scrolling. Think about it. All they have to do to help promote your business is lift a finger and double-tap a picture. It doesn’t cost anything, and they don’t even have to get up to do it. It’s a small thing, but when people won’t support you publicly, it shows you how they really feel about you.
Best believe, if those same people had a daughter as talented as you, they’d never shut up about her shaping and colors. They refuse to celebrate you, though, because you’re not the one they want to see win.
In the book of Matthew, Jesus explained why the people who know you refuse to acknowledge your greatness when he said, “A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown.” He experienced the same hate that anybody who pursues their purpose will.
Jesus was raised in a small Jewish village called Nazareth. Everyone there knew him as a carpenter. Around the age of 30, he left home and began his ministry. He preached about the kingdom of God, taught people to love their enemies, and performed miracles like restoring sight to the blind and healing a paralyzed man.
Word of all the extraordinary things he was doing made it back to Nazareth. Eventually, he returned with his disciples and began teaching at the local synagogue. Mark 6:3 says that instead of honoring the man he’d become, his old neighbors threw shade:
“Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us?”
All his hometown peeps could do was bring up where he came from. They couldn’t see past the kid they watched grow up. People outside Nazareth didn’t have that problem, though. To them, he was a celebrity.
The people you’d think would be your biggest fans morph into monitoring spirits. They’re surveillance cameras, watching from the shadows and recording every win and loss. Their silence makes it seem like they don’t fuck with you. Don’t get it twisted. They’re obsessed with you, and nothing you do goes unnoticed.
Years back, I ran into one of these wicked spirits myself. An old co-worker’s brother always showed up in my story views on social media. The odd part? He never followed me, but he kept looking up my page.
One day, I posted the artwork for a song I was working on and got a notification that this guy had replied to my story. After all this time, I was shocked he finally said something to me.
I opened up the message, and it was nasty. He wrote that I was fantasizing about people wanting to hear my bullshit music. I replied with a question mark. He hit me back with “wrong message” and quickly unsent it.
He meant to send it to his brother. Not me. That’s what people will say behind your back when they see you trying to make things happen for yourself.
You have to develop thick skin when you promote yourself publicly. People will insult you and say the meanest things to get a reaction out of you. Haters look for the tiniest flaw in what you do and jump at any chance to criticize you.
Still, sometimes there’s truth in what they say, so learn to tell constructive criticism from destructive criticism. Constructive criticism is useful feedback that comes from a good place and helps you improve your work. Destructive criticism is a personal attack from haters who rejoice in your shortcomings and want to shut you down.
You can tell the two apart by whether they’re talking about your work or about you. If that guy actually wanted to see me win, he would’ve told me how to make my music better instead of calling it “bullshit.”
The first few times you get attacked, it’s going to sting. In the beginning, your self-doubt is at its highest, and you’re still figuring things out. You’ll get over it, though. Over time, you’ll get used to people insulting you. People talking shit about you is the price you pay for chasing your dreams.
No matter what people say along the journey, it’s always better to be in the arena taking hits than sitting on the sidelines.
Theodore Roosevelt said it best:
“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 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.”
Anybody who’s busy chasing their own dreams doesn’t have time to bring somebody else down. You can’t expect haters to understand why you’re working on a Friday night while everybody else is out partying. They won’t understand the sacrifices you’re making because they’ve never made any themselves. Let people think you’re boring and keep working.
Don’t be naive and think the hate will stop once you become successful. The hate you get on the way up is just boot camp for what’s to come. Once you blow up, Harvey Levin from TMZ is going to host a convention and invite everyone you’ve crossed paths with in life. He’s going to step up to the microphone and say, “Everyone who’s had a good experience with so-and-so, please stand up.” Then he’s going to say, “Thank you for coming. You can leave. Everyone else who’s had a bad experience or has dirt, please remain seated. We’d love to hear your story.”
And it’s not just people from your past. The more popular you become, the more you turn into a piñata for people from around the world, and they’ll line up to take swings at you. Not everyone is going to like you, and your failures will become their favorite form of entertainment. We’ve all seen a public figure go through something embarrassing while people run to the comment section with popcorn, racing to post the best joke. There’s even a word for this mindset: schadenfreude. It’s a German word meaning the joy people get from someone else’s misfortune.
Some people will hate you for no reason at all. They don’t know you, and you never did anything to them. It’s just the positive attention you’re getting that irks them. They see you stealing the spotlight they’re used to having. The rapper Ice-T has a funny story that shows this dynamic. He said he could be hanging out at a record label surrounded by people, and to them, he’s the man. Everyone wants to talk to him. But if Prince walked into the room, everybody would forget Ice-T even existed and give all their attention to Prince. It hurts people’s egos when they see someone else getting more love than them.
Others have to put in an extreme amount of effort to win people over. They may have grinded for years to reach certain accomplishments or buy an expensive car. You could have less than they do, and people still like you more because you have an aura that makes them gravitate toward you. Nothing pisses off a hater more than that.
Keep a mental note of who’s truly supporting you on your way to success, because people will switch up once you start gaining traction. When they see you’re about to blow up, they’ll suddenly come out of the woodwork with big smiles, acting like you’re best friends. Old associates will start telling people how they went to school with you or used to work with you at the call center. The whole time you were struggling, they were nowhere to be found, but now that you’ve made it, they want to be part of your story.
Motivational speaker Denis Waitley once shared a story about going to his 30th high school reunion. He ran into the classmate who was voted most likely to succeed back in the day. Turns out the guy didn’t make it, but Denis did. You’re playing with fire when you reunite with old associates who see that the kid most likely to end up a loser somehow hit it big.
When the time comes, approach all these people with a simple mentality: fuck ’em. They weren’t there when you needed them most, so they shouldn’t benefit from your clout or money once you make it. Don’t even entertain them when they approach you trying to talk. Kill any hope they have of sliding back into your life. If you ever hit hard times again, they’ll disappear just like they did on the come-up.
And make sure you bless your real fans and day one supporters in any way you can once you’re eating. They rocked with you before it was cool and deserve to be spoiled for holding you down.
Don’t let haters deter you from chasing your dreams. When I was growing up, my parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and before our weekly meetings, we had to sing a song. I hated all of them except this one called “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.” That’s exactly what you have to do when you’re working toward something. Stay locked in on the prize like a racehorse with blinders on, focused on nothing but the track ahead.
In The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene wrote, “We forget a lot in our lives, but we rarely forget an insult.” If someone disrespects you, you’ll probably never forget it. You could get Alzheimer’s and forget your own name, and you’d still remember how they hurt your feelings. Meanwhile, when someone compliments us, we gloss over it and forget about it the next day. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking there are more haters than supporters in this world, because there aren’t. Haters just stick with us longer because of the way they make us feel.
Think globally, not locally. There’s a whole world of people who will support you and are depending on you to make it. They need to see someone like them, who came from a troubled background, poverty, or drug addiction, beat the odds and make something of themselves. Your story will be proof that if you did it, they can too.
If a hater ever gets under your skin and has you thinking about quitting, ask yourself: Are you really going to let someone who’s probably done nothing with their life knock you off your path? Somebody who deep down wishes they were you? I promise you, haters know how special you are. They knew it before you did. That’s why they work so hard to break you down.
Their greatest fear is that you won’t give up and you’ll become the star they know you’re destined to be.
