Ignore Your Haters
One thing I’ve learned over the last three years during my peak “influence” is that no matter how popular you may become, you will always have haters. It is impossible to get everyone to like or love you; getting hate is a mathematical certainty no matter who you are or what you’re doing. Even spiritual leaders who preach love get hate.
But the real issue does not lie in the opinions of others but rather in the desire to seek approval from others. Those who seek approval, especially from their enemies, are insecure—having a self-doubt that is not satiated by their supporters. Thus, they will go out of their way to show off to their opposition, to quell the internal strife within them.
How many stories have we heard about people being motivated by all the hate they received? Plenty. In most cases, what started as a passion of theirs turned into a goal to prove others wrong. The reason is that they were driven by their ego rather than a higher, more noble goal. The ego hates being proven wrong.
Pick any celebrity who has a rags-to-riches story, and oftentimes it will be about proving the people who doubted during their youth. Yet, even after achieving great fame and wealth, you will find that they are still empty inside.
Why?
Well, imagine your goals went from being motivated by the love of something to being driven to gain the approval of those who have no respect for you. Such approval, especially from your enemies, is something you shouldn’t care about in the first place, yet you spend much of your life trying to get it. Even if you prove your haters wrong, so what? They will still hate you in the end. And even if they gave you props, so what? You just got props from someone who doesn’t even matter because they are not on the same team as you.
I’d like to quote Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher.
I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.
This quote changed my life.
I used to be a people-pleaser. I was someone who refused to even take my own side in order to make everyone happy. I was always worried I was doing the wrong thing or that someone thought less of me. I wanted to be liked. I wanted to be loved. Such is the mentality of an insecure person, which I used to be, long, long ago.
But over time, I realized this insecurity exists in all people. In fact, I noticed that the biggest haters were those who were the biggest failures and that they projected their insecurities onto me. I realized that when someone tells you that you can’t do something, they are typically telling you that they can’t do it.
Certainly, there are times when you actually can’t do something due to real constraints. But most of the time people default to their pessimistic nature when it comes to goals, especially extraordinary ones. This is because most people are not extraordinary; they are ordinary. Such aims of achieving greatness in any endeavor are always met with doubt because extraordinary people are not so numerous. What are the chances you are such a person?
But whether you are an Olympic athlete, a mathematical savant, an influential figure, or none of the above, the same applies: you should always ignore haters because their opinions do not matter, ever. The only opinion that truly matters is your own. Once you accept this, you can liberate yourself from all the noise that comes out of the mouths of such people.
However, you must understand the difference between someone giving you a hateful opinion and someone being brutally honest. Oftentimes, people reject harsh truths that come in the form of negative feedback, mistaking them for hate. But if it is truthful, then it is not hateful; the truth is never harmful in and of itself—it is simply the fact of the matter. When people reject such truths, they do so to appease their ego.
You should never do this. In fact, some of the most brutal truths will come from your haters, who will critique you in ways none of your most loyal supporters would, either because they don’t want to hurt your feelings or because they are blinded by their biases.
You must never reject truthful feedback from anyone, even your worst enemy, because the truth is the truth, and it can always help you improve. But the hate—which you know is false—always ignore. Never feed into it, because it is a waste of your time, and it is being thrown at you to slow you down and make you break.
One way to train yourself to ignore hate is to expose yourself to it. I have gone through several cycles of blocking and unblocking people on my Twitter account. There was a point where I’d block everyone so I would not get triggered by their hate, and I felt that this was a weakness I had to overcome.
Why are this person’s words even affecting me? I must stop this.
I would unblock for a while but then reblock my haters because it angered me. But one day I realized that even blocking had become a nuisance, and I wanted to learn to master my emotions completely. So I unblocked everyone and purposely absorbed the hatred, teaching myself the art of nonreaction. I’ve mastered this to the point that no one’s hate can affect me anymore, because I know it comes from a negative place—their hatred is actually their problem, not mine.
In fact, now that I have learned how to be unaffected by such hate, I can administer the cure: unemotional feedback to disarm these types, hoping that my asymmetrical response could teach them a lesson—that I am a man they cannot affect and that their attacks are therefore futile, while also revealing that their own insecurities are showing.
With this level of mastery and patience, I can now deflect hate back onto my haters, so they either change themselves or go away. Regardless, I remain unfazed.
So, the best way to ignore your haters is to become completely unfazed. They will always be there no matter what you do, so the only thing in your power is how you deal with them—and that is entirely up to you.
But I will say this: achieving the level of self-mastery I have over the last year has been empowering. I know now that I can handle such hatred stoically, that my witty counterarguments are like a fun game to me—that is, if I care to respond at all.