Haters will hate
When haters show up, it's easy to see it as a failure.. but it's not. It's an indication you're going in the right direction. You have to challenge the status quo to break through, and that has a natural tendency to scare people.
It can be tempting to defend yourself, or give snarky responses, but it's important to reinforce the positive and let negativity-for-the-sake-of-negativity slide off your back. After a day or two, no one will remember the negative comment. They WILL remember your reaction to it. Flame wars have a tendency to stick in people's memory.
Remember:
- People see their failures reflected in your successes.
- People who need to attack someone else to feel better about themselves have a lot of sadness in their lives.
- They are wasting their emotional energy. Don't let them waste yours.
If you consistently put positivity into the world, you will attract more positivity than negativity. In any population great enough, the negatives will show up. It's a statistical inevitability. Keep working. Keep doing. Keep achieving.
If this is how they choose to react to you, it's their loss.
August 2nd, 2010 - 12:23
Especially if those haters are your own parents.
August 5th, 2010 - 14:06
It’s magnified if that is the case. In a way parents are re-experiencing their own lives vicariously through yours.
August 5th, 2010 - 08:17
What about those other people: Not exactly haters, but dear friends and relatives who always seem to find reasons not to do something the way you want to. Only to prevent you from harm, of course.
As you said, you need to overcome and emancipate, otherwise you’ll get stuck with a life that isn’t truly yours. But it’s a small path between not getting off track too early and getting completely blind for (constructive) criticism (those critics are just haters anyway).
August 5th, 2010 - 14:05
In my experience families do fall onto a spectrum, and they tend to either greatly OVER-estimate your ability to succeed (giving you a big head and unrealistic expectations) or greatly UNDER-estimate your ability to succeed. It is possible that they felt the pain of failure in the past and are rightfully trying to protect you from a pain that they felt.
Similarly as how you need to train your own mind, you need to build a catalogue of small successes that will eventually build to overwhelming evidence.
If someone in your life is a doubter, a hater, or an unreasonable critic, find a way to extricate them from your work. If they criticize your work whenever you show it to them, stop showing them. If they don’t believe in your goal, don’t tell them when you are working on it – find an alternative work location.
Of course it’s hard to give specific advice without the details of the situation, but hopefully some of that will help.
August 7th, 2010 - 12:56
I think that’s definitely true about those who are close to you falling on a spectrum of overestimation or underestimation. One of the hardest things to find is someone who can critique what you’re doing with a certain impartiality.
August 7th, 2010 - 13:22
Now to play devil’s advocate here for a second – Sure, OFTENTIMES people are hating because of those reasons, but what about those times when people are yelling and hating over something legitimate? Sometimes you have to take a second to check yourself and make sure you *aren’t* the one with the problem. This is especially important if you suffer from Big Stupid Mouth Syndrome. In this case you’ll likely have people who usually contribute more than just hate chiming in as well, making it a little easier to spot.
But, overall, I think it’s basically true that if you’re pissing someone off then you’re doing it right, you know – depending on the person. Like, if you piss off a bunch of racist KKKers who eat babies and stab kittens then, you know, GO YOU. It’s important to look at the person behind the hating too.