“I’ll fight to the death if I have to. But I get my feelings hurt pretty easily too.” – Anthony Smith, UFC Fighter
As a thought experiment…
How would you live your life if the negative opinions of others truly didn’t affect you?
If you were suddenly and completely inoculated against personal attacks, and nothing anybody said about you could impact your state of mind, your rate of progress, or your direction in life — at all?
Even better:
What if the folks upstairs personally guaranteed you would never experience another personal attack from anyone, ever again?
That you would receive nothing but glowing reviews, from here on?
What would you choose to do with your life?
What would you create?
How fast would you press the pedal to the floor if you were freed from the social braking system forever?
Of course, this is just a thought experiment.
And the first thought that probably comes up is:
Keep dreaming.
People are always going to have opinions of you, personal attacks are never going away, and this whole thought experiment is a waste of my Wednesday.
On the first two, I totally agree (people suck sometimes, welcome to being human).
But before you jump to the third, stick with me:
If personal attacks are never going away, then we should probably get better at handling them — right?
Especially if we want to do great things in our life, like building great businesses, having great relationships, launching a great mission, whatever:
Doing great things means more people will be watching which means more opinions are headed your way, and not all of them are friendly.
(it’s no accident that the biggest names in sports / entertainment / social media also receive the most hate)
Putting the full force of your personality into the world is going to create a counter-force, so what option do we have?
Shrink, play small, and be less of ourselves so our feelings are less likely to be hurt?
Or learn to not give a fv@# what people think, so we can finally start playing full-on?
This is a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about as I prepare to scale myself online in a bigger way.
Join me back here tomorrow and I’ll share my findings.
- T
P.S. Pair today’s email with this dorky-titled classic on dealing with “haters.”