My Advice to a Friend Who Is Dealing with Haters

I got a message from a friend with a YouTube channel. I’m not going to mention his name—this situation could apply to just about anyone—but he sent me a message saying, “Hey, my YouTube channel is starting to grow. I’ve got a bunch of followers and subscribers who love me. But I’m also getting hated on all the time, and people have been making up fake stories about me and lies and trying to ruin my reputation. What should I do? I’m a nice guy. I just don’t know how to handle this.

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Crabs in a Bucket
From my experience, when you start becoming successful, when you begin to stand out from the crowd and move ahead, people start throwing shade your way. They start taking shots at you. It’s kind of like the crabs-in-a-bucket mentality. If you have a whole bunch of crabs in a bucket and one tries to crawl out, what happens? The crabs will pull the other crab down because they don’t want that crap to escape. The same thing happens when you start to have success and you’re surrounding yourself with the wrong people.

Now, if you have good friends and people who truly love you and respect you, they typically won’t do this. But sometimes even people who love and care for you will hate on you or even subconsciously take shots at you to bring you down; your success is beginning to make them uncomfortable. People will hate on you, throw shade your way, and try to bring you down because your success is a reflection of what they’re not doing. It’s a reflection of their laziness, their inability to do what needs to be done to become successful, to take action, to continue learning and growing and pushing themselves forward.

When they see you being successful, they think to themselves, “If I want to be perceived as successful as this person, I can invest in myself, grow, build, learn, focus on self- development, and take massive action. But, ugh, that seems like a lot of hard work I probably can’t do even if I tried. The easier option is to throw rocks at this person’s empire. I’ll light dynamite under it, explode it, and take it down.” And that seems like the easier way for them to appear that they’re better than you.

The Evil of Egos
Many people are driven by ego. They don’t like when you seem to be getting ahead in life. And the fastest way for them to take you down is to hate on you; they will try to ruin your reputation, make up stories, and gossip.

I’ve dealt with this in my life. People have made up complete lies and stories that are even true pretty much to try to destroy me or take me down. That’s just what happens. It can be a nasty world out there; it can be brutal.

So how do you handle this? Well, you’ve got to realize one thing. You can only control your actions. You can’t control what other people are going to say. You just can’t. So as much as it hurts, we all want everyone to like us, but it’s just not going to happen. You just can’t control what other people say, think, or believe.

Do What You’ve Been Doing to Get Ahead
Instead focus your time and your efforts and your mind on doing what you’ve been doing to become successful. Focus on the things that you have been doing that have allowed you to become successful. If you are having success, then you surely have certain patterns in your life, certain action steps that you take that have helped you be successful. Maybe it’s going to the gym consistently; maybe it’s spending an hour meditating or reading or learning or networking or masterminding or just listing ten items a day. You’ve done something right, and that makes you really special.

If you’re having success and getting ahead in life and people are hating on you, you’re being successful because you’re an amazing person. Do not let the haters make you veer off course. If you’re getting the results, keep doing what you’re doing. Do not let these haters and their insecurities take you down. Do not get involved in fights and arguments and try to protect your ego—believe me, your brain is going to want to fight back. It’s going to want to go to war and stand up for yourself and prove to them who you are and what you stand for.

The majority of the time, it’s better just to let it go. There are people out there who will fight you all day long if you let them. I’ve gone down that road. I’ve taken phone calls. I’ve tried to reason with them. People are going to think what they want to think. I’ve dealt with this. There are a lot of people out there who don’t like me.

When I was normal and average and doing the things that allowed me to fit into the crowd, nobody ever hated on me. Nobody ever said anything. When I was just an average Joe, there was no hate. There were no lies and making up stories. But then you start to become successful, and next thing you know the drama begins; it’s part of the game.

Focus on Yourself
The key lesson here is this: Let them deal with the drama. Let them gossip. Let them make up stories. Let them hate. You focus on you. You focus on learning, growing, taking action, and doing what you’ve been doing to grow your business and improve your life. You’re going to continue to get more fit. You’re going to continue building your relationships. However you are succeeding in life, you are going to keep doing that.