Great entertainment cannot be created if there are haters. Haters have loud voices that overwhelm the satisfied crowd. As long as a hater has a megaphone, the rest of the audience won’t be able to get the good stuff.
Now that everyone’s on a global stage, we have access to billions of unwanted opinions.
Haters aren’t real people
Haters are roles that we assign to people. Sometimes they’re roles that people accept for themselves. Roles are not people. They are a simplistic lens to view a whole person. They are objectifications of people. So, to kill a hater, we don’t have to kill a person, we have to kill our labeling of people.
Kill a hater just the same way you kill Marty McFly – go after the parents. Haterism has three parents:
- Validation seeking
- Selfishness
- Negativity Bias
1. Get entrenched in the mission
We get creative validation from our mission, not from our audience or from strangers. Our fuel comes from doing great things in the big picture, not from individual projects or versions of a product.
Personal validation is something else altogether. It’s an umbrella over all. If we’re letting negative comments affect whether we feel lovable, there’s some major backtracking to do. Therapy and stuff, dude! It’s in common parlance to say that someone “hurt our feelings,” but our feelings are our own and are not in the hands of critics, let alone our loved ones.
When we personally are not safe to exist, we can’t create great stuff.
2. Be Generous
Give more. Find people who need help and serve them. This is how we started creating and it’s how we’ll continue. Definitely, we need to take care of ourselves, but then go forward and shift the spotlight from our own preservation to the improvement of the world.
3. Appreciate bad brains
We gotta look at, and accept our negativity bias. Haters are loud because we amplify them. This is natural and common.
When we’re driving down the street, there are a lot of things we could hit with the car. They’re all moving fast and diverse in color and size. So much stuff we could give our focus. It would be so dramatic and interesting to crash. The road itself is monotone and seems to not move at all. Yet, we focus on the road (most of the time) because — even though we know it’s not as engaging, it’s the important thing to keep us moving forward.
Take a peek behind the curtain
It doesn’t really matter what justification people have for making critiques of our work, but there is justification. There’s a good reason for them to make remarks from their standpoint. They have complicated lives and important perspectives. They have their mission and we have our missions and I am driven by the idea that my mission is one of the most important missions in the world, so I can’t slow down because they’re doing their thing.