5 Reasons Why You Should Love Your Haters

July 30, 2014

Everyone has haters, especially those aiming to achieve success in life. It can be people that don’t believe in your work or those that just outright hate you for no apparent reason. While having haters brings negative energy to your life, they actually offer great benefits to your career. Here’s are five reasons why haters are actually a blessing in disguise.

No one will be as brutally honest as them.

In a world where everyone’s hustling, it gets harder and harder to find real friends as you climb to the top. Most people don’t want to hurt your feelings, so all you usually get is praise from them, and even when you want them to be honest, they’ll most likely sugarcoat it. When it comes to your haters, they’re fine with laying down all your flaws and weaknesses in your face. While they aren’t right 100% of the time, it gives you a lot of good information of how you can improve yourself. Would you rather think you’re on track to win the race? Or that you’re slow as hell and need to hurry up?

It keeps you grounded.

Having too much praise and flattery around you is not always a good thing. Success and fortune can sometimes cloud your mind and forget where you came from. Similar to the first point, if all you hear are good things about yourself, you might let it get to your head. Having people that don’t like you reminds you that you’re not the center of the universe and that you still have a ways to go.

It challenges you.

Many people typically let negativity from their haters get to them, very few channel that energy into motivation to work harder. Remember, you have full control of how you feel in your life, either you choose to see other shit-talking as a way to bring you down, or an indirect way to make you push harder.

It makes being successful feel so much better.

The best part about having doubters is that they try so hard to break and bring you down. If you can pull through and reach success with their negativity constantly in your face, it makes reaching a point of success feel so much better. Nothing beats proving people wrong. Take this 2001 Bloomberg article claiming that the late Steve Job’s Apple Stores were going to fail, or this 2012 Time article saying that Mark Zuckerberg will not make Facebook successful. Can you imagine how they felt when they proved all the doubters wrong?

It makes for good press.

I’m a firm believer that “any press is good press.” Apart from that, people aren’t as engaging with positive stories compared to negative stories. When you get bad press, your haters love it so they talk about it, and your fans hate it so they come in and defend you. Author Ryan Holiday also notes a fascinating study the New York Terms where after analyzing their “most read” section, they found that the number one predictor of virality was how angry it made the reader. Socialite Justin Ross Lee outlines this notion perfectly:

“You always want fifty-one percent of the people to hate you and forty-nine percent of the people to love you, and the second that balance switches, you have to reinvent yourself and come up with some edgier material. Notoriety is all about people talking about you. No one likes to talk about good news or someone to write an article about how much money I have today, but how much money I won’t have tomorrow? That’s great. People are going to read it and it will likely take up an entire page in the New York Post on a Monday. I’d love that. I fucking love that, and I love my hate mail.”

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