You may think once you become successful, people will love you.
That those around you will admire you and will want to learn.
That you’ll be seen as a hero.
That everyone around you will recognize all the hard work, effort you’ve put in to get to where you are now.
And I’m saying… that’s unlikely.
This is because while some people admire achievement (and I encourage you to surround yourself with these folks), most people will care more about themselves. To be more specific, they’ll care more about how you’re making them insecure, through your success, than any merit of praise you deserve.
So yes, some people will love you.
Some people will appreciate you.
And some people will treat you well.
But you need to be prepared for the opposite too. And this is facing the hate, insecurity and jealousy of others.
Why Pleasing Everyone Is Impossible!
Now, this isn’t a rant. This is not my purpose. But it’s rather to tell a truth, which is that no matter what you do, some people will not like you.
You can create the perfect product and you’ll still have refund requests. You can practice for 500 hours for your speech and someone will still find it poor. You can spend ten years of your life developing your business and someone who never had a business before will find something to criticize.
And you know why?
Because nobody likes to feel inferior.
Imagine this scenario.
Let’s say you’re overweight. And you have two other friends that are overweight too. Life is good. You eat together. You have the same hobbies. You feel comfortable and accepted when together.
But one day you change everything.
You throw away all your junk food. You get a gym membership. You walk more. You exercise every single day.
Do you think your friends will admire you?
Say “yes, do more of this!” Or “you’re amazing”?
Do you think they’ll encourage you on your new path?
No. They won’t. They won’t care. At worst, they’ll try to discourage you because you make them look back. You make them feel guilty about how they’re not taking any action to feel better. You’re a source of anxiety now.
“The Monkey Experiment”
I heard this story, this experiment.
So scientists wanted to study the group behavior of monkeys. They’ve set up a simple system. They would put a banana at the top of a ladder. Each time a monkey would grab that banana, the researchers would water hose all the monkeys.
This would create a negative association, just like if you touch a very hot object and you’d burn yourself, you would make sure to not touch it again.
Then a few interesting things happened.
First, each time a monkey would try to grab the banana, all others would jump on it and prevent it from completing the task, sometimes violently.
Second, the scientists replaced the monkeys one by one. So from the original ten monkeys, they replaced each one until there was a new group. This new group never suffered the water treatment. Yet, when a monkey would try to grab a banana, the others would stop it. “Banana = water jet” became a group culture and survived through communication even after they replaced the members.
While this is fascinating, it’s also a good example of how things work in real life.
We like to hate on things. We have no reasons.
For example, many people grew up with the idea that money is evil. They’ve never faced this themselves, they’ve never faced experiences to show that money is evil, but this is what they’ve heard all their lives.
So as adults, they tell others that money is evil, even if they don’t even know why.
So it is with “haters”.
Haters hate. They don’t know why.
But I guarantee you that for every person that wants to learn from you and appreciate you for what you’ve achieved, there will be a dozen that will feel bad they have achieved nothing and will want to ruin your party.
It’s not fair, but it’s just how life works.
Your poor friends don’t want you to be rich. You being rich makes them feel worse about them being poor. Your poor friends want to hear from you you’re struggling because then they can say “well, at least I’m not the only one, this is the situation for everyone around me”.
“Just Move Forward And Ignore The Critics”
So what do you do then?
Just do your thing.
Let people be negative. Let them criticize and condemn you. You keep building wealth. You keep getting better. Their criticism has nothing to do with you and everything with them.
You’ll soon find some amazing people to keep you company who will do the opposite. They’ll support and love you and treat you as you deserve. This is because we always learn to associate with people like us.
Fitness freaks spend time with fitness freaks.
Entrepreneurs spend time with entrepreneurs.
Lazy people spend time with other lazy people.
Poor people are surrounded by other poor people.
You do your thing and you’ll build a new group around you with ease.
Oh, and one last thing.
Don’t try to “save” those that criticize you, those that “you’ve left behind”. It never works. If they want to be saved, they would do something about it. They want to feel good and self righteous, not to advance in life. So don’t get caught up in this drama.
Best regards,
Imran
