Don't worry about haters

I was brought up in the traditional Indian middle-class mindset of avoiding mistakes at any cost. When I made a mistake, it was strongly pointed out to me, both by my parents and by teachers at school. On the other hand, when I did something positive, when I took initiative, when I went out of my way to help someone, I wasn’t praised. Or if I was, it was muted, given much less importance. The unstated message was that it doesn’t matter whether you do something good, as long as you avoid doing something bad.

Even if one teacher pointed out something negative, my parents took it seriously and were upset. If I protested saying they’re making a big deal out of a small thing, I’d be told that everyone I talk to should say something good about me, or at worst neutral, but not negative. I’d be reminded that this is going in my permanent record and I’ll be kicked out of school and no other school will take me and my life will be ruined and I’ll have to work as a laborer for the rest of my life!

“Don’t get a bad name” was the overriding message. I was told it’s important to stay within my limits — don’t take initiative and do things that can fail and give you a bad name. I was told it’s important to not lose face.

This makes us neurotic, always worrying, obsessing, “Is someone thinking bad about me?” It destroys our confidence, and others would rather work with someone else who’s confident.

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Now that I’m grown up, as a consultant, I talk to a lot of people in the business world. And I find that they don’t obsess that someone, somewhere might be angry with them.

In fact, I’ve interacted with multiple businesspeople whose attitude is, “If you disagree with me, go fuck yourself!” Now, I’m not saying that’s an example to emulate, but at the same time, I could stand to learn from that. In other words, on a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is “Oh, no, someone somewhere might disapprove of me, my life is screwed, boohoo!”, and 100 is Ashneer Grover, 100 is not right goal for any of us to aspire to, but if I’m at 40, I should move to 60.

Some of the businesspeople I work with are impressive. They go and get things done quickly. One woman set up an engineering team quickly with a limited budget. She knew she couldn’t get good engineers for a low salary, so she recruited multiple good engineers as advisors to guide. I introduced her to a CTO friend who’s more accomplished than me, and I soon saw a photo of both of them having dinner at a restaurant, and before I knew it, he was working with her. And she raised a substantial amount of funding. She got all this done in a month! Another person is impressive in his own way — I wouldn’t bet against him.

When I look at these extremely high achievers, I notice that they don’t care so much about being criticised. There’s the exact opposite of some of us introverts who think, “Oh, no, if this person disapproves of me, word will spread about me, and nobody will give me a job, nobody will hire me as a consultant, nobody will join me as a cofounder, nobody will invest in my startup, nobody will work for me…”

One way to look at this is the love/indifferent/hate spectrum: when you talk to someone, they may love you: they can’t wait to work with you. They immediately hand over a cheque. They’re excited about working with you. They don’t think they can find a better person than you for the job.

The other extreme is hating you. They’ll stop the meeting partway through, delete your contact, and disconnect with you on LinkedIn. They may be pissed with you for a day or two. They’ll never work with you.

The middle ground is being indifferent towards you. They neither love nor hate you. They won’t work with you, because they’re not convinced to move from apathy. You don’t stand out from the crowd. If you’re a software engineer, you’re one among the 100 engineers they’ve met. They have no reason to work with you over the remaining 99.

So, people will work with you only if they love you, not if they’re indifferent towards or hate you. In the love/indifferent/hate spectrum, love is pass, and indifferent and hate are fail. To improve your score, you want to make more people love you. You can’t make the haters love you, since they’ve already made up their mind. The only way to make more people love you is to pare down the indifferent bucket. Be opinionated, be bold, and stand out, so that the indifferent people will make up their mind one way or the other. If 3 people are indifferent, and by being blunt about what you stand for, 1 loves you and 2 hate you, don’t worry about that, because the benefit from the 1 lover exceeds the cost of the 2 haters. After all, if you’re looking for a job, you need only one job. As a consultant, I can’t serve 100 clients, so I don’t want 100. Just a few. Contrary to what some of us believe, the haters are not going to post about you on LinkedIn. They’re not going to wake up every morning and think about you with anger. Instead, they’ll forget you tomorrow and move on to the 100 more important things in their life than you.

To illustrate this numerically, if you’re a diplomat, and you talk to 5 people, 1 might love you, 3 might be indifferent towards you, and 1 might hate you. If you’re opinionated, and 1 of the 3 indifferent people loves you and 2 hate you, you end up with 2 lovers and 3 haters. The opinionated person is ahead of the diplomat, with 2 lovers instead of 1.