Why You Should Love Your Haters

Please tell I can’t do something. Really. I love it. It totally pisses me off, thus fires me up. It’s the best form of motivation for me.

I can trace most of my success back to someone who said I couldn’t do something. It was their voice that played in my head during the grinding and painful periods it took to make a success out of whatever I as pursuing.

You read in my book the Entrepreneur Roller Coaster about the junior high English teacher that said, “Darren it’s just not in your DNA to be a writer.” That sentence even still fires me up. Hear it again… you read, in my third book, as a New York Times bestselling author, that my junior high English teacher said I didn’t have the talent to be a writer. Ah sweet revenge.

I remember when I decided to leave the real estate business to start my own marketing and advertising company in San Francisco. People thought I was crazy. I left when I was at the top of the market. No one could believe I was leaving. Particularly my dad’s wife. Who I love, but she said something that I owe a great deal of my success thereafter to.

I can still remember where I was, sitting at their kitchen table, and I remember the look on her face when she said it… it’s the picture that was taped on the mirror in my mind. She said, “You’ll be back. There’s no where else you can go and make this kind of money.”

THAT WAS IT. Resolve cemented. That was just the motivation I needed.

And when times got tough. When I hit rough patches. When I got knocked on my butt or doubt started to creep in… I just replayed her words… “You’ll be back.” And instantly I was fired back up again.

“Never!” my mind would repeat, like a mantra. She helped me burn the boats so to speak. I owe her a great debt of gratitude.

I remember reading about the great actor Sidney Poitier, the first African American to win an Oscar in 1964. He had to deal with seemingly insurmountable adversity, and very active haters. When asked why he kept persisting, he said, “After my first audition, the casting director said to me, “Why don’t you stop wasting people’s time and go out and become a dishwasher or something?” That was it.

This is true of so many illustrious careers the world reveres today. Elvis Presley often recited what Jimmy Denny, the manager of the Grand Ole Opry, considered the sacred temple of his music genre and the Jimmy its high priest said. It was after Elvis’ very first performance. Denny fired Elvis on the spot told him, “You ain’t going nowhere, son. You ought to go back to driving a truck.” That’s all Elvis needed to hear.

And you know where The Big O got her mojo. Of course I’m talking about Oprah. On her first position from prime time TV she was fired and told she was, ”unfit for television news”.

Oh… Donahue and many other since wish that person never said that to Oprah. You just awoke the beast… the beast whose new motivation and resolve would go on to create one of the most powerful media empires in history.

As Frank Sinatra said, “The best revenge is massive success.”

Instead of trying to reject the words people tell you about what you can or cannot do, absorb them. Let them boil your blood. Let their words harden your resolve. Then plot, scheme and take unrelenting action to prove those SOBs wrong. It’s fantastic motivation!

Then you can fly them to your Hall of Fame inductee ceremony. Place them on the front row and during your acceptance speech wag your finger at them like Michael Jordan did to Pop Herring, the High School basketball coach who cut him from the team, and say, “You made a mistake, dude.”

Love your haters. They give you someone’s ass to kick.