“Do what you love and not be hated? Now you’re just being greedy!”
NAKATANI Akihiro
“Better, I think, to make a difference and run the risk of failing sometimes, of being made fun of, and yes, appearing arrogant. It’s far better than the alternative.”
Seth Godin
“You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.”
James M. Barrie
Being liked is not the most important thing in the world.
Being hated is not the worst thing in the world.
Not even God and Richard Dawkins, whether you believe in them or not, get liked by everyone.
If characters like God and Richard Dawkins don’t get unanimous praise…what chance do you have? 😛
Allow yourself the freedom to be hated. Allow other people the freedom to hate you.
Which is not to say that you should let people get in your face/blog/home.
People who want to get in your face can talk to the police/secret service/security/hand/taze-me-brothers/delete button.
But you must allow them to exist. Out there. Sort of in the abstract.
You must allow them to hate you in their hearts.
You must allow them to speak ill of you in your absence.
You must allow them to look at you funny.
You must allow them to mutter under their breath.
You must allow them to laugh at you.
You must allow them to think you’re a weaboo, an idiot, a wannabe, someone who’s forgotten “who he is” and “where he’s from”.
You must allow them to think you’re a misguided idiot who will never get good at that language and even if he does WTF good will it do him?
Why? Because for a good reason?
No, because for selfish reasons.
Because setting them free will set you free.
Once you allow other people the freedom to hate you, you become free of the restrictions, distractions, distortions and contortions involved in trying to make them like you. You become unstoppable. It’s kind of scary, actually. The power.
Allow yourself the freedom to be hated.
Allow other people the freedom to hate you.
Here are the names of some people who tried to make perfect countries where everyone looked and thought about the same, where no one was allowed to hate them:
- Adolf “Godwin’s Law” Hitler
- Pol Pot
- Idi Amin
- Hendrik Verwoerd
- Jan Smuts
- Mao Zedong (after, like, season 50, when he jumped the shark)
- Lord Farquaad
It never went well and someone always had to come and clean up after them.
For your own personal life to be good, it’s important that you be a bit of a benevolent dictator in terms of information control, just like an athlete needs to remain supremely self-confident at all times.
But take a page from the Dutch playbook 1. For a people to be good, for a country to be good, for the world at large to be good — for everything outside your personal bubble to be good — it’s very important that idiots-that-aren’t-you be given a long leash.
Because while most of those idiots are just that — idiots — a few of them might do something truly amazing.
As a matter of fact, to the world at large, you might actually be one of those idiots, in the middle of doing an amazing thing.
Let unspoken, unactioned hate and misunderstanding run rampant.
Being hated is not the worst thing in the world.
Hating yourself, is.
Hating yourself and realizing that The 4400 is never coming back.
These are the worst two things in the world 😛 .
Mind your own business. Live in and work on your own reality. Compare yourself to yourself.
Notes:
- Ironic… ↩
LIES, THE 4400 WILL COME BACK!!
IT WILL IT JUST….
*breaks down*
This has come along at just the time I need it. I write my notes in work in as much kanji as I can manage, and people give me odd looks and mutter things about me. Even call me ‘weird’ and ‘strange’ to my face.
It seems for too long I’ve actually cared about all of this. If I free them, I free me.
I love you Khatz. \(^o^)/
YES.
The people I live around tend to be intimidated by me because I don’t pay them much attention and do things I know is going to get me looks but do them wholeheartedly with disregard to how people will label it. I’ve talked about this subject with my brother recently, and I’ve said a few times ‘People are not the be-all-and-end-all of everything to the individual. They are not you. A person shouldn’t be bound to any one person.’ I also referenced your article that talks about how your friends were upset because you were doing your own thing and not what they want to do – this is why I don’t make ‘close’ friends, because each person is their own person and whatever somebody else does is irrelevant to the individual; so what if so-and-so won’t go out with a drink with you? There’s bazillions of other people in the world, why be bound by any one person? Why be upset that they are doing their thing and not somebody else’s? A true friend, then, is one that embraces a person for what they are and is not bound by them. They accept that they are what they are, and they are what they are.
As ‘sad’ as it sounds, for most people ‘friends’ are a burden – because most people are bound to people they label as friends, they become upset when they do what they will and not what others will, and they have to avoid being themselves to stay on friendly terms. Is this not sad? Others are not you. Being acceptive of this fact is really the only thing that could seperate ‘friends’ from any one else – otherwise they’re just another unnecessary burden.
In short, if they hate you for it, in that moment they are not your friend – so let them be. Let them hate.
It’s strange, I haven’t experienced many jerks in my language learning experience… Maybe it’s because I’m not very social, but really, any time someone sees me doing reps, writing kanji, or pulling out my iPod during classroom breaks are like, “What are you doing? Learning Japanese?! Sweet!”
Could be that I’m in college… and I also kind of gave up on caring about other people’s perspectives in my final years of high school…
Is this a big issue to a lot of people?
I’m in High School right now, and according to Psychology, my elective, nearly all teens are self-preoccupied. Teens only think about what other people see in them. Guys care less than girls do about their self-image. Educated and/or older people also care less about other people’s opinions.
(All based on what my textbook says)
Being only one year out of my teen-hood, I can say that this sounds accurate!
Wise.
This is pretty much how I get through everyday working in Customer Service. Because let me tell you… there are some nasty people on the other side of that counter. ;D
Also, an on-the-side inspirational story? My great-grandmother was paying for my college, and one day I told her that I was thinking of majoring in Japanese. She immediately went into an ‘educational’ rant as to how they (the Japanese people) are all devils and monsters because they killed her brother in WW1 (… or was it 2? >_> no, probably 1) So, I sat there, and listened to her story to the very end, and when she had nothing left to say, I began to tell her of all the beautiful and amazing things about Japan, and how you can’t blame a whole nation for the actions of a select few people. She still wouldn’t accept it though (old people are stubborn) and every time I would go to see her, she would remind me of how she “disapproved”. Time flows right along though, it doesn’t stop for anyone – and neither does my Japanese. She could have disowned me, stopped paying for my college, thrown rocks at me? …but that’s still no reason to give up on what I loved. No one was going to die because I wanted to study a foreign language.
Fast forward to today, she found out how Martha Stewart (her idol) loves Japan, and now she can’t get enough of it. Irony. The same person who cursed those ‘foul dogs’, now praises them as if it was the most obvious of things in the world. If someone is too ignorant to even listen to your side of the story, they’re not worth explaining it to. Let them realize your genius on their own.
Haha. Another thing I’ve said many times before: “The average 40 year old is stupider than a child because they’ve had 40 years to develop an ego” People generally get more stupid the older they get; the difference between the average child and the average ‘adult’ is that the adult has had so many years to develop an ego =-p
Today I realized something. Somewhere I read that “the more you hate something, the stronger it becomes”, but it never occurred to me that the more others hate YOU, the more powerful YOU become.
The more they hate you, the more they can be affected by what you say or do. The more they hate you, the more your successes will hurt them. The more they hate you, the more that they damage themselves.
As Khatz would say: Don’t hate, stop being “an hero”, let haters be hatin’, and let success be the ultimate revenge.
That is probably the greatest thing I’ve read today. Awesome realization!
Very good article. This helped me a lot. Thanks Khatz!!!