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You’re successful once people start hating on you

A recent understanding — you can better measure your success by the amount of “haters” you have, instead of measuring your success by how many “fans” you have. #zenoferic

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In other words,

Measure your success by the number of people who are extremely anti-you.

I feel to make an impact in the world is to impact the emotions, thoughts, or ideas of others on a deep level. This means,

It’s better to have a small number of people who extremely love your message, instead of a large number of people who mildly like your message.

Taken further,

Don’t seek followers, seek unfollowers.


In 2017, when living a year in Vietnam, doing some deep and intense meditation, reading of classics, and an extreme disconnection from the Internet — I felt abundant with new, revolutionary, and epic ideas (which turned a lot of people off). As a result, a lot more people started to “hate” on me. While others might have seen this as a bad thing —I recognized it as a true sign of success. Why? I was simply sharing my ideas, 100% unfiltered, and honestly — and that turned many people the wrong way. By having people show extreme aversion to my message meant that I was affecting people and making an impact. And not only that, but I also discovered something interesting — I started to cultivate a following of some people who were DEEPLY moved and impacted with my message and ideas.


Demetricate

So the problem is in today’s society, we measure success by metrics — “measurable” metrics like follow numbers, like numbers, money numbers, etc. But the problem is this — numbers don’t show your success.

Vincent Van Gogh didn’t sell a single painting in his life. Horace wasn’t read that widely when he was alive. Marcus Aurelius’ writings were unknown until after he died.

I know it’s hard; in life, you cannot measure your impact in the world with numbers and follower numbers. Unfortunately the trend is simply accelerating — it’s easier for young people to judge their own self worth and self esteem by how many Instagram followers and Facebook likes they get —rather than measuring their own success by their own ruler.

As adults, we do the same, except we measure our success and impact in life via the car we drive, the neighborhood and home we live in, the social and country clubs we belong to, or the “prestige” of the institutions or schools we are associated with.


I say fuck all that. Rather, let us decide for ourselves:

How do I define success for myself?

Then start to judge yourself by your own ruler.

And if you’re going to judge yourself via others— once you start getting hated on or trolled, smile. You’re successful!

ERIC