This is How to Deal with Haters | Ep 717

This episode explores strategies for dealing with criticism and negativity, particularly in the context of business and personal growth.

1. Ignoring hate can often be the most effective response, saving time and converting negative attention into inadvertent promotion.
2. Agreeing with critics disarmingly can neutralize the potential for conflict and reduce the impact of their words.
3. Employing humor and self-deprecation when addressing criticism can deflect negativity and endear others to you.
4. Hate is often an indicator of success and visibility; facing criticism is almost inevitable for those who stand out.
5. Turning negative feedback into a learning or promotional opportunity can transform challenges into benefits.

1. Introduction

Alex introduces the topic and shares why understanding how to deal with haters is crucial for anyone pursuing significant goals. Alex Hormozi: "If you do anything worth doing, there will be people who oppose you."

2. Personal Experiences with Hate

Exploring personal anecdotes, Alex discusses how he handles negative feedback and the impact of his rising online presence. Alex Hormozi: "I get a lot of hate. Let's go through some of the fun ones."

3. Strategies to Handle Criticism

Detailed strategies for dealing with criticism, including ignoring it, agreeing with it, or using humor to disarm it. Alex Hormozi: "Ignore, agree, or one up. That's kind of the escalation that handles 95% of it."

1. Ignore trivial negativity: Focus your energy on constructive activities rather than responding to every critic.
2. Use humor to disarm: When faced with criticism, responding with humor can defuse tension and endear you to your audience.
3. Agree with detractors when appropriate: Sometimes, agreeing with criticism can neutralize its sting and show your humility.
4. Self-deprecation: Own your flaws before others use them against you, which can reduce the power of their words.
5. Convert negativity into opportunity: Use negative attention as a free promotion, drawing more people to your message.

“If people know that they can control your behavior by pushing this button to get this response from you, more people will hit that button.” Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) shares effective tactics for managing hate and criticism, drawn from his experiences as a successful entrepreneur behind Acquisition.com. He emphasizes the power of persistence, resilience, and humor in turning negativity into motivation and maintaining a positive public image.

Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.

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Mentioned a quote by Winston Churchill

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Alex Hormozi
We should always be better at mocking ourselves than anyone else does. Think about all the things that you can think of that are adjacent to the insult that they have so that you can agree with them and attack even more viciously than they are to yourself. And then you will appear as the class act. You will appear as more humble, and they will have nothing to say back.

The wealthiest people in the world see business as a game. This podcast, the game, is my attempt at documenting the lessons I've learned on my way to building activities acquisition.com into a billion dollar portfolio. My hope is that you use the lessons to grow your business and maybe someday soon, partner with us to get to $100 million and beyond. I hope you share and enjoy.

If you do anything worth doing, there will be people who oppose you and they will throw rocks at you and attack. And I want to break down how I've dealt with it, going from one, seven and a half million followers over the last two years. So you kid too. I get a lot of hate. Let's go through some of the fun ones that my team pulled.

We'll see him working at Starbucks soon. Loser. How much did the fake private jet cost you? Loser. He just wants you to buy his course.

My shit's free, by the way. So point is, is lots of people. Hey, and I'll read you a more good one that I prefer from Winston Churchill because I think that probably matters a little bit more than loser. 29. You have enemies.

Good. That means you stood up for something sometime in your life. And I think that that kind of gets a little bit of the essence of what I talked to today, but more importantly, how to deal with it. And I want to give you really tactical what to do is not just, like, be tough, think positive, everything sucks, because don't be wrong, all that stuff's true. But I want to give you, like, more of, like, a PR playbook in terms of how to manage competitors who will hate on you, negative customers who will give you backlash, employees who will talk shit about you.

Like, these are the real things that happen in business. And so I want to walk through kind of two frameworks that I think through when dealing with hate negativity, people calling you a liar, calling your character in question. These are all things that'll happen. And as a side note, before I dive into this, hate is a prerequisite for success. Just like Winston Churchill said, you have enemies.

Good. You stood up for something sometime in your life. And so the only people who get no hate are people who are invisible. Like, if you do nothing. That is the only way to guarantee that you have no hate.

But if you stand for anything in your life, there will be people who stand against you, and it is in their nature to attack. And that's okay. Right? So first things first. I want to give you the.

This is the quick and dirty, and then I'll get a little bit more nuanced. All right? So when someone attacks you, you have three options, as I see it, if the claim they are making has an element of truth. And so at level one, you have ignore. All right?

Now, this is what I would consider my all time heavyweight champion of the world personal preference reasons why ignoring it cost me the least amount of time, the least amount of effort, and this is a very, very important one, is that they're choosing to advertise me. They're choosing to take all their hard earned attention, their eyes, the goodwill they have in their audience, and say, hey, everyone, look at Alex, man. Like, what a gift. And the crazy thing is, is that when people direct their customers towards you, some of them buy, and you don't even have to pay affiliate commissions for this stuff. And, like, that's what's mind blowing to me.

I'm like, thank God. Like, loser 29. Like, I hope you keep doing this. Cause it just continues to fill my bank account. So, that being said, ignore costs you the least.

There's no effort on your behalf. You get to siphon their audience to yours. And guess what happens next? Because most people see hate and then just think dramatic. So then they go and engage with your stuff, and then they oftentimes make a decision about you.

And then, as a corollary, make a decision about the person who sent them. All the while, guess what? You did? Nothing. It's amazing.

This is why it's probably one of my all time favorite ways to deal with most things in life. Now, I'll give you the quote that my dad told me many, many times in my life. He said, God gave you the power to ignore. Use it. Now, the second thing, or the second course of action is a little bit.

This one takes effort. All right? And this is also one of my favorites. Agree? All right.

Now, I think Gary popularized the concept of Eminem winning the rap battle. And what he did in the rap battle so that the other guy couldn't talk shit about him, is he claimed every single negative thing that was about him. He's like, I'm white, I'm short, I'm small, whatever. All the things that he said, right? And so what happens is, so let's say someone comes up, and I'm going to tell you really real world story that I just talked someone through who's a very big influencer, who's getting maliciously attacked about something that wasn't true.

I'm gonna actually read the whole dialogue that I sent this particular individual, and I think it'll help you. All right, but I'll get to that a little bit later. Now, if someone says, hey, Alex, you're such an egotistical douchebag and you don't care about other people, I'd be like, I could agree. Because it was like, yeah, man, I suck. What do they say now?

Now, my fans will probably laugh at that because they'll be like, wow, Alex is just playing the game, or whatever it is. But, like, if he or she. Then what do they say after that? Yeah, man, you do. Like, there's nothing to say, and it just silences it.

Because the thing is, is that conflict only goes on as long as there's an equal or opposing force. As soon as you step to their side of the table, there's nothing to push against. And so this actually ladders back to a way different story. I've talked about customer service, which is there's only one person allowed in the angry boat. And so what you can do is you get in the angry boat with them, and you say, I know, I suck.

And they're like, and then they have to get out. Because if they agree with you, then what? It just eliminates the conflict. There's nothing left to talk about. And then you move on with your life.

Now, the third level of this is, what I would consider ninja level, is there's different terms for this. Charge the shooter. But I'll just go just to keep the language simple or agree plus one or one up them. So if someone says, alex, you're an egotist and you don't like anyone, or, you know, you hate everybody, whatever. I could say, dude, you don't know the half of it.

I do this and this and this. I don't even talk to my mother. Like, all of these things. Like, you agree, and you say, if you knew half of it, you would say even more than that. And so what happens there is you just like Eminem.

You take every single thing they can possibly say about you. Now, the thing is, is that in this moment, it sounds easy for me to say this, but when you're in the trenches, the last thing that you're going to think about is ignore, because you're going to want to attack back because you're like, how fucking dare you, you liar. You're insulting me. But the thing is, is that the more it insults you, oftentimes it's usually there's an element of truth to it. And so ignore if you want.

Agree. Level two, level three is one up them. Insult yourself better than they can, and you should know how to do it better than they can because you know you better than they do, too. So this is the quick and dirty. Like, if you don't have a lot of time to think and you got to get something off fast, this is typically how I would approach it.

Now I'll give you a simple example. So, like, let's say you're a natural athlete, meaning you're a sports competitor of some sort, and you've built your career on being natural or like a vegan or whatever, right? You've built it on something that makes you unique. Now, if someone says you're not, that, you're building your whole brand on being natural, and this has happened many, many times in the bodybuilding world. So this is not like a news story.

And it's because people look crazy if they're on steroids. Spoiler alert, taking steroids, I inject testosterone. Let's just get that out of the way. Fantastic. I say it every fucking video.

That being said, how do you handle in that incident? Okay? Because there it's like, well, you don't want to agree. Be like, dude, if you knew half the steroids, well, it doesn't work there right now. I still oftentimes lean on this, which is ignore.

And ignore is so powerful because they're still sending you lots of traffic. And the reality is no one gives a shit because the only thing they will care about is drama. But no one likes somebody who just keeps punching someone who doesn't respond. The old stoics used to say, how do you get angry at a rock? You can yell at a rock, you can scream at a rock, but the rock does not change.

And eventually they go away. Honestly, 95% of the conflict or the attacks that you will get, usually you can deal with, with this three step process, which is first level, ignore, second level, agreement, third level, plus one. If you haven't seen this, there's an unbelievable scene in Ted Lasso where Nate, his former protege, gets on the camera live and talks a bunch of shit about him and says that he's an idiot. He doesn't know what he's doing, whatever. And then fast forward to the press conference where they're asking Ted Lasso, who's kind of the pinnacle of, like, the ultimate character in the movie in terms of how noble he is and how good of a person he tries to be.

And he handles it perfectly from a PR perspective. And he actually uses number three. He says, oh, man, Nate said that about me, man. He could have said this. He could have said this.

He could have said. He could have made some fun on my accent. He could have made fun of. And he's like. Cause I sound like Yankee doodle over here.

And so he just keeps on braiding himself. And then the whole crew of newscasters just start laughing because there's nothing else to say. Now, if he had then attacked back then, it would have become this whole drama. But after that, it's done. He puts it to rest, and then Nate looks vicious for attacking somebody who has a sense of humor.

So ignore, agree, or one up. That's kind of the escalation that handles 95, 99% of it. Real quick, guys, if you can think about how you found this podcast, somebody probably tweeted it, told you about it, shared it on Instagram or something like that. The only way this grows is through word of mouth. And so I don't run ads.

I don't do sponsorships. I don't sell anything. My only ask is that you continue to pay it forward to whoever showed you or however you found out about this podcast that you do the exact same thing. So if it was a review, if it was a post, if you do that, it would mean the world to me, and you'll throw some good karma out there. For another entrepreneur, the second category is typically ones where there are, there's a lie, and that's one where.

So here's, there's elements that they track. They attack your character, or they attack some element about you, whatever. But if someone lies, so really, like, I'm going to be very honest with you. There's tough ones with, like, sexual assault stuff and things like that. Like, that can be really tough.

On the flip side, you've got people who, like, lie about claims. Things they did, they didn't do. And that happens in sports, it happens in finance, stuff like, there's lots of claims basically, people make. But I think at the foundational point, it just comes down to a lie, is that they accuse you of lying about something. Now, even in these situations.

All right, so I'm just going to give you, like, these are the hard ones. Like, I think these now, most people just get destroyed on the ones that I was talking about earlier. I don't even see those as problems. Like, they're sending you traffic, they're making you money. Thank God for them.

All right, and you can do one, two, three, and you dismantle them publicly, and you look like a class act, and they look like a douchebag. Now this is something called an extinction curve, which basically means that people will, over time, you basically extinguish action. And so a classic example would be like, I could yell at a rock. And if I keep yelling at a rock, at some point I will stop yelling at the rock. Why?

Cause the rock doesn't give me any feedback. And so what we want to be in this situation is the rock. Like, when you are ignoring, you are stone, right? They can do whatever they want. It doesn't affect you.

And I love this position because you are greater than. And I'll give you a couple quick sayings around hate that I think are helpful. But, like, hate only comes from below. It never comes from above. In my entire life, it has never come from above.

And so if someone hates on you, just take that as mental note of the fact that they're below you and they concede the fact that they follow you. And they also are bad at business. Because, by the way, in my entire life, I don't think I've ever publicly hated or thrown shade on someone. And it's because I never want to send my customers to somebody else. I never send my audience that I work so hard to to somebody else, especially if I don't like them.

Why would I do that? Right? Why would I give them that gift? Why would I waste time on my platform to not deliver any value to my audience and then direct them to a competitor? What a fucking moronic thing to do.

Anyways, so you have this extinction curve that people, now some person will yell at a rock once and then walk away. Some people have to yell two, three, four times. They walk away. But everyone has a curve where they stop doing something, right? And so, like, if you knock on a door and no one comes, sometimes you knock again, and then, so.

But some people knock three, four, five times, everyone different based on how many times you've had to knock in the past before a door gets open. That's how extinction curves work. It's based on past behavior. And so based on the person who's hating on you, they will maybe hit on you one time and then disappear or hit on you two times and then disappear. But if you don't respond, they will eventually disappear.

It is just a fact of life. Unless they get reinforcement, they will disappear. And that's why I just choose not to engage. I also don't like wasting my time. Now, let's go into the four box of the ugly scenarios of what if what they're saying is basically calling you a liar around something core to your brand or what you've been known for.

Okay, so here's my little box. So you've got bigger than you, smaller than you, and then they said you lied about something or they said something else. So I told you this can get really tactful. So you can just like, look, where's this person on this sphere? All right, so let's start with the easiest one.

If someone's smaller than you and they just said, alex has big ears, I can ignore them, which I probably would, because I don't have time for that. I could agree and be like, hell yeah, I got big ears. Should see what else. Number three. I can be like, not only do I have big ears, I could one up them like they're actually even worse when it rains, because then I catches all the water and then my back gets wet.

It's a whole problem. Believe me. My wife will tell you right now, all of a sudden, there's nothing they can say. So you do the one two three process here. You pick whichever one you want, and all three of them will serve you.

Now, let's go into slightly harder territory. They're smaller than you, but they're basically calling you out on a lie that could threaten your reputation. They say you falsified claims you like you did something that you weren't supposed to do. Something along those lines, which typically comes to dishonesty, which is one of the things that the whole world hates. The world forgive just about anything except for a liar.

Kind of interesting. Now, in my opinion, I'm just giving you the Alex playbook. I ignore. That's it. I ignore.

And as painful as it is, and to see them frothing at the mouth and the comment threads they have go back and forth, never once have I made less money from anyone doing this. Because think about this. The only way that you combat their message is by being louder with yours, not directing your traffic to them. And so you ignore them. Plus, you amplify, because every moment that I spend addressing them, I stop giving value to my audience.

So in a very real way, attacks have taken people down, but because of how they responded, not because of the strength of the attacker. And so they take someone off their game. Then they get in this petty, pissing match with someone who's lower than them and it makes them look bad. Even if you win, you lose. It's a pyrrhic victory.

You lose credibility, you look petty, people see different side of you. All of that's bad. And so I prefer to pretend you don't exist. And then ten x my message and tell everyone who's on my team these fuckers are lying and trying to destroy us. The only way that you beat hate is you don't beat hate, you drown it out.