The Ugly Truth About Haters (How To Stop Waiting)

I need to show you something.

It’s ugly and crass… but you need to see it.

If you have things to create… if you wish to share your thoughts, ideas, products, services, artworks on a public stage…

Then truly, this may well save your creative life.

Dabbling at creation in private, when there is no risk of critique, is easy.

But the moment you ship…

The moment you pull the trigger and put your creations out into the world…

That is when you expose yourself not only to the fans you seek, but the haters you dread.

Haters like this guy:

 

 

Take the time to read it again. Especially the last line.

See, here’s the thing:

You already know you “can’t please everyone.”

But the deeper truth is that most of the so-called “haters” are just brothers in pain.

Your work is not the offense. It’s just the random dumping grounds of the broken-hearted… the garbage can the drunk pukes into.

You and I live in this age of skin-deep, tech-enabled barbarism, where the social consequences of bad behavior are artificially absolved…

…where a man can safely hurl insults at another from behind the safety of a screen.

That is the reality you and I create in.

That is the collective vomit we must wade through, now, to do our work.

That terrifies most would-be creators. But for you, that must be your liberation.

You don’t need to steel yourself:

For behind every wild slur is a man wracked. A man caught in the throes of his own outworking.

So for fuck’s sake: CREATE IT.

See all your would-be haters thus unfanged.

Though the forest bristle with tooth and claw… let loose your lamb.

Take your “best” idea… the one sure to be your opus… the one you’ve kept in reserve for some future, unspecified date, when you’ll finally be “ready” to do it justice… and hack it to life, now, up on the stage for all to see.

Whatever it is you’ve been holding back, polishing for a future unveiling… SHARE IT WITH US NOW, while you are still above ground:

For this brief moment, here you are, walking the earth: blooded, enfleshed, eyes roving, lungs taking in another day’s breath:

Show us your shaggy, untrimmed truths, your lurching creations, your raw, unsifted songs:

Split us alive.

You have some weird magic to bring: some haunting note your life has carved you to make.

Never let another man keep you from that glory.

Just because one man’s creation draws another man’s destruction like poison to the suck is no reason to go on not creating:

That the torch draws moths is no reason to keep in darkness.

…

Bryan Ward is the founder of Third Way Man and author of the LIT Black Paper