Responding to Mean Comments
Dear Friends,
In this article, I would like to talk about mean, unkind, and negative comments that we have received about our company, team, website, library, and/or articles.
If you have received a link to this page in response to a comment you made, please feel free to scroll down to find your particular negative comment, and our “stock response” to that comment.
If you are a subscriber, I hope this article will help you realize that there is a lot of “gratuitous negativity” out there, and that it is ok to not engage with it. As an investor, professional, or entrepreneur, reading these mean comments might help you become desensitized to them, and help you manage the emotional impact of mean comments that you will inevitably receive on your own journey towards financial success.
Be aware that negativity can come from anywhere: family, friends, bosses, coworkers, competitors, clients, neighbors, online trolls.
Be aware that negativity can be overt (ie. “you suck”) – or covert (ie. “good luck with your cute little project!”, “I’m just offering helpful unsolicited advice”)
If you are struggling with the impact of negativity towards you or your business ventures – such as through anxiety, procrastination, perfectionism, or depression – you might want to consider engaging the services of a therapist to help you manage the negativity in the moment, and to teach you emotional resilience and assertiveness skills to manage incoming negativity more effectively going forward. If things escalate, or lines are crossed, you might also want to consider reaching out to the police and/or legal council if appropriate.
People are endlessly creative in their negativity, so we will update this list from time to time with any new unpleasantness we come across.
Mean Comments and Responses
“Your website is ugly”
That’s ok – Beauty is in the eye of the beholder – Our website design works for us – and we are not trying to compete with Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel. At best, we hope the aesthetics don’t prove to be an impediment to the learning experience of our subscribers. I would caution against looking for educational content based on the aesthetics of the website, rather than the utility of the content itself. “Don’t judge a book by its cover…”
“Your website is pretty basic”
To be honest, I’m not sure what they meant by this. Probably a combination of basic appearance and basic functionality. But they’re not wrong – appearance isn’t really our goal – and our website’s functionality is pretty straightforward -it’s just a platform to share articles that we hope are more or less useful to subscribers. We’re not really inventing a new rocket propulsion system or curing cancer…
“Your writing style is bad”
That’s ok – different strokes for different folks – We are not Shakespeare, and we are not trying to write high literature or win writing contests. Our goal is to communicate information and ideas that are educational and informative in a way that is as efficient and effective as possible. Word smithing, beyond pragmatic functionality, takes a lot of time, talent, and effort – so it is not something we want to invest in. We believe our subscribers want to be educated, not bedazzled by literary prowess.
“Someone is just going to make something better and steal all your subscribers”
That is definitely possible, and we hope it doesn’t happen. However, we are confident it won’t, and will take steps to manage that situation if/when it does.
Furthermore, part of our educational service to our subscribers is to proactively share links to other educational resources that we believe they might find useful and helpful. Educational content and services aren’t mutually exclusive, and we strongly encourage subscribers to find additional educational tools that will help them triangulate ideas, learn from a different point of view, and cross check our own website’s content and ideas. It is a terrible idea to rely exclusively on one source of information – getting second and third opinions is usually advisable.
“If you charge money, nobody is going to subscribe”
We already have subscribers, so this comment is factually incorrect. Different people sit on different points of supply and demand curves. The fact that your interest and budget for this kind of content is $0.00 USD, doesn’t mean that someone else’s budget isn’t $1,000.00 USD. Furthermore, be aware that some people sit on the negative end of the demand curve – you’d essentially have to pay them to read this content. If we all had exactly the same supply and demand curves for everything, we wouldn’t have an economy at all.
“This stuff is available for free”
Yes – 99.999% of the ideas and information we share on this website are available for free online, through public libraries, and through other resources. Furthermore, you can probably also derive 99.999% of our ideas and conclusions on your own if you think about a topic long enough.
You are more than welcome to spend your time and energy looking through the internet to find the information yourself. You are also more than welcome to pay us a subscription fee to access that information already sorted, organized, thought about, annotated, and presented in a standardized format. We believe our searching, organizing, commentary, and presentation adds value to your learning journey, so we feel it is appropriate to charge subscribers a fee in return.
In addition to this stuff being available for free, the ideas and information we share are also available for greater sums of money – eg. elite private tutors are more than happy to teach you the same comment for $1,000.00 per hour. You are also able to borrow $200,000 USD in student loans to learn the same content via an MBA at a university.
We believe that our website offers a good intermediary between the free but chaotic mess that is trying to learn about finance and economics on the internet “by yourself” – and the highly structured, organized, and personalized learning experience you might get from private tutors or university degrees at exorbitantly high price tags.
“I can find all this stuff on Chat-GPT or other AI”
Yes and no – We use Chat-GPT and other AI platforms as part of our content creation process – we find it quite useful in some instances, and quite unhelpful in others. We encourage you to use AI as a learning tool in conjunction with any other learning tools that you find helpful – with the caveat that they might contain errors – much like our content, or any other content, can contain errors. “Trust, but verify”.
Closing Remarks
Haters are going to hate – so it is good to get used to catching flak from people.
1) Evaluate their comments for kernels of truth, because unless the other person is clinically psychotic or insane, they are usually not completely wrong. Imagine your critics are free consultants with shitty attitudes – ignore the attitude, and look at the content of their message. Some of them will be useful consultants with shitty attitudes, some of them will be useless consultants with shitty attitudes. In the end, they are working for you for free… so take what you can get.
2) Respond to them in your head, but don’t bother reacting to them in real life. What does your reaction achieve? You don’t need their permission, convincing, validation, or acceptance in order to continue and succeed on your financial journey. For every hater you meet, there is someone else out there who will appreciate you – focus on investing and spending energy on positive people who will reciprocate the positive energy, rather than sinking it into negative people who will only reward your attention with more negativity.
3)Evaluate if it is actually negative and you are right to be upset, or if you are misunderstanding the situation. ( ie. is their comment intended as constructive and helpful, but you are taking it the wrong way? is it simply a result of an individual’s habitual negativity bias or blunt phrasing patterns? or is it actually intended to be destructive, discouraging, trolling, hurtful?)
4) Why are they sharing this negative comment? “Hurt people hurt people” – so there might be some ulterior motives to their negativity beyond mere sadistic gratification or entertainment at getting a rise out of you – is their negativity an attempt to protect or bolster their own ego, soothe their insecurities, or promote their own business interests at your expense? Understanding that their negativity is usually about them and their psychological issues being triggered by your positivity and success can help mitigate their negativity affecting you. If they’re negative towards everyone and everything, it isn’t personal – so don’t take it personally.
To use a video game analogy – video games are chock full of bad characters – monsters, villains, minions, enemy soldiers. However, you usually have to fight them physically – with guns, swords, shields, magic spells. In real life, there is an additional category of villain that uses “psychological warfare” in order to mess with you. This kind of antagonistic behavior is hard to model and implement in video games, so it is usually left out. (I’ve never seen a video game villain that tries to undermine your self confidence and self worth as a way to stop you from winning the game). However, bad actors that use psychological and emotional abuse are extremely common in real life. Therefore, in order to progress in real life, you will likely need to learn how to confront and overcome these bad actors by improving your psychological hardening and emotional self defense skills – in this case, you fight fire with fire proofing, so that their attacks have less or no effect – ideally just bouncing off you.
There are infinite reasons why people might share negative or hostile comments – but it is always up to you to choose how you respond. If you quit your job after every mean comment, try to get everyone’s approval before proceeding on a business venture, or get stuck in back and forths with every troll you meet online – you are never going to get anywhere. “Take the high road” – and don’t bother getting stuck in mud fights with trolls under bridges (except if you’re into that sort of thing… but why….)
As for the bullies, haters, and one-uppers, I’d encourage you to move along – kindly go find another venue to spew your hate, toxicity, and negativity – it is not welcome here, and we will not tolerate your presence. You are free to cancel your subscription of your own accord, or we will kick you out – either way, no means no.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please feel free to message us via our public contact page or our subscriber only library help desk.
All the best,
Ricardo Vollbrechthausen
Post Script
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