Haters. Got some? Good! To paraphrase the great and funny Katt Williams: If you don’t have haters, you’re doing it wrong. Having haters means that people are noticing you, engaging with your work and having an emotional response. If that response is to get on the internet and call you a racist or a no-talent, well… First let’s look at some tactics for just processing all that acid that someone just spat at you. Timothy Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Work Week which I reviewed below, wrote a great post about this on his blog. In that, there’s a video, check it out:

He talks about Seneca, bad reviews and crazy people leaving you voice mail. He’s clearly very happy with himself and that can grate a little, HOWEVER, he’s dropping MAD SCIENCE. Absorb it.

The next is an interesting post I found at AudibleHype.com. This one is quite relevant to us as musicians who are on the internet a lot. In the post he interviews many underground hip-hop musicians and talks to them about their approach in dealing with criticism and negative feedback. This is especially interesting because if you know the internet hip-hop scene it is an INCREDIBLY toxic, testosterone soaked, hater packed environment. I personally would rather hang out in that water filled trash compactor room from Star Wars. For whatever reason some of the braggadocio that is in the genes of hip-hop has mutated into an incredibly ugly set of behaviors on the internet that you can see on YouTube comments, various forums, basically any web 2.0 space dealing with hip-hop. This may also be that your average hip-hop listener and internet user is young, male and filled with vague feelings that they are being ‘slept-on’.

He starts with some nice and simple bullet points:

1. This is a business, not a talent show. That’s real simple but 90% of rappers will still complain about their skills getting slept on. There are seven billion human beings on this planet and every single one of us is going to die. Getting over yourself is the best business investment you can make…and it’s not easy.

2. Life is not fair because there are no rules. The main test of character you face in life is what you decide to do after you finally realize that. Is that an opportunity or a tragedy? Your call. Nobody is there to referee the game. You will have triumphs, you will have setbacks, but the game itself is never over.

3. If you really thought you were the shit, you wouldn’t need to prove it. Arrogance is actually not confidence, it’s insecurity.

Check out his article here: Love Thy Hater: How to Learn and Profit from “Bad” Feedback.j