Why Your Success Will Attract Haters

Know Yourself, Have a Plan, Press On (Comedy Mindhacks #138)

Recently, I was watching The Ultimate Fighter when one of the fighters said something that immediately made me stop and write it down. Before walking into one of the biggest fights of his life, he looked at the camera and said, “I’m doing this to prove to myself that I can do it. I don’t care what the world thinks about me.” I remember thinking, That’s exactly the mindset I want to carry into life in general and stand-up in particular.

I’m glad I wrote it down because that exact quote hit me again just a few days later. A comedian friend of mine just launched a brand-new comedy venture in his local scene. For a first show, it couldn’t have gone much better. The show sold out, the room was packed to standing-room-only capacity, the audience loved it, the comedians had a great time, and the venue owners and staff couldn’t have been happier. By every reasonable measure, the evening was a huge success. It looked like the beginning of something that could become really special and I know it’s gonna be.

But I also remembered what I had told him a couple weeks before the event: “Dude, just remember: When yo do something good, there’ll always be haters.” It was almost prophetic. Within hours of his event ending, people inside his local comedy scene had already started criticizing the show in a private group chat. They weren’t offering constructive feedback or thoughtful suggestions about how to make it better. They were simply tearing it down because, as I’ve learned, that’s what crappy people do; that’s what haters do. Want to know if someone’s a hater? Here’s the telltale sign: Haters don’t create; they try to tear down creators and what they’re creating.

Comedy’s a strange business because, while there are tons of haters, so many comedians I’ve met are generous, encouraging, and genuinely want others to succeed. Others, however, operate from the “famine mindset” I’ve talked about before in these articles and on my podcasts. That is, they operate from the assumption that success is a limited good. So, if another comedian gets a booking, they feel like something has been taken away from them. If someone else builds an audience or starts a successful show, they see it as evidence that there’s now less room for them.

I learned that lesson a couple years ago at an open mic in Hawai’i. On that particular night, not a single audience member showed up. Not one. The room consisted entirely of comedians sitting with their arms crossed, scrolling through their phones, waiting for their own turn to perform. Since they’d already heard my material numerous times at these open mics, I decided to throw out my prepared set and spend my seven minutes practicing crowd work on the only people available: The other comedians.

One comedian absolutely hated it and, for some reason, it pissed him off. While I was still on stage, he started yelling at me to “do real @#$%ing comedy” and stop wasting everyone’s time. After the mic, I approached him in the parking lot because I honestly wanted to understand what had upset him so much. We talked for a few minutes, went our separate ways, and I assumed that would be the end of it.

Several months later, we ended up booked on the same lineup for a Don’t Tell show with a real audience. That night, I performed one of my regular sets, and afterward he walked over to me and, quite surprisingly, he apologized for what he’d said months earlier. He admitted that he’d assumed I didn’t actually have jokes because most of what he’d seen me do was fool around with crowd work at an empty open mic. But watching a real performance completely changed his opinion.

That experience taught me something I’ve never forgotten: Many people form strong opinions based on very little evidence and many critics aren’t actually evaluating us as fairly as we imagine. They’re filtering what they see through their own experiences, frustrations, insecurities, and assumptions. It’s the same reason I take the advice of competition judges with a grain of salt. Of course, there are times when criticism reveals something I genuinely need to improve. Other times, however, it reveals far more about the critic than it does about me.

That’s one of the reasons I think so often about something Kobe Bryant once said: “Learn to love the hate. Embrace it. Enjoy it. You earned it.” I don’t think Kobe meant that we should go around trying to make people hate us. What he meant is that the moment someone begins doing meaningful work, they’ll inevitably attract people who are bothered simply because they’re moving forward. And he was 100% correct! If you have a hater because of your hard work, you earned it. Here’s the truth: Progress has a funny way of exposing people who have stopped progressing themselves.

That’s why I loved what the fighter on The Ultimate Fighter said before he walked into the cage. He wasn’t fighting to satisfy critics or silence doubters. He wasn’t trying to prove himself to strangers on the internet. He simply wanted to prove to himself that he could do the thing, that he could do something difficult. In my view, that’s such a healthy place to work from because it puts the focus back where it belongs.

Stand-up has been teaching me that same lesson over and over again. If I perform to earn everyone’s approval, or even anyone’s approval, I’ll lose because that game can’t be won. There’ll always be another critic, another cynic, another anonymous comment, or another comedian convinced that my success somehow threatens theirs. If I let those people determine whether I keep going, I’ve quietly handed them authority over my journey.

So, I’m always trying to adopt and stick with the fighter’s mindset instead. I wanna write better jokes than I wrote last month. I wanna become a stronger performer than I was last year. I wanna keep producing shows, writing articles, recording podcasts, and stepping onto stages because each one gives me another opportunity to grow. Whether someone else applauds that journey or criticizes it really isn’t the point. The point is: The more my identity depends on other people’s approval, the more vulnerable I’ll become when my success inevitably attracts their criticism.

The truth is, there’ll always be people cheering from the crowd, and there’ll always be people complaining from the sidelines. So, what do I do when I start succeeding and people come after me? I stay focused and keep pursuing my goal. Nobody else gets to decide whether I continue. That decision belongs to me and me alone. When I remember that, I spend less time worrying about what the world thinks and more time proving to myself that I can become the person and comedian I wanna be.

Now, one last thing while you’re still here: Recently, I created a new app, a tool I wish I’d have had early on: Comedian Persona Explorer. It can help comedians figure out what they didn’t realize they were missing regarding their persona. Whether you begin with a single report or continue using it as you grow, my goal in creating it is simple: I hope you’ll spend more time becoming the comedian only you can be. Check it out HERE.

Along the same lines, let me just say that, if reflections and tools like these are helpful to you, that’s also exactly why I wrote Comedy Mindhacks. My goal isn’t simply to help comedians write better jokes. It’s to help comedians understand the invisible thinking behind better comedy. Every mental model becomes another tool for building momentum, and over time those small shifts in thinking have a way of producing much bigger shifts on stage.

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