Learning From People You Hate

A few days ago, I saw the announcement that Logan Paul was going to be a featured speaker at the Traffic & Conversion Summit in San Diego. And… the reactions ensued.

Personally, I couldn’t give two flips about Logan Paul. But, apparently a lot of people think he’s a real ass. And they proceeded to rip the organizers of T&C for having the nerve to invite this guy to be a featured speaker.

Because, OF COURSE, a room full of online marketers can’t learn anything from a guy who built a Youtube channel with 23.5 million subscribers and built a net worth of about $50 million while only being 27 years old. No way! He’s annoying, so dismiss that guy, right?!

You wanna another grand example?

Donald Trump.

The moment you saw that name, you probably experienced some kind of emotional reaction rather instantly, right? You either like him or you hate his guts.

Now, if you hate him, here’s the next question you should honestly answer…

Can you learn anything from him?

Can you separate out how you FEEL about him and still see what he’s good at? Trump clearly is a master marketer. He can MOVE an audience. I think he is a great branding person. And, let’s face it, the guy moved from a real estate dude, to TV and books, to being the President of the United States. Again, regardless of how you FEEL about him, he did that. And you’d be lying to yourself if you say there’s nothing that could be learned from that.

Even if you dislike a person, you should still be able to recognize the things they’ve done well.

Nobody is uni-dimensional. And whether you like them or disagree with them shouldn’t have any impact on you being able to extract what lessons there are to be gotten.

Donald Trump is probably one of the starkest examples. In fact, the polarized reactions he gets is, from a marketer’s standpoint, proof it is working. You never want people to be indifferent to you. You want them to either love you or hate you, but either way they’re talking about you. And Trump is the living embodiment of that. He says what he thinks and says it in very absolute ways… which is one of the known strategies for building authority.

In political circles, I would put AOC into the same boat. Look, I FEEL as if she’s an idiot, I’ll be frank. Personally, I disagree with almost everything she says. I don’t like her much. But, I can put that aside and recognize and respect her. Here’s why…

Even if AOC says things I think are stupid, I see that she has managed to get into Congress at a young age and develop some real political power to boot. She knows how to use social media to MOVE her followers (much like Trump). She is incredibly gifted at that. I don’t have to agree with her to recognize that SHE is a GREAT MARKETER. And if I were working on developing my “influencer” cred on social media, I’d be an idiot not to look at what AOC is doing.

In internet marketer circles, a lot of people know who Tai Lopez is. And he’s another guy who manages to garner some pretty polarized reactions. A lot of people dislike him and find him annoying. They get these instant reactions when they see the name Tai Lopez. Thing is…

Lopez is actually one hell of a businessman. And he, too, knows how to work social media to his advantage. And those polarizing reactions people get about him are intentional on his part. Just like AOC. Like Trump. Like Logan Paul. And probably many others you could think of.

Noticed how so many people on social media were talking about Andrew Tate in the last week or so? There’s another gem. What can you learn from that?

Look…

Social media has dumbed people down. It has trained people not to think, but to react.

People have shut off their brains. The algorithms just sit there and spark your lizard brain on purpose to get a reaction. And now the culture seems to be so busy having knee-jerk reactions and spewing bipolar feelings that they’ve lost track of real life.

People are too busy reacting to stimuli the algorithms have trained into them that they forgot the real world doesn’t really work like that.

Not only that, I think social media has led to a whole lot of ME, ME, ME! People think their reactions are actually important and they feel they need to react to every little damn thing or person on social media. Where, in reality, hardly anybody gives a crap about what you think. Maybe people who know you in real life might care, but people on social media don’t give a crap. Not really.

But, all these self-important nobody’s with outsized egos are out there reacting and commenting on social media about every person and opinion. Usually not realizing that those emotional reactions are engineered. That they’re being manipulated most of the time. And that, often, the person you’re reacting about is playing the game knowing all that.

So… put your ego aside.

Turn off your lizard brain.

We’re here to live and learn and to grow.

And if we are only capable of learning from people we love everything about, that’s pretty damn limiting, isn’t it?

And if you’re busy projecting your knee-jerk emotional reactions to things, you’ll often be blinded to what there is to learn in the first place.