Somebody hates me. Yaaaay! - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Somebody hates me. Yaaaay! - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog Last week, an editorial in one of Denmarks leading newspapers took aim at yours truly. Heres the introduction: Enforced mirth The title alone guarantees some mirth: Chief Happiness Officer senior happiness comissioner. The line between embarrassing and funny may be a fine one, but you certainly cant take a title like that seriously. Truth to tell, among many other ridiculous titles, it has to be a candidate for some award: stupidest title of the year or something like that. (source) It goes on at some length When I first spotted this editorial it made me sad. Nobody likes to be criticized I certainly dont and this criticism seemed both unfair and a little malicious to me. A blog comment like this one is another good example. Theyre very rare, but they do crop up occasionally. As I was thinking about how to react to the editorial, I remembered this graph by Kathy Sierra: In one of her very best posts (and thats saying something) Kathy talks about the physics of passion saying: You dont really have passionate users until someone starts accusing them of drinking the koolaid. You might have happy users, even loyal users, but its the truly passionate that piss off others enough to motivate them to say something. Where there is passion, there is always anti-passion or rather passion in the hate dimension. This means that the kind of criticism I got in that editorial is great news. It is a sign that my message is sharp enough that some people take an active dislike to it. They may not care for it but they care! If all I got was negative feedback it would probably be time to rethink my work in happiness, but fortunately its not all hate far from it! Many, many people tell me that they enjoy my book, blog and presentations and have used them actively to become happier at work. I think we can all use Kathys excellent reminder to do two things: 1: Whatever youre doing, get yourself and others passionate about it. Your project, product, company, process, leadership, work, salesmanship whatever youre doing will go better with passion. This means that your message can be anything but bland. Dont set out to actively piss people off thats just crude. But if youre pleasant, moderate, mild and soft-spoken you also run the risk of being utterly forgettable. No one will oppose you but no one will be passionate about whatever it is you do either. Thats why you must hone your message to the point where its possible to be passionate about it. 2: When people get negative about you, remember that this is part of the process. As Kathy puts it: Should you ignore the detractors? Diss them as nothing but evidence of your success? Should you just wave them off with a just jealous remark? Absolutely not. Somewhere in their complaints there are probably some good clues for things you can work on. But if you start trying to please them all or even worse, turn them into fans, that could mean death. Death by mediocrity, as you cater to everybody and inspire nobody. Id rather go down in flames than risk death by mediocrity. Kevin Briody said it best: I don?t want their reaction to be a measured, rational, dispassionate analysis of why the product is better than the alternatives, how the cost is more reasonable, feature set more complete, ? I want ?f**king cool! Period. I want that pure sense of wonder, that kid-at-airshow-seeing-an-F16?on-afterburners-rip-by so-close-it-makes-your-soul-shake reaction, that caress-the-new-Blackberry until-your-friends-start-to-question-your-sanity experience. I want an irrational level of sheer, unfiltered, borderline delusional joy. What about you? Thanks for visiting my blog. If you're new here, you should check out this list of my 10 most popular articles. And if you want more great tips and ideas you should check out our newsletter about happiness at work. It's great and it's free :-)Share this:LinkedInFacebookTwitterRedditPinterest Related