People Don’t Back You Because You Are Right
Or, not everybody agrees with you, but those who do have strong affinity towards you
Welcome to Issue 52!
👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
I rarely do this, but I was on an internet forum a few days back where this person was talking about why he was unable to do anything meaningful for quite a few days because his work got rejected.
Rejections hurt. But it only does because we give too much value to somebody’s opinion. In any creative field, it is almost impossible to satisfy everybody. No matter how good a book is, it has a number of one-star reviews.
Rejection is just somebody’s opinion; nothing more.
Creators always face rejection. If you aren’t getting rejections you are not creating. You are not challenging the status quo. You are playing safe. Creators take risk. They explore unknown territories. The best of them face the worst of rejections.
The best way to become immune to rejections is to have so many of them so frequently that they stop to matter. Creators conjure up things out of nothing. These things, unlike rejections are permanent.
Smart people don’t look for new information. They look for are new perspectives.
New perspectives come from strongly opinionated people. Being opinionated does not mean you are angry, negative, and shout at people all the time. Being opinionated means you can shift how people think—about themselves, about the society, and about the world.
Your opinion may not be the best, but you’ve done the work required to have one, and you can state the arguments for the other side better than your opponents. That’s what counts.
People don’t back you because you are right. They back you because you’ve got a backbone. It doesn’t matter if you are right or wrong. What matter is that you have skin in the game. You stand up for what you believe in. You are not number one. What matters is you are a “Category of One”.
You polarise people. Not everybody agrees with you. But those who do have strong affinity towards you. They share your opinion. They believe what you believe. If you have strong opinions, you have strong fans.
If you are a writer, you don’t publish commonly accepted that is available in 1,000 other places which everyone agrees with. If you are a filmmaker or an author, you don’t copy-paste tried and tested formulas. You are experimental. You are radical. You are avant-garde.
If you are a founder, you don’t make money by seeking rent from existing ideas. You have a mission and an enemy—both of which you want to execute.
You are not very big. You are niche. You don’t have 1,000 true fans who’ll back you with $10 a month. You’ve got 100 true fans who are ready to back you with $100 a month.
You inject what’s unique about the way you think into what you do. You pour yourself into your craft and everything around it: how you market it, how you sell it, how you support it, how you explain it, and how you deliver it. Others cannot copy your narrative, because you are part of it. You are too unique to emulate.
Not many people are like that because faced with the opportunity to become the Category of One, they hesitate. They compromise. They dumb things down. They play safe.
They take the easy way. Instead of thinking for themselves, they depend on the insight of others. It’s easier to copy than to innovate. It’s easier to borrow insight than generate one.
Nothing wrong with it. But when we assume the insight of others is our own, we create an illusion of knowledge. Borrowed wisdom is not original. No matter how much we act on it, we cannot own it.
It’s possible that you are a Category of One without many fans. But you will never become a Category of One if you follow the crowd. It takes guts to be outrageous. It takes hard work to have an opinion. It takes courage to have skin in the game.
TIMELESS WISDOM
In a hypercompetitive world, it is infinitely more productive to ask, “How am I different from someone?” instead of, “How do I stack up compared to someone?” There’s a lot more to be learned from contrast than comparison—about ourselves and others.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
1.
“We’re like sailors on a ship that long ago left port and now urgently needs repair. We’d love to return to dock and get it kitted out perfectly — setting up our lives so they’re just as we’d like them — then start the journey again. Instead we have to patch things up mid-voyage as best we can, adapting incrementally towards the people we’d like to be.”
— Struggling to Achieve Perfection?
2.
“One of the most pervasive examples of this kind of blindness is one that I haven’t seen mentioned explicitly. I’m going to call it orthodox privilege: The more conventional-minded someone is, the more it seems to them that it’s safe for everyone to express their opinions.”
3.
“I would advise you to take even simpler, or as you say, humbler, problems until you find some you can really solve easily, no matter how trivial. You will get the pleasure of success, and of helping your fellow man, even if it is only to answer a question in the mind of a colleague less able than you. You must not take away from yourself these pleasures because you have some erroneous idea of what is worthwhile.”
— Do Not Remain Nameless to Yourself
4.
“Following the end of World War 2, these four psychologists were interested in finding out what had motivated so many supposedly ordinary citizens in Germany (and elsewhere in Europe) to participate in the awful designs of the fascist regimes that had taken hold there. This is what they found out…”
5.
“In the last half-century, the global production of meat has undergone a seismic shift. While meat was once mostly raised on small farms, today almost all the meat we eat comes from industrialised “factory” farms which are ideal environments for virus and bacteria mutations that human immune systems have never seen.”
BOOK WORTH READING
James O’Brien is a British radio presenter where he listens to people phoning him everyday and blaming benefits scroungers, the EU, Muslims, feminists and immigrants for whatever is wrong with the country and the world.
In How To Be Right, James provides a hilarious and invigorating guide to talking to people with faulty opinions. With chapters on every lightning-rod issue, James shows how people have been fooled into thinking the way they do, and in each case outlines the key questions to ask to reveal fallacies, inconsistencies and double standards.
The reason why conversations like this are simultaneously so frustrating and revealing is that people like him have lost the desire to question what they are being told. Their bespoke, unchallenged diet of ‘news’, augmented we now know by Facebook algorithms and deliberately fake stories, is so unvaried that the possibility that it might be largely bogus is never entertained.
It’s a pretty solid reminder to question your assumptions before forming them. Unfortunately, it isn’t so easy. The least you can do is do the work required to form an opinion before getting into arguments and debates.
— How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong by James O'Brien
TWEET WORTH MENTIONING
The best way to heal a sick education system is to empower parents so they can help their children to learn for themselves. This will save them time, money and energy.
Before You Go…
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