Don’t Let Other People Control Your Emotions

You wake up early, get a ton of work done before dawn, go grab a coffee. You’re feeling great. Today’s a good day.

You open up your email. It’s junk, mostly. You move on to check your app store reviews.

There’s a new review in there. Exciting!

Except it’s a negative review. Not just negative, but downright mean. The kind of review that makes you question humanity itself.

Why would someone write something like that? More importantly, why would someone write that about your app?

The sad reality is that eventually, if you keep putting your work out online, you’re gonna get flamed.

We’ve all got haters. It took me a depressingly long time to realize that. Even longer to realize that there’s nothing we can do about it.

It’s easy to get upset. I know it sounds ridiculous, but the first negative review I had on one of my apps made me really angry, then really sad. I went through a whole spectrum of emotion.

I spent a ton of time getting that app ready for the world. He hadn’t paid a cent. And he’s there telling me how worthless it is. That he wishes he’d never downloaded it.

In fact, I think getting a little upset is probably a reasonably response.

After a while you get desensitized to the whole thing. You’ll get bad reviews. Bad customers. Bad investors.

But the truth is, it all gets better. Getting mad doesn’t help. Letting it get you down doesn’t either.

By putting yourself out there online you’re opening yourself up to the risk of negative comments. That’s what you sign up for.

By letting them get you down you’re giving the people that made them control over your emotions. They don’t deserve it.

You should be proud of what you’ve made. The people making comments online aren’t the ones making world-changing products, but you could be.

Don’t let anyone stop you.

I’m just a guy from the UK that’s okay at writing, better at startups, awesome at making coffee.

I curate a weekly email digest and publication called Starting Up.

This is day 91 in a 365 day writing experiment. You can check out why I’m writing every day here.

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