Why Proving Others Wrong Is A Powerful Motivation (At The Start)
Everybody has encountered people who disagree with them or put them down at some point in their lives.
For most people I know, it started in school. It happened when their teacher told them for some reason, that they will never achieve their dreams or goals because it’s too big or ambitious
For some people, it might be when they were 3 or 4 years old and their parents told them that they need to be “realistic” in life.
For a few people, they might have been achievers when they were in school, but when they went into the real world or when they started working, their achievements were belittled by bosses or co-workers.
No matter who you are, you have experienced this at some point in your life.
What you do when people do this to you will define whether you’ll be successful in the future.
The average person will let these people dictate their life. They will listen to their voices even if they hurt. They will accept and say “these people are right, I will never succeed in my dream, oh well time to be realistic now.”
You really can’t blame these people because it’s so hard to fight other people’s perception of you. Humans are social creatures and we tend to care what other people think about us.
Successful people on the other hand does the opposite. They won’t let those kinds of people dictate their lives. They will get what they want. They will achieve their goals.
There’s a secret that some of the most successful people share: they use those people who put them down as motivation to succeed. They prove them wrong in the end.
Let’s take an example of 2 of the best basketball players of all time: Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant.
I watched Michael Jordan’s speech when was put in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. Everybody was surprised.
MJ mentioned everybody in his basketball career that put him down, everybody that didn’t believe in him or went against him, and he proved all of them wrong.
Kobe Bryant is another example. When he failed in the famous match of his rookie year against the Utah Jazz, when he airballed those shots, everybody put him down. He used this as motivation to get back at the Jazz, for the rest of his career. That’s why he always played great when playing against the Utah Jazz after that incident.
There are also multiple stories on MJ and Kobe taking it personally on other players who trash-talked them and going on to shut them up the next time they faced off.
The desire to prove others wrong might spark the inner competitiveness that you never knew you had. It’s a great feeling to know that you proved that your haters are wrong and you won in the end.
This can be a great motivating factor, at least at the start. The caveat here is that when you prove others wrong, that’s all you will care about. You will never stop being competitive.
I think eventually, there’s one important person in our lives that we can either prove wrong or right: OURSELVES. We want to prove to ourselves that we can do it, or we want to prove ourselves wrong when we say we can’t do it.
This might be the ultimate motivation that we need to succeed. Until then you can use those haters as motivation, prove those motherf*ckers wrong and get the success that you want!
