Do it the hater way and die

Notes from a hater

Don’t live the hater way

I confess I’ve been a hater. In fact I still hate sometimes. And it doesn’t make me feel better.

That’s why l know what I’m talking about

In the next sections i’ll try to enumerate the different situations I’ve experienced

The Twitter hater

I used to use Twitter to answer any famous people tweet. l used to be very critic in my answers. And to be honest I didn’t use nice words.

I’m pretty sure you have seen this scene more than once. You might even seen yourself doing the same.

When we show this behavior we should ask ourselves, why am I doing it?

The code hater

I’m a software engineer. Recalling my first job as a software engineer I can remember the habit acquired from more senior engineers. We used to check other developers code together. The intention was just laughing at the others’ code written.

Now I can see what a stupid attitude I was having

I know this usually happens also in other fields, people usually evaluate others’ work.

When we show this behavior we should ask ourselves, how would I feel being on the other side?

The success hater

Have you ever seen yourself watching some successful entrepreneur / sportsmen/women speech and criticizing them?

I have.

It’s difficult to accept others’ success sometimes. We usually associate it to some external help or inheritance. And we just do it to punish ourselves for not being that successful.

When we show this behavior we should ask ourselves, what does success mean for me?

I reckon you can find more examples and situations. Don’t hesitate to share them in comments.

What’s the point?

I think hating doesn’t help to our mental health.

Our brain works by routines. We also learn by repetition. If we get used to hate. while showing our points of view, it could become a routine.

This can lead to sadness. It could make you feel you’re not good enough. You can start comparing yourself with other people and hate them just because they’ve accomplished something you haven’t even tried.

That’s why I recommend doing the exercise of asking ourselves a simple question after a hater behavior appears. I’m going to share the main answers I found for the ones I mentioned before.

why am I doing it?

Briefly said, jealousy. It’s difficult to say ourselves we’re jealous about something, but doing the exercise can put you in to a position of honesty. And once you realize that the main reason of your behavior is driven by jealousy, you find out it’s not worth it to keep doing it.

how would I feel being on the other side?

Unempathetic. There must be a reason why someone does their job in such way. When me see some work we don’t agree, we can just fix it of let it as it is. But we don’t know the context when that work was done, so we shouldn’t evaluate it.

In fact in programming it won’t be the first time a programmer criticize some code that was written by themselves not that long ago.

what does success mean for me?

Something completely different from the one I’m hating. I might feel jealous or raged because those people succeeded in something I would like to be good at. Or because they risked something and I weren’t confident enough take the risk. It doesn’t matter. People succeed and fail every day. If you were reading someone who succeeded you’d better gathered their knowledge there hating them for succeeding.

I just wanted to share some tricks that helped me moving from the hater side to the admirer and learner side. And I’m mentally happier than before.

Thanks for reading.