I Survived A Contract (Reputation) Killer’s Character Assassination Attempt

16 ideas and books that helped save my life.

Over the past year, someone bent on revenge has tried to assassinate me online.

You have probably seen a movie or TV show where a ruthless assassin is hired to kill someone. Often the story revolves around the fact that although the assassin doesn’t know anything about the intended victim, they have a job to do, so they do it without emotion.

I am currently the target of such an assassin. Although the assassin is not one trying to physically kill me, but my reputation and that of my businesses. My assassin is a “journalist.” Under the cover of being a professional writer, this “journalist” took a contract from someone looking for revenge for a business loss they believe I caused. I do not think they mean me any physical harm. Nonetheless, their purpose is to “destroy me,” truth be damned.

“Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” — The Assassins Creed’s Maxim

Living this experience has caused me to reflect. I’ve thought about the attack on me specifically, but also the growing use of attacks like this against people in general. In an era of fake news and “Deep Fakes,” where what happens online and on social media is perceived as real and lives forever, what can we do to protect our sanity (and reputation) from a targeted assassination?

My purpose in writing this article is not to rehash or rebut the story leading up to the assassination attempt. My purpose is to share what I’ve learned from surviving the attacks.

In today’s world, assassins armed with a computer and an active imagination can weaponize online news media and blogs to create viral misinformation. They can write stories that look like news, but which are one-sided, negative and rife with “alternative facts.” In the same way a contract killer might use guns, knives or bombs on a hit, they use words. The words create lies, the lies create a narrative and the narrative can destroy a reputation.

After receiving payment, my contract “reputation” killer wrote an “investigative article” and published it on a “news” site, then expanded the hit with additional “stories”.. A year-plus into their smear campaign, they are trying to intimidate other people and companies associated with me. The threats go something like this: “Do what we say” — i.e. remove me from their company board or disassociate with me — ”or the next negative article will include / be about you.” They have let it be known they will not stop and will keep trying to humiliate, embarrass and discredit me and those who are associated with me.

After these attacks started, I sometimes became discouraged, stressed, angry and frustrated. It created difficulty for my businesses, my partners and people I work with. It created difficulty for my family, and sadly my children, who had to deal with their own form of collateral damage as the stories circulated at school.

But despite all the negativity, there have been many positives. What I’ve learned living through a reputation assassination attempt has made surviving it not only possible, but in many ways has allowed my business to become stronger, and for me and my family to become happier. Here’s how.

The Top 16 Ways I Survived the Hit

“Character assassination is at once easier and surer than physical assault; and it involves far less risk for the assassin. It leaves him free to commit the same deed over and over again, and may, indeed, win him the honors of a hero in the country of his victims.” — Alan Barth

There are plenty of resources out there to help you defend or rebuild your reputation, but I want to tell you about how to fearlessly continue with your life — without hiding, feeling ashamed or giving up. Sixteen key ideas I’ve picked up from a variety of excellent books helped me neutralize the effects of the assassination and turn this negative experience into an opportunity for positive growth.

1. “Stop Worrying and Start Living.” Bestselling author Dale Carnegie’s advice is always applicable whenever you find yourself worrying about things that might never happen. For the most part, the negatives we imaginenever materialize, and likely never will. My imagination about the assassination attempt’s effects was always worse than it actually was. So each time I realized I was worrying about a worst-case scenario that may or may not become reality, I made myself stop. My biggest fears were in my head, not in the real world. Carnegie’s How To Stop Worrying and Start Livingmay have a dated style, but its timeless lessons endure.
2. Have perspective on the problem. Many problems always seem huge and final in the moment. But what’s amazing to me is that as the years go by, my “biggest problems” usually have turned out to be my dearest blessings in disguise. I can only recognize the connection from problem to blessing with a little perspective, i.e. time and distance. In the moment, try to accept that although it might seem like what’s happening now is terrible, it isn’t final. The future can hold a positive end. If all else fails, go read Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
3. Attitude is more important than fact. Zig Ziglar used to say, “Your attitude determines your altitude.” In my case, I understand that to mean a positive attitude can help me take the high road, despite the “facts.” If you know the truth and maintain a positive attitude, you can minimize many of negatives thrown at you. Check out Learned Optimismby Martin Seligman.
4. Never lose faith and hope.Whatever your beliefs, having faith in the face of hopelessness is really hard — but essential. When my assassin first published his story, he also started emailing links to people. The story began to spread, with people who had never met me reposting links with titles like “A cautionary tale…” spreading the story without even trying to determine if it was true. Then I lost a business opportunity I had been working on for over a year when the person on the other side lost faith because of what they read about me. This caused my faith and hope to waver. I started to question “Why me?” Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus, my favorite book to give away since 1987, helped restore my faith and hope. I’ve given over 300 copies to family and friends, because in tough times, this book can help us embrace the scary, not be discouraged, understand our true purpose and never give up on our path.
5. Practice gratitude. Post attack, I doubled down on being intentional in giving thanks and recognizing others, because despite the problems, I have a lot to be thankful for. In practicing gratitude, I use a daily journal, as well as the WinStreak app by Strategic Coach, The Perfect Day Formulaby Craig Ballantyne and Daniel Pink’s trick on Mental Substitution. The Gratitude Principle by Dan Sullivan is my go-to book on the topic.
6. Accept the things you cannot change. As poet Robert Frost once said: “In three words I can sum up everything I have learned about life: It goes on.” I couldn’t undo what was done, so anger, fear or self-doubt were not going to help. I had to accept the attacks happened and figure out how to move forward in my new reality of being a victim of a character assassin. The Surrender ExperimentandThe Untethered Soulby Michael Singer are great reads about accepting what cannot be changed.
7. Take responsibility.Even though my attacker was deceitful, one-sided and misrepresented more than he told the truth, the basis for his stories was founded in some truth. As a person, business owner and venture capitalist (VC), it is true that I’ve made and continue to make plenty of mistakes, and have failures alongside my successes. It’s the nature of investing in other companies that sometimes investments pay off, which makes everyone happy — and sometimes they do not. Any VC will tell you that, unfortunately, 6 or 7 out of 10 investments fail, meaning investors, employees and customers are sometimes negatively impacted. When failure strikes, denial doesn’t help anyone involved. I’ve found that owning up to mistakes lets me move on. It also helps those involved. By taking responsibility when things don’t work out, we can begin the healing process for any hurt we feel or caused. We all can acknowledge we did our best, learn from what happened and hopefully avoid repeating our mistakes. Check out A Better Way To Live by Og Mandino.
8. Understand the truth about problems. Without problems, you can’t grow and get better. I obviously wouldn’t have chosen to have an assassin try to destroy me online, especially through misrepresentation and falsehoods, but I know that since I refused to let him beat me or define me, I am already better because of this experience. Even writing this article and putting my name on it, when privacy is a big thing for me, has been a growth experience. The strongest trees, and people, face the biggest and most numerous storms. Do yourself a favor and find the poem Good Timber by Douglas Malloch and then the book It’s Not About The Horse by Wyatt Webb — there are enough pearls within to make it worth a quick read.
9. Don’t hide. One of the worst things about being attacked was that it sometimes became uncomfortable to interact with people who read the articles. As humans we don’t like to be uncomfortable. I found some would avoid me because they didn’t know what to say. I avoided certain people so I wouldn’t have to talk about the negatives so much — but this is just another way of running away from your problems. Then I remembered that bullies lose their power when you don’t hide or cower. I can’t control other people, but today I am not avoiding anyone. Now I often bring up the attacks in conversation, even if the other person wasn’t aware of that part of my story, so that we can get it out of the way. People get it. I’ve seen how it’s better to rip off the Band-Aid than to hide. My friend Kevin Lawrence wrote a book called Your Oxygen Mask Firstthat touches on this and lots more.
10. Be yourself. We all have identities that make us who we are. Sticking to our identity in the face adversity can be tough. My attacker wanted to make others think negatively of me in the hope that they would reject me. But the attacks likewise had me questioning myself at times. Adam Grant has a great podcast, Worklife, where he recently said “When people reject you, it helps to remember that there’s another you. Don’t put all your eggs in one identity basket. Having a portfolio of selves is a source of resilience.” Listen to his podcast and read his and Sheryl Sandberg’s great book, Option B.
11. Find the positive.My personal, family and business motto is, “Nothing Positive is Forbidden.” It evolved from Dr. Stephen Covey’s “Family Mission Statement” exercise I completed in the early 1990s. My assassin oddly tried to use this against me in his made-up narrative, to imply that because I’ve been involved in failures, I was a fake and not true to my values. Attackers will attempt to make everything about you negative, but don’t let them. Anyone who really knows me saw through him and knows that I do my best to live by my values every day. I shouldn’t be ashamed of trying, or of failing. This doesn’t mean everything I’ve done has succeeded, or that failure is forbidden — it means that it is always possible tofind the positive. Remember the deal I lostin point 4? Because the deal fell through, that company had the time and resources available to allow it to jump onto a bigger and probably more lucrative and legacy-leaving project, which wouldn’t have been entertainedif the original deal hadn’t been lost. Thick Face, Black Heartby Chin-Ning Chu is a masterpiece, and the sections on Dharma were especially useful in helping me look at the big picture positives instead of the short-term negatives my would-be assassin wanted me to.
12. Don’t retaliate or become a hater, resentful or negative. The first thing I wanted to do when my assassin came at me was retaliate. Should I get a lawyer and sue? Write a tit-for-tat exposé on some things I found out about him? Make a rebuttal to counter his lies with the real facts? When someone wrongs you, it is natural to want to get back at them or to become negative, defensive and resentful. Thankfully, Jack Canfield wrote to remind us: “everyone is doing the best they can with the awareness, skills, tools and knowledge they have.” So instead of lashing out, I’ve learned to take a breath and feel sorry for my attackers and the state of their lives. If my hired assassin improves any area of his life, he may regret what he has tried to do. Review The Success Principles by Jack Canfield for this idea and more.
13. Get professional help — the counseling kind.I’m very lucky as my wife is a trained RIM Master Facilitator and we know quite a few counsellors and therapists, psychoanalysts and other mental health professionals from investments in addiction treatment and behavioral health I have made. Throughout my experience, I’ve spoken with people who have professional training, and received a lot of advice and insights that I found helpful. If you can’t pull yourself out of the negative, and it seems that your assassin is winning, it may be time to get some professional help. My wife would be upset if I didn’t recommend Goodbye Hurt and Painby Deborah Sandella, the founder of the RIM technique.
14. STAY.Speaking of help, thanks to Damian, a Scaling Up coach I work with, who introduced me to this idea from Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*CK: Stop Thinking it’s About You (STAY). My attackers wrote what they did because of their problems, not mine. The same is true for all who bully, discriminate, lie and cause pain. Be it a colleague bent on revenge whose anger causes them to create a fiction in their minds to justify their behavior, cutthroats who set out to damage you so they can get ahead, or simply those who may have a mental health issue that causes their actions, you must refuseto let their problems become yours. It’s about them. It’s not about you.
15. Leave a legacy.One of the greatest privileges of my life was the opportunity to meet and learn from Dr. Stephen Covey. He told me that he wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Peopleand his other books to help prepare people for the only thing that matters — the legacy you leave. Whether your legacy is potentially being tarnished by a lying assassin, like mine, or you have actually made mistakes that are putting your legacy at risk, it is important to remember that your legacy is determined by the goodyou do and the people you help over your life, not a single event or a few mistakes. If you haven’t already, I recommend you read Dr. Stephen Covey, in particular The 8thHabit.
16. Remember there are two sides to every story. Or at least there can be. Self-talk is important. Tell your own story and make it a positive one. My accuser attempted to paint me as a failure by pointing out only some of my failures in a very dramatic, one-sided and embellished way, and by quoting only people who had an axe to grind. My telling of the same story is different. I am a risk taker and find success in about a third of my endeavors, which is about average for all investors. This can mean living with the mess caused by the failures. The old analogy of Babe Ruth’s 1923 season is worth remembering. That year, the famed slugger led the league in both home runs and strikeouts. It would be easy for someone to argue that Ruth was a failure, by only taking into account his strikeouts — they could even make it salacious and scandalous by adding some lies into the story to explain them. But we know what Babe and baseball fans focused on: the home runs. Re-reading The Top Five Regrets of the Dying by Bronnie Ware was settling for me throughout this experience, and probably gave me a better perspective than anything else I’ve read.

The Truth Will Set You Free

To be perfectly honest, I’m not at the point yet where I’m glad the attacks happened. But I know the truth — and it really does set me free.

I knew most of the ideas listed above before my reputation was attacked. What I have come to realize in the months following, is that applying good ideas has made a true difference in my life. Learning from these books helped me survive the assassination attempts. More importantly, I now do not fear future ones.

“Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have — life itself.” — Walter Anderson

Weaponizing the internet and media, falsifying information in blogs and news stories and distorting a message for adversarial purposes such as the spread of propaganda or misinformation is not going to stop. It will almost certainly get worse as we rely more and more on social media and the internet to define people and facts. Let’s be honest — this weaponization works. Consumers of information are usually too rushed to worry about thinking critically. It will always be easier to accept what you read, hear and see online rather than to challenge the accepted truth.

But I am confident that (eventually) the truth always comes out. The difficulty is that until it does, this type of practice causes pain and problems for people who are targeted like me, and collateral damage for those close to them.

Being disciplined and proactive in the way you let challenges in life affect you is very important to your survival. The ideas and books I shared truly helped me, and I hope they help you do the same, or inspire you to find your own sources of encouragement, should an assassin ever put your reputation in their sights.

Allow me to close with a quote that I came up with after attending a seminar, and which I’ve adopted as a personal mantra for the past twenty years: “The reward of self-discipline is the lack of regret.” Even if someone tries to assassinate you it is possible to live without regret if you are disciplined about how you react and respond.