5 Reasons Why People Hate On Your Success (And Why You Should Be Successful Anyways!)

Alesha Peterson
15 min readJan 30, 2022

Let this sink in, again.

Just In Case You Haven’t Read the first one, start here. But let’s jump in.

#1. The Truth Is…You don’t get into business for your friends and family support. (LET THIS SINK IN).

Limelight consultant, a music guru I follow on Instagram said 2 things that really made me want to write a follow-up. Along with a Dan Lok article.

“I did 5 of my friend’s teeth for free. And they haven’t seen me one client. But that one stranger that paid…and they sent me 5 new clients..(LET THAT SINK IN). Moral of the story, you don’t do this shit for your friends support. because they already feel entitled, to not pay you pay…not share your business, and not pay for anything…its’ sad but true. So you have to have the mindset of not taking it personal but you know you need marketing to find your true supports and work hard to make strangers happy with your product…and say F*** your friends support.

“When you a black business owner, it’s your own people/friends who will try to use you and take advantage of your kindness first. It’s a challenge to be a black business owner, from the lack of business funding to your family and friends wanting stuff for free and barely supporting you.. That is why i don’t care who you are, friend or family..I’ll pay full price whatever it is that I need your service for…cause the small shit you let slide in the beginning..becomes something bigger that is harder for you bounce back from.

Real. This is so real.

I would have loved if more friends and family supported my businesses and unconventional choices. But when you come to the realization that they don’t like your shit, they are not apart of your audience, and it’s not a great fit (not all customers are right for your business). Do not make a business just because you think it will make family and friends like you.

I’ve had businesses that was barely staying afloat, and the last thing I was thinking that a friend or family member was gonna come save me. It wasn’t gonna happen. We had to pivot, create a new strategy or something.

This is why I personally will support a family and friend’s business and pay, especially if it aligns with me and I personally like the product. I’ve owned businesses before and that shit is hard.

No one else has to know I’m supporting it or you either, it can stay between us even. If I can use your product in my day to day life and it’s something I can really get behind, I’ll financially chip in as much as possible. Loves, if it’s something I can’t use, I’ll just wait until you release something that I can use. I’ve had friends and family create things I don’t have a need for, and I’m like babe, love you, but that’s not for me…..but maybe in the future it can work out.

What To Do When Others Don’t Support You

According to Dan Lok, people will fight you when you and discourage you when you go on the off beaten path. We all know this. You may be struggling with having supportive friends and family when it comes to your goals of starting a business or trying an unpopular and unconventional choices.

You have two choices. You can let it bother you or you can keep doing what you’re doing, but beware that you have a difficult road ahead. Studies have shown that people are strongly motivated to follow the crowd and copy what their peers are doing, even if it doesn’t make sense, even to the point of duplicating irrational behavior.-Dan Lok

Stories. By Dan Lok.

There is a story of a fisherman who went out and caught buckets of crabs. A man walked by and saw a bucket with no lid. He wondered if the fisherman was worried the crabs would crawl out. The fisherman said he wasn’t. If one crab tried to crawl out, the others would pull it back down with the rest of them.

It’s sad, because if all the crabs worked together, they could escape. People with crab mentality feel jealous when someone does something remarkable. They will bash other people’s goals in an effort to keep everyone at the same level.

This is a reason why friends and family won’t support you , particularly if you want to try something none of them have done before. Entrepreneurs and business owners and anyone who wants to leave the well-trodden path face this isolation. Their friends and family decide whether something is okay based on what other people do.

Psychologist Robert Cialdini demonstrated social proof in an experiment on stealing. He was curious how people perceived right and wrong depending on what their peers did. He removed a sign from the forest that said, “Your heritage is being vandalized every day by theft losses of petrified wood of 14 tons a year, mostly a small piece at a time.”

The path without the sign had less theft. The path that still had the sign had more stealing, implying that people thought the message gave them permission to steal. Not all social proof was negative, however.

It’s a bleak message to think that people could permit something like thievery. It opens the door to people allowing immoral behavior if their peers think it’s okay. And it’s scary to think that if you made a decision to do something your friends and family didn’t like, then they as a group could turn against you and take action, even if what they are doing is wrong.

This part was ripped from an Dan Lok article on support, because there’s no need to change it. Without copying and pasting every Dan Lok article and making it sound like the last article I wrote, I’m going to make this one different (But you will tell this is Dan Lok influenced).

I will tell you, when I said I wasn’t going to take the same route and made a public declaration (Your loved ones want you to be just like them and follow the proven formula that’s worked for them. Go to school, get a job, buy a house, pay off debts), you will be amazed how many people turned on me. You want to be different and leave the wolf pack. But what if you’re leaving one pack you don’t want and joining the wrong pack? When it comes to taking your own path, you go into the unknown with a lot of twists and turns.

#2 If you are seeking validation or permission, and the people around you don’t support you, don’t wait for it.

If you come from a family of employees and your friends are employees, and you want to be a business owner or take the entrepreneurial route, they’re warning you about the consequences of failing and going deep into debt…and failing miserably? And come up with every worst scenario case that could happen, it’s almost like being around them is bad for your mindset, am I right? (As much as it hurts? The people you love are so focused on being realistic and safe that they fail to envision all the possibilities, as I quote in this Ramit Sethi quote

Safety, not excellence. In other words, they want us to take that safe job. They want us to live in that safe place and make those safe choices because they’re worried about the risk of us ending up homeless or (gasp) unhappy. What they ignore is the potential for excellence. To be excellent, you have to make unconventional choices. Sometimes, the choices that seem risky. -Ramit Sethi.

You can expose them to successful entrepreneurs and their stories as proof that your goals are not only achievable, but have been achieved before. Does this mean you can influence them? Not necessarily. In many cases, you may have to distance yourself from them until you accomplish your goals. Once you’re highly successful, they will understand the vision you had all of along.

In a study, researcher Albert Bandura and his colleagues worked with a group of children that feared dogs. After they watched a boy playing with a dog and having fun for over four days, they were able to lose their fear over time and play with the dog also. Knowing that people naturally want to fit into a group, this model for changing behavior has many implications.

In a simple social conformity experiment, researchers realized how powerful conformity is when they were able to teach people to behave irrationally. In the experiment, a newcomer to a patient waiting room noticed everyone stood up when they heard a beep. Eventually, she learned the behavior and she stood up at the beep even when she was alone in the room. When new people arrived, she showed them to behave in the same manner. A social norm had been created, and no one questioned the reasoning behind it.

Let’s go back to the metaphor of the crabs in the bucket.

You’re the crab trying to escape the traditional path and find your own, independent future. Your well-meaning family and friends are trying to pull you back in.

If they believe everyone around them thinks the same way they do, they are cool with you. When you follow social norms, and do the same things people around you are doing, you are seen as doing something socially acceptable. Could we teach people to do as we ask and follow you even if it’s different from what they understand?

How can you get people supporting you really? You won’t persuade others to agree with you or believe in you until you’re successful in what you’re doing, or show that you can take care of yourself. (In rare cases, you may have people that want to build with you and you have nothing to offer, if you find theses sorts, they are rare gems. If you find someone that wants to help you without expecting nothing in return that’s a rare gem too. It’s true, everyone has to start somewhere, but I personally find if most people can’t use you they don’t want to be bothered.)

People have a very strong tendency to follow the crowd and do what they think is acceptable, even if it doesn’t make sense. It’s more comfortable to fit in and settle with the other crabs than be the one struggling to climb out. If you need emotional support, then you don’t have what it takes.-Dan Lok

So what can you do if people around you don’t support you? How can you keep going on a different path? When I first started as an entrepreneur, I didn’t have any support, and still don’t to a certain degree. A lot of people stopped talking to me, and as I write this article I’m on my own. Quite a few of my peers stopped talking to me when I said hey, I don’t want to do the work you are doing, I want and demand more. Some might even accuse you of thinking you are better or accusing you of being falsely successful or delusional. (Their definition of success and your definition of success could be totally different. You don’t have a million streams on your Spotify, so how can you call yourself an successful musician? You’re not on a billionaire on Forbes, how can you call yourself successful? You’re delusional, you’re not Beyonce or Taylor Swift successful, the audacity? In their eyes, their standards of what they think success is is different from yours and vice versa. You might not want to be a billionaire, you might be happy with making 6 figures, or 30,000 a year. I touch on this more in my musician article. For you, having a small tribe of fans that love your products/music is all you need, but to others, because you are not selling out concert seats in 5 seconds you are a failure and this is not true. How people see and measure success is different depending on what goals you want to achieve. Everyone’s definition of success is different with a little bit of a grey area. What the world wants for you and what you want for yourself could be totally different. Also, many get caught up in the trappings of wealth that they don’t actually recognize wealth when they see it. )

#3. When you take a path in life that your peers, friends and family don’t understand, they will more in likely not support you.

  • Your situation is unfamiliar to them, so they don’t know how to help
  • They fear the unknown and they want to protect you
  • They fear that you will fail
  • Sadly, some of them may want you to fail so you can stay where they are.
  • But don’t count on their support. You can try to explain your position and give them a chance to try to convince them. Maybe you can get a few on your side. You can still love them even if you are not on the same page as them (sometimes, you have to love people at a distance)
  • When you start on your path, your track record isn’t likely to be all that great, everyone has to start somewhere. You will have tried many things, and failed many things. Or what if you’re a dropout, Youngblood and straight out of school with little experience? Why should they trust you when you tell them about your vision, especially when you messed up before? They won’t buy into your belief or your plan at first because your track record isn’t very strong. So the first thing you need to do is believe in yourself. Believe in yourself and what you want to do, and stay committed to your goal.
  • The first thing you need to do is believe in yourself, no matter what your past or future path looks like to yourself and others. Believe in yourself and what you want to do, and stay committed to your goal.
  • Don’t expect or wait for anybody to support you. It’s going to be lonely path, but you can’t let that stop you from what you plan to achieve, as long as you stay committed.
  • Over time, once you achieve some success, then you might get some support when people see how dedicated you are
  • Show commitment to yourself, then the world will see it.

#4. What the world wants for you and what you want for yourself could be totally different.

Sadly, it can be your friends, your significant other, your siblings or parents, who are afraid of losing you because you’re doing something completely unfamiliar to them.

Take a look at the people around you. If they can see that you’re behaving differently. You’re acting, talking and carrying yourself in a different way. You may even appear elegant or high class being a jet setter. You’re going somewhere they’ve never been. In some cases, if they socially disapprove of what you are doing, they may even turn or try to sabotage you. And talk shit behind your back. Even if you’re doing your mission to make a better future for them, they don’t support you because of their fear, or sadly jealously.

You could be the first person they know to reach new heights of success (meaning millionaire and so forth). So don’t be afraid to be highly successful despite being the first in your family and friend group to do so. Change how you react to the people around you.

At the end of the day, it’s your path. You get to decide how to live your life. It doesn’t matter if it’s your spouse, your parents, your children, your siblings, or your friends… don’t let them influence your choices. It’s not going to be easy to go against the herd and be the crab climbing out. But think about the reward when you succeed.

You can’t help anyone if you don’t help yourself. Make your choices for yourself and don’t count on their support. Don’t drag them along by trying to change their point of view. It will just slow you down.-Dan Lok

#5 Fear of failure and fear of success can also hold you back.

If the people around them aren’t that successful, they won’t have many role models or life experiences to pull from. If they haven’t been exposed to high levels of success, they can’t tell you what it’s like. Some people don’t get the same opportunities others have. If they haven’t had the opportunities to make a lot of wealth or reach a lot of success in their lives, they can’t see how you can reach prosperity.

If they haven’t had the opportunity to make a lot of wealth or reach a lot of success in their lives, they can’t see how you can reach prosperity.

#6. When people see you on your path, they’re afraid of losing you.

Today, I’m going to share some additional advice on what to do when your friend and family, and others around you don’t support you and you find yourself trailblazing a path on your own.

  1. Be yourself. Know who you are and don’t try to convince others of your worth. When you become successful, you will attract others who are like you.
  2. Address the concerns from your loved ones and listen to what they have to say. Just because they don’t understand what you are doing, doesn’t mean they don’t respect you.
  3. Become self reliant and focus on your goals. Tune out all distractions, especially the fears of those who don’t support you.
  4. Reach out to a new network to find people with similar goals to yours. Ask them for advice and support. There are many online groups these days.

(5 More Reasons To Be Successful Anyways, By Me: )

I loved this Dan Lok article so much I decided to make my own version, if you read over my version, it’s very similar. But I try not to directly copy and paste.

  1. Have you noticed when you’re successful, sometimes the people you expect to be happy for you feel threatened instead of being proud of you? (If you read my first article, all of this sounds awfully familiar.)
  2. You Didn’t Follow The Status Quo. Your Success Reminds Them That They Gave Up On Their Dreams Due To Fear, Uncertainty And Society Pressure. Most don’t appreciate or understand the work it takes to get success. They want material things and the life. But they are upset at the Lamborghini person/celebrity for actually putting in the work. Or have a negative mindset towards money ($) and don’t put in the mind work to earn those things themselves. So it’s easier to hate than put in the work.
  3. Your Success Reminds Them The Norm Isn’t Fulfilling. You Took The Steps Necessary To Make It Happen. They Aren’t Doing Anything To Change The Life They Don’t Like. When you’re successful, many times family, friends, and people around you get pissed off because you have accomplished your goals. Instead of applauding you for you taking action with your life, they try to defend their inaction and mediocrity. It’s the script that they tell themselves to justify not fulfilling their purpose and living unhappy lives.
  4. The highest level of hurt comes from going through life unfulfilled with broken dreams. You took responsibility and made your own destiny. They are upset because they let themselves and their dreams down. Or worst, let people talk them out of it and settled for less.
  5. They Don’t Understand What You Went Through To Achieve The Success.

One More Important Thing I Must Add:

I noticed in recent weeks, my music on Soundcloud is getting a lot of plays. At this rate, I’ll hit at least 100k before spring (CRAZY I KNOW). It’s a slow, organic growth (1,000 plays here, 200 here, and so forth). Not in a viral sensation kinda way, just a slow and steady kinda way.

I do not have a lot of followers, not actively seeking fame, but when I started posting my music on Soundcloud, I noticed I started getting plays.

Because my numbers are getting higher and higher, I have noticed people subtly coming out of the woodwork. People that haven’t paid attention to my music in the past is starting to now. People are fickle.

People are funny like this. If your music only have a 100 plays, most don’t take you seriously. But if that same track hits 100,000 or more, people are going whoa….We live in a viral sensation and numbers obsessed society where too many people think that numbers=fame, numbers=success, numbers=happiness. Not always. Just because you’re famous and have the numbers doesn’t always mean success. (I have a post on this later). It could just be a group of enthusiastic fans found your music and is so dedicated to it that they play it all the time. And they love it so much they are telling their friends, and their friends friends. There’s plenty of musicians out here who don’t have a lot of numbers, but are earning a living off their music.

Sometimes it’s a matter of finding the right platform for your music and finding where your audience is (mine is unexpectedly Soundcloud). Am I going to play attention to Soundcloud now? You bet. I’m just going to ride the wave and see what happens on other platforms. (And to those listening and pushing me over the top, thank you! If you want the link comment, I’m not going to overly push the links, because I have plenty of links throughout this article).

References:

It’s 2022 🔥🙌

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Alesha Peterson

Howdy! Entrepreneurship, fitness, music, acting, real estate, tequila & investing is sexy. Idea for an article? Input wanted! https://linktr.ee/aleshapeterson