How to Handle Haters
Want to do something big? Scared of people bitching?
We live in a world of internet trolls and keyboard warriors. They have an unusually loud megaphone because frankly, employed people with satisfying social and romantic lives tend not to spend their time spewing toxicity online. A disproportionate quantity of what we read and consume online is divisive, negative, and deliberately intended to introvert us.
That’s not fun. If you’re a dreamer, if you’re wanting to really DO something in this world, the thought of running up against an army of people pointing out your worst flaws, can be rough.
This article is my top tip for handling haters.
My Baptism of Fire
I came to understand bullies by being on the receiving end of a lot of them.
I was bullied a lot at school. I had sticky-out ears, and a terrible haircut, and I was born half deaf — which meant I spoke loud and lacked spatial awareness. I was also born with no enamel on my teeth, and we were relatively broke, so my parents decided to put adult-sized veneers (to last longer) into my child-sized head. I was a goofy-looking kid.
I didn’t want to be that way. I knew my flaws more than anyone. I wanted to improve. And yet, every time I’d try to be somebody better — deep down knowing I wasn’t — and I’d be exposed, belittled, mocked, and shamed back into my little box. I hated that.
I went through a posh university as ‘the broke kid’, and wound up getting a job in investment banking. I thought I’d made it. I thought I was a big dog. Not quite. I was the only guy who got that job on merit, not because of daddy’s connections. I was initially proud of that, but then I got into that job, and discovered I was again the outcast. I was called the ‘diversity hire’, and thrown the shitty jobs. This fired me up because I was smarter than these clowns and could run rings around them.
Banking wasn’t my dream, it got boring, really fast.
All I wanted to do was play piano.
And again, there were haters. When I left that job, even my mother told me I’d lost my mind. I quit anyway.
20 minutes after I quit the highest-paid job in the planet, I was playing piano in the street. I didn’t have a game plan. I just wanted to live. I wanted to feel something. I wanted adventure.
I pushed a piano in the street and started playing. From the first song I played, people stopped. I worked on my craft and very quickly, I learned how to block the streets. What a rush. For 5 minutes at a time I was Mick Jagger. As insane as it seemed, I started to believe maybe I could actually do this!
And then the police came, to stop me. I was making too much money, they didn’t like it. The crowds were too big, it ‘wasn’t safe’.
Next came sharing my content online, and I got my first viral video. Go read the comments. 17,000 of them. At least 3,000 were negative, and mocking.
I posted more, I got more love and I got more hate. For every 50 ‘I love you’ DMs, I’d get a ‘you’re ugly’, ‘you suck’, ‘I hate you’ etc etc.. I had crazies breaking into my recording studio in Soho. Some left underwear, some left love letters, but one person broke-in and took a giant shit in the middle of my rug, and yet another person made a point of mailing every negative review to me with a lipstick kiss on each one.
Then I started an online school, Ridley Academy, and it’s become one of the fastest growing piano schools in the world, with over 30,000 students (5 years old to 95 years old) across 40 countries. Ridley Academy ads have done over a billion views. And guess what comes with that huge amount of attention? You guessed it. Once again, I get hate videos, I get weirdos attacking me.
Every time, at every point in my life, these haters have fallen into 2 categories — ‘the jealous’, easily identified by the fact they haven’t achieved what I’ve achieved (we call this ‘shitting from below’ in Yorkshire), and ‘the parasites’ who are those who try to ride the coat-tails of the attention you’re getting, leveraging and degrading your name to try and promote theirs. This is the YouTube attacker, or the school bully who resents the attention you’re getting, and that they’re not.
I’ve had this throughout my life. It increases as my activity level increases. And as I look up towards those figures I most admire, they are attacked 1,000X more than me. So I don’t imagine it will ever end. So, how do you handle it?
First, spot them.
Second, handle.
Let’s start with step 1; spotting them. Easier than you’d think.
The Bully’s True Motivation
Everybody wants to survive well. That’s a fundamental that crosses all cultures and boundaries. From that basic motivation stems 2 kinds of people.
The majority are people who want to survive by creating their life.
A smaller group of people think that the only way to survive is by attacking others, and trying to stop them from prospering. They are not doing well in their own lives, and so think that if the other fellow creates and improves, well then they’d doing even worse. And so, loudly or covertly, they will attempt to destroy those, whose success threatens them. This is dumb, because they make enemies of people who could’ve been their allies.
They often hide as your ‘friends’. They can sometimes be your family. You will know them by their actions.
In my experience they have 10 basic approaches to trying to destroy you.
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Pay attention to who you think of as you read this list…
1. Character Assassination
• Spreading false or exaggerated rumors.
• Twisting your words or actions to make you look bad.
• Accusing you of things you never did.
2. Gaslighting
• Making you doubt your own reality or memory.
• Dismissing your feelings as overreactions.
• Rewriting history to suit their narrative.
3. Social Undermining
• Isolating you from others by turning people against you.
• Sabotaging your relationships, reputation, or opportunities.
• Subtly planting doubts about you in others’ minds.
4. Public Humiliation
• Mocking or embarrassing you in front of others.
• Using social media to shame or ridicule you.
• Creating or sharing false, manipulated, or private content.
5. Projection & Deflection
• Blaming you for things they themselves are guilty of.
• Shifting focus from their bad behaviour by making you the issue.
• Acting like the victim when confronted.
6. Passive-Aggression & Fake Niceness
• Backhanded compliments (“You’re so brave for trying that.”).
• Pretending to be supportive while subtly tearing you down.
• Using sarcasm and “jokes” as a cover for insults.
7. Devaluing & Dismissing Your Achievements
• Downplaying your successes (“It’s just luck.”).
• Undermining your credibility and expertise.
• Comparing you unfavorably to others.
8. Psychological Warfare
• Repeatedly pointing out your flaws and mistakes.
• Using intimidation to make you feel powerless.
• Manipulating situations to keep you on the defensive.
9. Exploiting Your Emotions
• Provoking you to get a reaction, then using it against you.
• Playing the victim to make you look like the aggressor.
• Using guilt or shame to control you.
10. Cyberbullying & Online Attacks
• Creating fake accounts to harass or spread misinformation.
• Posting negative reviews or comments to damage your reputation.
• Encouraging dogpiling or mass-reporting to silence you.
Bullies Will Find Your Weakness
Now let’s find theirs
We learned how to spot the bully. Next, how do we handle them?
I learned how to handle bullies from one of the richest men I’ve ever met.
The problem with having somebody do something unjust to you, is exactly that... it’s unjust. And the knee-jerk reaction is to get even. Vengeance, punishment, and blood-sports galore. Movies and pop culture celebrates this ‘solution’.
Does it really work? Is it effective?
Recently, I’ve watched 2 friends I love dearly, wage war through a bitter divorce, where their full-time jobs became hurting the other person, as much as possible. They have punished the other person so much that their hearts, once filled with love, are now filled with cynical poison. That’s the problem with punishment; it degrades the punisher far more than the punished. They both became people they are not. And this sourness and spite that now fills their heart is a curse neither want for themselves.
“That’s the problem with punishment; it degrades the punisher far more than the punished.”
The murderer who is then murdered by the vengeful wronged victim, has simply murdered one more person. For he converted a good man into a murderer too. Vengeance doesn’t work. Degrading yourself to their level, simply results in that; a more degraded form of you. And ironically, that’s exactly what they want.
I can give you another very real example. I have an online presence, both as an artist, and as the Face and Founder of Ridley Academy. Sometimes people say things I don’t like; defamatory and untrue statements.
The immediate impulse is often to go medieval, and put their head on a pike. That’s the Yorkshire guy in me. But okay, say I did it. Say I went full Jack Reacher. Then what? I’d be sat in a jail cell for the next 20 years, and so in a weird way they’d still win.
Or I could burn half a million in legal fees, but again, why not put that money towards your actual goal? Why allow yourself to be side-tracked, and distracted from your goal?. After all, that is their intention. And whatever success you’ve accomplished so far, is the reason for their hate in the first place.
That’s not a theory, it’s obvious. If you want to see someone with no haters, go find the person who has descended to the point of doing nothing with their lives. The person who has completely given up. The person that these same toxic people would now want to ‘support’ by putting them on welfare, and subsidise their miserable inactivity, so as to perpetuate it.
I come from a town that had 40% unemployment growing up. I learned one thing. A man without a purpose — without goals and ambitions — is dead.
But, a man who has a purpose and moves towards it, so often gets attacked.
So how does one win, with so much injustice in the world? How do you withhold from the temptation to meet them at their level? Or stoop lower?
Fucking WIN
Fundamentally, the bully, the criminal, the troll, they’re failing. They project this failure by attacking your attempts to survive better, to create, to flourish, to prosper, to expand.
Their primary motivation is to make you shrink, to make you less, to introvert you, to squash you, to prevent you from reaching out and driving forward and winning.
The temptation is to fight, the temptation is to break a nose, get the big guns lawyers, and destroy them publicly. But to do that is to distract yourself from your purpose, your mission, your activities.
You’re a great person. You have big goals. And no matter how much you may try to cover it up, there’s a big dream in your heart, if you just let your guard down enough for it to express itself. Maybe you’re religious, maybe you’re not.
A recent interviewer for Beverly Hills Magazine told me whilst interviewing me, that she believe a person’s dream is their gift from God. Wherever you believe they originate from, your goals ARE a gift. They provide fire, motivation, and inspiration. They are the hope of a better tomorrow. And the bully is trying to dissuade you from leaning into that most precious gift.
The single easiest way to defeat a bully is to simply succeed.
Just. Win. And at first, as you succeed more, maybe they will attack more. And, what do you do? You just keep right on succeeding. You keep right on expanding, you flourish, you do well, you crush it! You do exactly what they can’t - WIN.
In the last 4 years, I have gone from obscurity to getting my first 1 million followers across social media (checkout my instagram and youtube). In the last 3 years, I 400X’d Ridley Academy, and it’s become one of the fastest growing piano schools on the planet. I’ve gone from 62 students to over 30,000 in those 3 years.
And I’ve barely got started.
I’m going to take the school beyond 100,000 students, I’m going to boom my presence as an artist, and flood the world with beautiful music (both my own, and that of my students). I’m going to do so as a man of whom I’m proud. And that’s the tip of the iceberg.
And the haters? Let them hate.
We will win.
Stephen Ridley
Founder, Ridley Academy
✍ — Edited and Published by Dr. Gabriella Korosi, at Dancing Elephants Press. Click here for submission guidelines.
