Why Negativity Is The Easy Choice

Taking a look at social media, we get flooded with negativity and hate.

Everytime an achievments gets posted, it is greated with both sides of the emotional coin.

While some applaud in awe of what someone has accomplished, others respond with negativity. Talking down what has been done, quickly reminding everyone of potential flaws.

In theory, this doesn’t make any sense.

If everyone would spend their time in favor of love and happiness, instead of mistrust and judgment, society as a whole would improve.

Why positivity is so difficult

Complementing others on things you have not yet achieved is not easy.

Sure, it will be of no mental challange to congratulate the second prize winner, as long as you stay on top.

But even in a position of superiority, many fail to keep their temper.

Despite proving a better performance on that day, genuinely showing goodwill towards the competitors seems to be the exception rather than the norm.

Even though this is already concerning behavior, looking at it the other way arround will give us an even grimmer picture.

In fact, winners are often met with claims of unworthiness.

“you don’t deserve to win”

“you were lucky that’s it”

Many people, who wished for a different outcome, come up with the wildest reasoning to support their opinion.

Understandably, if you are invested emotionally in a sport or event, and find yourself met with disappointment, you are not left behind without a bitter taste in your mouth.

However, what gets these people to take their frustration as far as attacking the opposition directly via social media, and what story does this tell about their mindset?

On the other hand, how often do people who didn’t quite pull it through congratulate the winner.

Clearly, this would be the logical choice.

As you have prepared well and gave it your best shot, disregarding the winner’s performance, in the end, will undermine your own efforts.

If he didn’t deserve to win but still managed to, than you sure as hell didn’t deserve to win either.

Additionally, praising someone’s ability will make your second place only shine in a brighter light.

If he put on the god-like performance that day, so be it, losing to that, perhaps being close to winning, will only make you look better in the process.

On top of looking better, you might feel beeter, too.

Showing respect to your opponent, praising his abilities, will make him respect and praise you more as well.

And if he doesn’t he is the bad, unlikeable, guy. Not you!

However, the more involved in a competition you are, the higher the stakes.

Losing to your rival in a competition that feels like decides over life and death can be extremely frustrating, obviously.

Searching for external reasons or conditions is easier than looking at your own flaws and weaknesses.

Naturally, it can prove difficult to swallow your pride, look at your own mistakes, and move on trying to fix them.

Anyhow, if you are really feeling the burning desire to win, the passion to succeed, you should be willing to go this step of the way, as losing as part of competing.

While you can find a lot of people who are ready to put in hard work to fuel their passions, it is harder to come by anyone who will ignore his own pride for it.

Therefore, it is hard to come by positivity in these situations.

Why negativity is so easy

Apart from competition, negativity finds it’s way as a result of envy, fear, and frustration in our every day life.

No matter what you do, accomplish, or strive for, it is never really impressive.

Someone will be there to point out how this has been done before. That it is actually not that hard. That most people could do it if they tried.

For the most part, it is easy to distinguish why someone would try to drag you down like that.

They themselves are afraid to try, and fail.

People who think their abilities are a fixed skillset come by difficult situations.

If you try something that does not seem to be relatively easy from the get-go, it might prove that they are not as smart, fast, or good as they think of themselves.

On top of that, it might expose their abilities to others alike, negatively changing their perception of this persons’ capabilities.

Instead of taking the risk, they will dismiss the challenge, fearing a change of perception in regards to their persona.

Because they rob themselves of the opportunity to achieve something great, to grow as part of a learning process, they don’t want anyone else to do exactly that.

They know that once you pull through, accepted failure as a possibility, and went ahead with it anyway, their minor achievements made by safe bets where nothing major can go wrong shine in a different light.

They don’t seems as smart or successful anymore, they got overtaken by people like you.

That’s why trash talking other people’s ideas, only pointing out potential pitfalls, and doing anything within one’s power to drag others down is their profession.

It is simply the easy way to tackle life.

Never taking risks, never running danger to expose weaknesses, showing that you are not perfect, and never owning up to anything.

However, while this might be an easy way to live life, noone ever gets successful with this sort of attitude.

How to deal with negative people

Now that we know a little more about their reasoning to drag people down all the time, how can we make sure we are influences as little as possible by it?

After all, getting told by close-ones, or people in general, that your goals are not attainable, your achievements not worthy, and your skills not sufficient can take its toll.

Especially when people with seemingly more experience tell us that we cannot do something, we tend to believe them.

For this not to affect us anymore, we need to change our view towards these people.

Instead of feeling frustrated, thinking that they are right in their assessment, we need to be able to spot negative people and pity them.

Remember that if you want to be successful, you cannot count on these people.

They will always provide more negative than positive input, and only when you did it when you pulled through with whatever you wanted to achieve and made it happen than they will act like they have known you for so long.

All of the sudden they start loving what you are doing, telling you they never stopped believing.

To weed this out, learn to spot negative behavior early on, and assign less weight to these opinions.

To clarify, I am not talking about constructive criticism, I am talking about people telling you you are not good or smart enough.

Non-believers who will only point out flaws without providing solutions.

You don’t gain anything from their comments, you only lose out.

Furthermore, try to spread positivity yourself.

Don’t answer to haters with hate.

Pity them because you know they will not get as far as you get, not achieve as much as you do.

But try to be a positive influence.

Perhaps they will realise, perhaps they will change.

Bottom line

On your way to success, you will encounter many nay-sayers and negative people.

They will try to bring you down to protect their own and everyone elses’ perception of their own abilities.

In order to fulfill your dreams, you have to learn to deal with these people by assigning less worth to their opinions.

Try to spread positivity yourself, try to be the one taking the hard route, instead of the easy one.

Do it and watch your growth!

Thank you so much for reading!

Matthis