Why We All Have Haters, and Why I Respect Mine

Dear normal person who is busy as hell,

Hey. It’s me, Gary.

I know you don’t like me.

You think I’m brash, too busy for anyone, and loud.

I know you think I’m loaded with charisma and just got really good at selling stuff.

And I get it. If I were you, I would think those things too.

But that’s all on me. It’s on me to change your perception of me. It’s on me to create more narratives and more content for you to see what I am actually like.

So, here we go:

I believe that time is our number one asset. When I say “our”, I mean everyone. Me, you, your family, your co-workers. All we have in common is the time in our day, and we just have to work with that. You probably feel similarly. You don’t want someone wasting your time when you could be doing something you actually want or need to do, right?

Because of that, maybe you’ve only seen five seconds of one of my videos. Or ten, or twenty at most. You watch a keynote and you see me cursing like a sailor. I’m yelling in a video. Not a great way to meet someone. I seem loud and annoying. I come across as arrogant. In those short moments I have, one part of me absolutely takes over. Being an extrovert brings it out; when I am onstage or behind a camera, I get into that headspace. How I act is predicated on my environment; give me an audience of three people and I’m at one level. Give me an audience of 1000 and I’m another level. An audience of 10,000 and it’s a new level. It goes on. I’m sure you can relate to that and understand it.

Situations dictate behavior. We all have haters.

For example, with my team, I listen. I listen a lot. Even though I am talking quite a lot, I’m listening when they talk and, on top of that, I’m listening when I talk by watching how they react to the conversation.

But that isn’t what you see. You don’t see this humility right now. And this is what I’m most proud of. This is why I love the marathon more than the sprint. In sprints, I lose. You don’t like me in that ten second clip. But in a marathon, when you take the time to get to know me, I win.

This brings us back to time. We are all busy, and I don’t want to waste your time. I respect you, even though you don’t like me (for now). So I’m trying to create more articles, more videos, where you can see what I’m really like in a short time frame. This is part of that. It’s on me to create context for you. I don’t expect you to go down the rabbit hole of my content and figure me out. It’s on me to try to get to you. Not the other way around.

So, I respect you. And I hope, after this, you respect me a bit too. If not, that’s cool. I’ll see you in 2023 and we can revisit this conversation then.

Thoughts? Let me know. Would love to hear them.