The Alex Hormozi Guide to Haters [REVEALED]

Summary

• When dealing with hate, consider it comes from those who oppose something worthwhile you're doing.
• Use the power of ignoring as it costs the least time and effort, and inadvertently promotes you.
• When attacked, there are three primary responses: (1) ignore, (2) agree, and (3) agree and one-up.
• Ignoring haters often leads them to give up, as hate without reinforcement fades away.
• If the claim made against you has an element of truth, admitting it can disarm the conflict.
• When faced with lies, be the 'rock' that doesn't react; persistence in not engaging makes the hate irrelevant.
• If someone smaller than you is hating, applying the 'ignore, agree, one-up' approach can neutralize their efforts.
• When someone bigger than you attacks, it's a gift; humor and self-deprecation can be powerful defenses.
• Attacks can take people down only if they respond incorrectly – by engaging or changing their message.
• The only way to combat an attack is to amplify your value-laden message, making the hate inconsequential.
• Reputation damage isn't from the strength of the attacker, but from the victim's response. Winning lies in focused value provision.
• Any acknowledgment of haters indicates that they control you; staying unaffected is key.
• Your brand is built on association; constantly denying a false claim strengthens the association with it.
• Hate should be seen as a backhanded compliment and an indirect recognition of your impact.
• Focus on delivering value to the audience that supports you and dismiss attacks by staying consistent with positive messaging.
• Realize the proportion of hate is often minuscule compared to support – it's a matter of perspective.
• Persevere with your message, providing value over time will dilute the significance of hate.
• Being attacked is a natural part of standing for something; strength lies in consistently promoting your positive message.
• Ignore haters to inform everyone, including them, that there's no 'cheat code' to disrupt your path.

Video

How To Take Action

Here's what you need to do when dealing with haters:

First, try to ignore the hate. It takes up the least of your time and energy. Plus, when you ignore, haters often give up. They're looking for a reaction, and if you don't give them one, they get bored.

If someone says something about you that kind of has a point, just agree with them. Say, "You're right," and they won't have much else to say. No fight can happen if you're not fighting back.

But if you want to be clever, do the "agree and one-up" move. If someone makes fun of you for something, you say something even funnier about yourself. Beat them at their own game, and do it with a smile.

Now, if a bigger person comes after you, that's a good thing. Use humor and don't fight back. Show everyone you can laugh at yourself, and the haters look silly for trying to bring you down.

Finally, always keep giving value to your customers or fans. The more good stuff you put out, the less people care about the bad stuff. And remember, there are always more people who like you than hate you. Focus on the fans, not the haters.

So here’s the plan:

1. Ignore hate most of the time. Remember, no response is a strong response.
2. If the hate has truth, admit it to take away its power.
3. Use humor to agree and one-up the hater.
4. Keep sharing your positive message and providing value.
5. If a bigger person attacks, use humor and self-deprecation. Turn it into a win.
6. Don't let the hate change your message. Stay true to what you stand for.

This is how you deal with hate by spending little time on it and still come out on top. Keep doing your thing and the hate won't be able to touch you.

Quotes by Alex Hormozi

"God gave you the power to ignore, use it"

– Alex Hormozi

"If someone says 'hey Alex, you’re such an egotistical douchebag and you don’t care about other people,' I could agree, 'yeah man I suck.' What do they say now?"

– Alex Hormozi

"The only way that you can combat hate is to get louder; you shrink them into irrelevance"

– Alex Hormozi

"The only thing anyone will care about is value and if they came there for the value they will stay there for the value"

– Alex Hormozi

"Hate is a prerequisite for success"

– Alex Hormozi

Full Transcript

I get a lot of hate let's go through some of the fun ones that my team pulled we'll see him working at Starbucks soon loser how much did the fake private jet cost you loser if you do anything worth doing there will be people who oppose you and they will throw rocks at you and attack and I want to break down how I've dealt with it going from 1 75 million for the last 2 years so you can too so I want to walk through kind of two Frameworks that I think through when dealing with hate NE ity people calling you a liar first things first this is the quick and dirty and then I'll get a little bit more nuanced so when someone attacks you you have three options as I see it if the claim they are making has an element of Truth at level one you have ignore this is what I would consider my all-time heavyweight champion of the world personal preference ignoring it cost me the least amount of time the least amount of effort and and this is a very very important one they're choosing to advertise me they're choosing to take all their hard-earned attention their eyes the Goodwill they have in their audience and say hey everyone look at Alex what a gift and the crazy thing is is that when people direct their customers towards you some of them buy that's what's mind-blowing to me I'm like thank God like loser 29 like I hope you keep doing this cuz it just continues to fill my bank account that being said ignore cost you the least there's no effort on your behalf it's amazing this is why it's probably one of my all-time favorite ways to deal with most things in life I'll give you the quote that my dad told me many many times in my life he said God gave you the power to ignore use it the second this one takes effort agree I think Gary popularized the concept of Eminem winning the rap battle I am white I am a [ __ ] I do live in a trailer with my mom the other guy couldn't talk [ __ ] about him is he claimed every single negative thing that was about him here tell these people something they don't know about me if someone says hey Alex you're such an egotistical douchebag and you don't care about other people I could agree yeah man I suck what do they say now there's nothing to say and it just silences it because the thing is is that conflict only goes on as long as there's an equal or opposing Force as soon as you step to their side of the table there's nothing to push against there's only one person allowed in the angry boat and so what you can do is you get in the angry boat with them and you say I know I suck and then they have to get out because if they agree with you then what it just eliminates the conflict there's nothing left to talk about and then you move on with your life now the third level of this is what I would consider Ninja level agree plus one or one up them so if someone says Alex you're an egotist I could say dude you don't know the half of it I do this and this and this insult yourself better than they can and you should know how to do it better than they can cuz you know you better than they do too so this is the quick and dirty 95% of the conflict are the attacks that you'll get you usually you can deal with with this three-step process if you haven't seen this there's an unbelievable scene in Ted lasso where Nate his former Protege gets on the camera live and talks a bunch of [ __ ] about him and says that he's an idiot he doesn't know what he's doing whatever fast forward to the press conference where they're asking Ted lasso and he handles it perfectly from a PR perspective and he actually uses number three he says oh man Nate said that about me man he could have said this he could have said this he could have said he could have made fun of my hey but that's Nate the great for you you know he's the same way on the pitch you know he'll find the tiniest little weakness in a team and just want to attack that and then the whole crew of newscasters just start laughing because there's nothing else to say now if he had then attacked back then it would have become this whole drama but after that it's done he puts it to rest and then Nate looks vicious for attacking somebody who has a sense of humor now the second category if someone lies they accuse you of lying about something this is something called an Extinction curve a CL example would be like I could yell at a rock and if I keep yelling at a rock at some point I will stop yelling at the Rock why cuz the rock doesn't give me any feedback and so what we want to be in the situation is The Rock when you are ignoring you are just you a stone they can do whatever they want it doesn't affect you and I love this position because you are greater than hate only comes from Below in my entire life it has never come from above and so if someone hates on you just take that as mental note of the fact that they're below you and they concede the fact that they follow you and so based on the person who's hating on you they will maybe hate on you one time and then disappear or hate on you two times and then disappear but if you don't respond they will eventually disappear it is just a fact of life unless they get reinforcement they will disappear and that's why I just choose not to engage I also don't like wasting my time now let's go into the ugly scenarios of what if what they're saying is basically calling you a liar around something core uh to your brand or what you've been known for here's my little box so you've got bigger than you smaller than you and then they said you lied about something or they said something else so let's start with the easiest one someone smaller than you and they just said Alex has big ears I can ignore them I could agree and be like hell yeah I got big ears you should see what else number three I could be like not only do I have big ears I could one up them like they're actually even worse when it rains cuz then I catches all the water and then my back gets wet it's a whole problem believe me my wife will tell you now all of a sudden there's nothing they can say so you do the one two three process here you pick whichever one you want and all three of them will serve you let's go into slightly harder territory they're smaller than you but they're basically calling you out on a lie that could threaten your reputation they say you falsified claim something along those lines which typically comes to just honesty which is one of the things that the whole world hates the world forgive just about anything except for a liar kind of interesting now in my opinion I'm just giving you the Alex Playbook I ignore that's it I ignore it as painful as it is and to see them you know frothing at the mouth and the common threads they have go back and forth never once have I made less money from anyone doing this because think about this the only way that you combat their message is by being louder with yours not directing your traffic to them and so you ignore them Plus us you amplify because every moment that I spend addressing them I stop giving value to my audience so in a very real way attacks have taken people down but because of how they responded not because of the strength of the attacker they take someone off their game then they get in this Petty pissing match with someone who's lower than them and it makes them look bad even if you win you lose it's a pic Victory you lose credibility people see a different side of you all of that's bad and so I prefer to pretend you don't exist and then 10x my message and tell everyone who's on my team these [ __ ] are lying and trying to destroy us the only way that you beat hate is you don't beat hate you drown it out and as a second point to this someone can hate on you who's below you and get you to respond it means that they control you they are in control of your actions how weak does that appear I want to be a rock I want somebody to be whatever the [ __ ] they want to do and I will continue to be a rock that's at least how I perceive these types of situations use it if useful but ignore and amplify now we've covered box one and two so these are the easy ones if someone's bigger than you and they say something else you one two three of them same as before and what I recommend is really lean into number three just eviscerate yourself so there was a major news Outlet like re top five you know who this news person is attacked somebody who's in the porn industry and they were discrediting and saying man look at what this generation has come to and it was just a video of a bunch of girls jumping in the pool whatever and so they responded because everyone tagged and knew who they were and so they said you should join us next time now the news anchor was trying to hate on them but they just made a joke out of it what's the coolest way to respond just make a joke out of it and what does he look like super Petty what do they look like fun and awesome and what did they do that next day record sales he chose to use his platform to direct attention to theirs for free didn't have to pay affiliate commissions what a steal we should only hope that someone bigger than us hates on us rule number one never attack back you cannot win by attacking you win by deflection or by amplifying above you never win in direct conflict when it comes to reputation now in the last box someone bigger than you tries to discredit you how do you respond so there's a mega influencer and I saw this influencer that I followed for many many years make all these posts about kind of denying this claim that they were getting attacked for so this was a lie that many people were trying to attack them with and it was specifically a competitor of theirs that was trying to defame them right really petty stuff but tough for that individual because they built their whole career off of this particular um truth I'm just going to read The Exchange to you I said uh can I suggest something I believe that brand is built on associations if I stand next to something and say I am not a pink elephant people will over enough time associate me and the Pink Elephant replace pink elephant with whatever you are claiming you are not think about that for a second this is me cutting to you who's listening or watching this right now if you keep saying I'm not that way I'm not that I'm not that all that people remember is you and that that's it so you keep repeating that and you actually feed into the narrative you're trying to disprove although well-intentioned I don't think these posts help you for context I didn't know you were dealing with this but then you drew my attention to it so you used your platform to increase awareness of your enemy's message the only way you could combat hate is to get louder you shrink them into irrelevance you don't win on logic you win by force because you'll never convince them you can make them so small they cease to matter take it or leave it just my opinion but I've studied brand deeply in creating mind from zero and I get plenty of hate and people who say I faked my business success and that I make up my numbers Etc I gain Nothing by drawing attention to them no one follows you because of this particular reason that that the person was worried about I said they follow you because of the value you provide them and let's face it even if someone did think that you weren't this one particular thing it doesn't affect them at all it doesn't change their behavior anyways I'm just saying this if you didn't reply nothing would happen your following won't stop growing you won't stop making sales only reply to people bigger than you I'm just giving you brand strategy if you want to respond I respect it I just tell you what I would do which is nothing focus on winning be louder take the anxious energy and put it into your megaphone about your mission another saying I like is they're not worth the skin off the back of your knuckles the law of large numbers makes it appear as though the world hates you humans aren't built to get this much feedback imagine you're 85 years old and saggy and no longer look how you do now will you care about this blip and I say this to say that if you get 500 hateful comments that's .1% of your audience the other 99.9% love you focus on them and right now you're moving up and so that means the bigger the game the bigger the dragons also all these people based on the nature of this particular person the hate was also laced on the fact that they couldn't have done as well as they did without Faking It basically and so I said they're just complimenting you like that's all this hate fundamentally is so take that insult as a compliment instead it only bothers you because you choose to let it bother you and so I'd sent this particular person the story of uh Lela getting called to skinny [ __ ] by some dude who walked past her she was like did you hear that called me skinny and so even though the guy meant it as an insult she took it as a compliment which means the entire thing was just based on our subjective choice of how we choose to take these things and said so it only bothers you because you let it otherwise they're just sending you traffic they're choosing to promote you for free what a deal I said can you ask them to send some to me too I would just like the extra attention but let them know that I won't return the favor just to be clear I'm not sending my traffic to them so I finalized all of this stuff with just saying if it's true lean into it if it's false and they're smaller ignore it if it's false and they're bigger make them seem Petty and Beyond those actions you only win by getting louder you don't silence say you drown it out you only lose if you get quieter or you change your message and so you get quieter by not saying anything at all which in a way stops delivering value to your audience or you change the message you have to your audience because you're no longer providing value to them and directing them elsewhere in either scenario the only solution is value because the only thing anyone will care about is value and if they came there for the value they will stay there for the value and most times those people will attack the people who are trying to discredit you because they love the value that you give them and they don't want it to stop but no matter what no one keeps attacking someone who does not reply and if you just keep getting bigger and keep getting louder and keep providing more and more value you weather the storm it has happened every time in my life and I've had some crazy people come after me and you know what long enough time Rising Extinction curves always rule if you yell at a rock long enough you walk away yes even these big ones where it feels the worst where they're discrediting the biggest thing one 2 3 ignore agree one up if you can so somebody was being discredited so was an athlete for being not natural so being accused of taking steroids this was a girl now all these people are trying to attack her and I thought that the most elegant response that she could have done hey guys you got me I'm not natural my boobs are fake my hair it's actually a darker brown and my eyelashes peel them off these are actually fake too and hold on let me take this makeup remover thing and smear it off my face and yep I wear makeup too and so you got me the rumors are true I'm not natural I enhance my appearance and if she had said something like that that would have killed anything else someone else can say because she would have made a joke out of their attack and so if you're noticing an underlying theme with all of this the one thing that counters hate above everything else is humor and one of the alltime funny things that you can always always do is make fun of yourself and we should always be better at mocking ourselves than anyone else does why cuz we have more material and so just think about all the things that you can think of that are adjacent to the insult that they have so that you can agree with them and attack even more viciously than they are to yourself and then you will appear as the Class Act you will appear as more humble and they will have nothing to say back because no one kick someone who admits their quote faults or wrongs they look like the bad guy and then the conflict dissipates now I walked you through these examples but I want to give you a realistic representation of the proportion of times that I use 1 2 3 so if this is a pie chart where I use 1 two and three one being ignore two being agree three being agree and one up for those of you listening at home I just drew a big circle with the world's tiniest slice sliced out of it and that tiniest slice is two and three together 99% of my attention just goes to continuing to amplify my message people catastrophize the hate because it feels like ding we have a lot of strong social behavior that is bred into us like in the first things we do as a kid we get shamed and we correct our behavior and so when people say bad things about us we change it feels bad the problem with social media is that it amplifies that hate you get a lot of it and so we're not really built to take that kind of hate but what we can't comprehend is the law of large numbers that are associated if you have a million people who follow you and you get 500 people who hate you every single day it's 5% you could barely even see it on this graph but it feels like 500 people and that feels like so many but it's just it's just a very small percentage of a very large number the quote I say where you can only lose if you quit is true again here if you have reputation the only way that you can get canceled is if you choose to accept being cancelled or some external power makes it impossible for you to amplify your message meaning if you get deplatformed from everything and no platform allows you to post and they have ai that searches every video that anybody else makes about you and removes it automatically yeah you got canceled but short of that the only other way you get canceled is if you choose to accept being canceled and choose to stop making your message because on a long enough time rizon if you keep putting out the value that you have you keep announcing the message by percentage of the things that people are consuming more and more of it is the positive thing that you're talking about and so today it may seem like 50% of the news is bad but if you take today and then multiply it by 6 months and it's one day or two day or 5 days out of 180 days that 50% was about this negative thing and that all of the extra was you providing value providing value then that shrinks the amount of quote hate or negativity that you receive and the only way that you can solve it is through activity is through advertising in the literal sense by making your message known hate is a prerequisite for success just like Winston Churchill said you have enemies good you stood up for something sometime in your life the only people who get no hate are people who are invisible if you do nothing that is the only way to guarantee that you have no hate but if you stand for anything in your life there will be people who stand against you and it is in their nature to attack and that's okay and so I want to walk you through this because if you're dealing with one of these situations whether it's employee whether it's a customer whether it's a competitor or just somebody who just is envious of you the Playbook has already been written it's just hard to execute in the moment but the the more you do it the better you'll get at it and the tldr is remember that number one is still by far the biggest part of this which is you just keep doing you because if people know that they can control your behavior by pushing this button to get this response from you more people hit that button you actually let your audience know and you let your competitors know and your enemies know that you have cheat codes that they can dismantle you but if they can hit any button wherever they want as hard as they want and you're going to keep doing you you become very hard to beat