The Worst Trolls And How To Deal With Them

You know who you are.

I hired you/helped you/made you money/supported your efforts/donated to your charity/paid your rent/whatever.

Then, when you had a chance, you trashed me.

I wrote to you, “why?” Or I wrote, “I can’t believe you did that.”

That was my mistake because you were never going to apologize.

I never heard from you again.

There’s three levels of trolls.

1) There’s the ones that are anonymous. Who cares. They are teenagers in their mom’s basement.

2) Then there are, on occasion, “journalists” or other people with a “platform” who think they can achieve some status over you by lying and distorting information so they can get page views or whatever.

They are vile. But I don’t care about them either.

3) Then there’s you.

I made you money. I took care of you when you were sick. I paid your rent when you were broke.

I hired you when you had nothing. I babysat your children.

Despite what you say, your children are mostly mediocre.

A few months ago, I bought the entire Internet.

I wanted to educate people about cryptocurrencies. I thought there were a lot of scams out there and I wanted to tell people what was what.

But to get attention in today’s attention-glutted economy, you have to advertise.

The ads have to work. Else all of your hard work is useless.

We tested thousands of ads.

The ads that worked were the ugliest, most vile looking pictures of me. I don’t know why they worked. It was like the “protocols of the elders of Zion” version of the ads.

Me, with gold coins in my eyes and fire in the background.

I didn’t want to use them. “These are disgusting”. But they were getting people to my message. So I said, “Ok.”

People clicked. Who is this Satanic Jew?

And now I have more readers who are not only reading my current advice but looking through my years of articles on all sorts of topics. Listening to my podcasts that I created out of love. Reading thousands of free articles on my site.

Some people asked, reasonably, “Did you sell out?”

But as Tony Hawk once told me, “You can only sell out if you are selling.”

And should Richard Branson give away free plane tickets just because he’s a billionaire?

Don’t have a poverty complex.

When you create something of value, don’t forget that you become a person of value. It’s ok to charge for that.

And yet, 99.999% of what I do is for free. Read my 2200+ articles or 400 podcast episodes.

I spill my whole life for free. It’s ugly and bloody.

You knew that.

But some people just simply hated me from the ads.

Fair enough. This is what is great about America. You can have an opinion.

Some people lied in their articles about the ads. They said mean and untrue things about me. It hurt my feelings.

But I’m over it. I hope these people eventually live better lives.

Live a life measured by impact and not page views.

The blessing is I built a thicker skin. I practice being grateful for these people. Because in some way they help me to learn and be better and strive to create positive impact.

I always picture them and ask myself, “how can I love them as if I were their mother?”

That sounds stupid but it works. For moment I love them. And, yeah, it’s also stupid.

But then there was you.

You know who you are.

I made a mistake: I tried to respond to your hate. I tried to understand. “Did you even see the final product?”

Did you even read my articles for the past eight years?

Or even think about all the things we worked on together, did together, lived through together?

The impact we’ve had?

I was really disappointed in you.

I cried. I felt like I was on stage being booed for 24 hours a day.

I said all the cliches: I guess you were never really a friend to begin with.

Or…I hope I can one day invite you to a destination wedding in Portland, Oregon and I won’t show up.

But I was really disappointed. Why would you do this?

Oh well. See you when I see you.

Image: me trying to make sense of it all and share it in a way that makes no sense at all. We all are struggling to simply figure “it” out, without knowing what it even is.

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