The Value of Being Disliked | Robin Sharma

Hi, it's Robin Sharma, author of the Leader who Had no Title, founder of the Titan Academy, and welcome to this mastery session. This mastery session is all about the value of being disliked. So here's the brain tattoo I want to offer to you with great love and respect.

You can be a change maker. You can be liked by everyone around you. You don't get to do both. We live in this society that loves to be liked. We seek likes on the social media, we want people to follow us, we want everyone around us to applaud us. We have this deep seated fear of conflict. Now this is a neurobiological wiring. It allowed us to function in a community in the days when we were out the savannah. And if we strayed from the tribe, we would be eaten by saber toothed tigers. This neurobiological instinct allowed us to continue when if we strayed from the herd, we would starve. Okay, but now we are in the modern world. We want to innovate, we want to be a players, we want to own our craft, we want to bring on our best. And yet we want, we have this deep need of rising above the cult of average. And we live in a world right now where there are so few people willing to be disliked. Here's another idea I want you to wire in. As a core belief, every visionary was once ridiculed before they were revered. I'm going to repeat that again because I believe it's so important for you as an A player, every visionary was initially ridiculed before they were revered. I mean, let's look at someone like an Elon Musk or a Steve Jobs or a Vincent Van Gogh or an Edison or a Jonas Salk or a Henry Ford or.

The creator of Amazon or Google, or we could just go on and on. And anything that has moved the needle in society came from a brain of a person who was initially laughed at. I mean, the impossible is generally the untried. But here's the thing. When you are a visionary, you have these brave ambitions, you get this incredible idea, your instinct says this is going to make history, and then people start laughing at you and you start getting ridiculed because the very nature of innovation and a beautiful idea means you're going to disrupt the marketplace or you're going to disrupt society. And at a deep level, that causes fear within people when they see a new idea. When you challenge the status quo, which is really what leadership and being iconic is all about, disrupting the status quo, whether it's in your marketplace, whether it's in if you're in your field of skill, you're going to be a disruptor. And so that threatens people and makes them scared. And what most people do is they laugh at you, they dislike you, some of them even start to hate you. And if you're really disrupting the status quo, they will kill you. Martin Luther King, Jr. John F. Kennedy, Mahatma Gandhi. So my point is simply this. I know you're with me in this mastery session because you want to live a legendary life. You want to own your game. In your professional life, you want to live a beautiful personal life. You want to have a giant, no, let's say, gargantuan impact on humanity. Please do the interior work required to get to a level where the negative opinions and the chattering voices of the cynics do not knock you off your ambition. They do not knock you off your vision. They do not deplete your game. You see, that's the interior capability and capacity that's required from someone who wants to really be a history maker. You have to be so strong and your own skin that when people dismiss your ideas or they don't understand it, or they laugh at you, you simply keep on going until they start to see the brilliance of what you do. I mean, look at a lot of the innovations out there. I mean, look at the inventions out there. At first, no one thought they would amount to anything. They really were ridiculed and laughed at. And now they're ubiquitous. Every one of us use them every single day. When we turn on an electrical switch, we don't sit there and go, wow, that was genius. But even the light bulb, Edison was mocked. He was so misunderstood. But now it's so ubiquitous, so commonplace, we take it for granted and we don't really see him as a genius. Every visionary is first ridiculed before they are revered. So also remember, related to everything I've shared with you, leadership is a pretty lonely sport.

And every great genius, every great producer spent a lot of time alone. And the reality is, you can be part of the majority. You can be busy being busy. You can watch all the TV shows. You can be like everyone else, or you can play in the rare air of world class. But to have the results only 5% of the population have, you must be willing to think, be and produce in a way that only 5% of the population think, be and produce. And when you do that, you're going to leave the majority. You'll leave the herd, and you'll be called eccentric. Be okay with being eccentric because all world Changers were eccentric, they were considered strange, they were called weird, they were laughed at, they didn't fit in. But it was worth it. So I hope I've been of value in this mastery session. I hope I've given you some insights deconstructing your journal later tonight before you go to sleep. Please remember transformation lives in the awareness. As you develop more awareness about what it takes to rise to mastery outright leadership, becoming a titan up in your industry, your behavior starts to match the new awareness. So I wish you all green lights. Thanks for being with me in this mastery session. I hope I've been of use. I'll talk to you soon. Hi, this is Robin Sharma. I hope you received great value from this mastery session. If you'd like to receive potent training videos, blog posts, learning tools and information on my two live events, Personal Mastery Academy and my flagship four day experience the Titan Summit, go ahead and visit robincharmer.com.