Dear Entrepreneur: You Cannot Please Everyone, Unless You Want To Fail
Someone said that the surest way to failure is to try and please everyone. You cannot do it. You can at least try but at the end, you will fail miserably. You will never succeed in pleasing everyone.
According to Paul Hudson, “some people can’t be pleased no matter what you do.” He says that such people may not be pleased because they either don’t like you or don’t like your work or may not have a specific reason they can point out. It is the nature of human beings.
I have come to realize that everyone has an opinion and that to sail through life, you have to learn to accept the opinions of others. What many people fail to accept is that opinions are not necessarily facts and that not every opinion should matter in your life. Simply, you should not respond to every opinion.
Read: 7 Things You Need To Drop In Order To Succeed
As an entrepreneur, you should be the proverbial lion that never loses sleep when the sheep are holding a meeting about him. To truly make it, you need to please some and look bad in the eyes of some. Watch out, when everyone is always happy around you, praising you and say you are ‘perfect’, you are either an idiot or they are idiots.
Criss Jami once said that ‘to be truly positive in the eyes of some, you have to risk appearing negative in the eyes of others. In fact, Jocelyn Murray puts it bluntly that ‘if you are busy pleasing everyone, you are not being true to yourself.’
Businesses have numerous ups and downs. Some of your customers will be happy while some will be terribly unhappy with your service or product. Some of those who might be unhappy might have genuine reasons and to that, you have to learn from them and change. Some might have no reason at all, to them, you should not go ballistic but within yourself, learn the words of Bangambiki Habyarimana which he said ‘don’t go into the business of pleasing people. You can’t please everybody. Simply do your best at what you do.’
In this life, you can’t compete for likes and follows because certainly, you won’t win. The only thing you can do is to pour out your heart and allow love to flow to those who need it.
As a leader, you first have to acknowledge that people naturally hate change. Nobody loves change. Even if a change is good, it must have someone who will oppose it. What do you do in such a situation? Do you wage war against those who oppose your change? Do shed them off from the team? The answer is no. All you have to do is to explain to them why the change is necessary.
One major mistake that leaders make is to want to impose change on their team or followers. Be sure such a move will be rejected at some point. But a great leader will explain the stake that his team has in the change and why it is paramount to embrace it.
READ: The Less You Associate With Some People, The More Your Life Improves
Sometimes, however, it falls upon the shoulder of the leader to determine whether the change is needed despite the unpopularity among the faction of the team. It reaches a time that you have to force people to change, not because they want to but because you as a leader you know that they have to. In such a move, people might be unpleased and as long as you know that what you did is the right thing, you do not have to apologize or worry. Move on.
Borrow a leaf from Margaret McBride who said that ‘you can please some of the people all the time; all the people some of the time and some of the people none of the time, and these are the people you pray for all the time.’
The fact that you cannot please everyone does not mean that you become arrogant and ignore those who have a different opinion about you.
There are 10 simple rules that you can embrace when dealing with people, both those who love you and those who hate you:
- Listen –