You want to hear what they say to me? Because they’re probably going to say something similar to you. On this episode Russell gives several examples of some of the angry messages he receives from people on social media, and gives some advice about what to do with it. Here are some of the insightful nuggets to look for in this episode:

-- Find out why Russell doesn’t give too much thought to the haters.

-- Hear what some of the things are that people get angry at Russell over.

-- And see why the best advice to get through people who say horrible things is to get a thicker skin and learn to ignore them.

So listen here to find out how Russell has grown a thick skin and learned to ignore the haters.

Anyway, that’s just a small sprinkle. It goes on and on, every post I make, as I see in my other folder, I’m getting attacked by at least 10-15 people. On every one, no matter what I post. Positive, negative, family, good things, bad things, raising money for charity, it’s the wrong charity. You’re helping these people, you didn’t do it right. On and on, it’s crazy.

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What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today I am in a huge van driving around Bear Lake and I wanted to share with you guys some thoughts because a lot of you right now are in the process of starting to publish, especially for the Two Comma Club X publishing program. We have you all publishing podcasts, and YouTubes and blogs, and a whole bunch of amazing things, and my guess, not just my guess, I know this is true, one of the biggest fears for most of you guys including those who haven’t started publishing yet, which is probably the reason why you haven’t started publishing yet, is because your fear about what people are going to think about you, what they’re going to say about you. So this episode, if that’s you and you feel that way, this episode is for you.

So I want to come back to my goal with this episode, it’s funny because every time I tell someone to start publishing, they start doing it, the first thing that happens is they get beat up. You start getting people commenting, and usually the weirdest things are your friends and your family at first are like, “Why are you doing this? Why are you trying to grow? Why are you sharing? Just go back into your little cave and just don’t talk like you used to be. We liked you better that way.” That’s the first wave of the weirdness as you start putting yourself out there. And I remember going through that back 17, 18 years ago now where people are like, “Why are you doing these things? Stop.”

And then after that, then as your voice starts getting louder, and you start getting better, and more people start finding out, you find this really weird thing. Number one, if you’re neutral nothing happens so it doesn’t grow. So I want to warn you again about that. Neutrality, while it may seem nicer and less annoying, it doesn’t help, it doesn’t get your message out there. If you really want to grow you start putting out there your thoughts and your beliefs and your message, and you create that polarity. And that polarity does one of two things. Number one, it draws people to you. The more polar you are, the more people will be drawn to you.

But then the opposite side of polarity, when something is pulling toward, there’s also the thing that pulls away from you. And that’s the people who are going to freak out and not like you. And I get people all the time, “Well, it’s easy for you Russell. Everyone loves Russell Brunson.” And I’m like, “Oh, let me tell you.” So this is what this episode is about. I want to tell you that part of it.

So I’ve been on family vacation right now. We’re down at Bear Lake with my kids, we’re having a good time with my family. And there’s a lot more down time here than I’m used to in my normal life. In my normal life it’s like, I wake up and I am running until I pass out at night. And that’s the pace that I set. In fact, I’ve got so many friends and coworkers and employees and people who are like, “Man, I do not know how you keep this pace up all the time.” But that’s kind of my pace and I love it and it’s like my normal thing.

So here I’m at Bear Lake and we’re sitting at the lake and it’s like, there’s no pace. We’re on the sidelines just chilling and I’m freaking out. Must run, gotta create something, what do I do? So a couple of times I sneak my phone away and start looking at stuff and I go through all my messages and everything and then I’m kind of done.

So I spent some time going, you know when you have Instagram or Facebook, it’s like your messages that your friends and family send you, but then there’s another tab of people who aren’t your friends and they message you, it just kind of goes in there. So if you want to them, you can. So I decided to explore in the other tab, and first off, I want to warn you before you look in that tab, if you think the comments that are public are mean and brutal, the comments on the other tab are even worse.

And I want to caveat first off by saying, I know that people have it worse than me. So I’m not going to, in fact, I’ve got a friend, someone in our Clickfunnels community who was showing me, she gets men, men send her the most vulgar, horrible things to the point where I would love to fly out and just take these people out. Anyway, so I don’t get much of that, thankfully, so I do understand that there is worse. But I do want to give you a snapshot of what I saw today, because it’s kind of like that Adam Sandler movie where it’s like, ‘They’re all going to laugh at you.” Yes, there are going to be people laughing at you as you do this thing and they’re going to make fun of you and everything you say. No matter strong of a stance you have one way or the other, people are going to attack you.

And it was just kind of a, today was an interesting day to kind of see some of that stuff, so I’ll share some of them. One of them was somebody, I was posting pictures of my kids, and me and my family on vacation. And this person had been sending me messages, and I didn’t realize this until I looked in the other tab and started scrolling up, for over a year. Hundreds of messages talking to me about how horrible of a person I am that I have 5 kids, and I’m causing over population and I’m killing the world and killing these things because I have these kids. You think like, ‘Oh Russell, you have this cute little family and your kids are so awesome. And you’re a dad who’s trying his best to help raise them in the best way.” all these kind of things. But it’s like, no there’s people on the other side saying you are ruining the planet because you have so many kids.

This other one where we had just gone to Waffle Me Up and we did take home because Covid rules, you can’t eat at a restaurant, so they put them in these Styrofoam, not Styrofoam, they were actually like cardboard boxes. I don’t know. So we brought them home, we were eating them, and I look at this thing and I went to the other folder, and there was a message from some guy and I start reading it. And there is hundreds of messages over the last two years of this person commenting on every single thing I’m doing that’s destroying the environment. Talking about how the plastic forks were, “How can you care about these other causes when you’re destroying the environment with your plastic forks? And you’re this thing and you’re that thing.”

And I had a picture of my jeep, I saw a month earlier, and it’s like, “You’re destroying the ozone layer with that jeep.” And just ripping on me, how horrible a person I am because I use basic products, just stuff. There’s that one right.

I’m trying to think of all of them now, there’s so many. Oh with, right now as I’m recording this, it’s world trafficking day, so I’m talking about OUR and how we’re raising money. And you’d think that would be a positive thing, like “Hey Russell, you’re trying to save kids from sex slavery. That’s a noble cause, you should do that.” And you think that everybody in the world would be like, “Yes, Russell that is a good noble cause.” But it is not the case.

Instead what happens is there are so many people that are angry with me. Saying, “Oh Russell, you’re a white savior, trying to save these little kids. Blah, blah, blah.” Thing after thing after thing. “Why don’t you care about people in your own home town? There’s problems happening in your own town? Why do you have to go help people outside the country?” tons of negative around that.

And then I had other people that were yelling at me because I had shared Jermaine Griggs post who is one of my black friends who spoke at Funnel Hacking Live and he made a really good post about kind of his struggles with stuff. So I posted that, and somebody yelled at me, “Why are you concerning yourself with these kind of topics when there’s kids being taken away, sex slavery. You should be focusing on those efforts.” I literally am doing both, I’m trying my best here.

Anyway, that’s just a small sprinkle. It goes on and on, every post I make, as I see in my other folder, I’m getting attacked by at least 10-15 people. On every one, no matter what I post. Positive, negative, family, good things, bad things, raising money for charity, it’s the wrong charity. You’re helping these people, you didn’t do it right. On and on, it’s crazy.

So I’m sharing this with you guys because an earlier Russell, 10 or 15, 20 years ago when I was getting started in this game, a lot of this stuff would have been too hard to for me to handle, it would have been, I probably would have stopped. I would have said, “It is not worth this.” But now that I’ve been doing this, this long, I’ve gotten pretty thick skin. And I care more about the missions than the haters and the people that are talking against it. And I understand that there’s so many soap boxes and so many things, and the reality is I agree with almost all of the people. Yeah, I should be doing more things for the environment, yes I should be doing more things to help kids get out of sex slavery. I’m doing my best. Yes, I should…..

Everyone’s platforms are good, but it’s just when people take you trying to focus on the platforms that you’ve chosen and attacking your for those things, because it’s not the ones that they have. And I just want to remind all of you guys who are listening, first of be aware of that in yourself. If somebody, if their mission is to help people with anxiety, or help entrepreneurs, or help kids, or whatever their thing is, let them do their thing. That’s their calling, that’s what their gifts were created for. That’s what God called them to do that thing. So let them do that thing and be proud of them, even if it’s different from the thing that you’ve been called to do. Just because you’ve been called for this mission and that mission doesn’t mean you should be focusing on the opposite, or yelling at people because they’re not focusing on your mission and the thing that you care about.

The guy who’s yelling at me about having my car, and having plastic things, that’s a great mission. That’s his calling and he should run with that. But cutting down other people because that’s not their mission shouldn’t be, isn’t going to help your mission grow. It’s like taking on the mantle, taking extreme ownership of it, and then running, and giving, and serving, and doing the thing that you’ve been called to do. Not criticizing people for following the callings and the missions that they’ve been called to do.

Kind of an example is the other day Matt Maddix, who is Caleb Mattix’s dad, Matt’s awesome, he, I actually shared a really cool podcast a couple of weeks ago with you from him about the questions that he asks and it was, anyway, awesome podcast. Matt messaged me the other day and his mission that God called him to do is to work with fatherless kids and people in the streets, all sorts of stuff like that. And he shared all these things and was tagging me in everything and I messaged him, I said, “Hey man, I love this. It’s not my calling. My calling is to serve entrepreneurs and to serve people through these charities that I’ve already, you know, that I focus on. But man, I love you and I respect you and I support you because I know that’s your mission, I know what you’re trying to do. I will pay, I’ll give you money, I’ll give you time, I’ll help support your mission. But it’s not my mission, that’s your mission. I can’t go all in. I’m not going to spend the rest of my life doing it because it’s not my mission. These are the ones that I’ve been called to focus on.”But I support him and I love him and I’m grateful for him being the one who took the mantle and ran with those things.

So I want you guys to understand that, because it’s funny, most of the people yelling at me, they weren’t people who didn’t have good intentions, they did, they just, I don’t know, wanted to attack my good intentions for whatever reason.

A couple of other things I noticed in there, one was, and this one is interesting, if you guys don’t know Rachel Hollis, Rachel, she’s struggling right now because, I’m not going to go into her details, but I remember she was telling me when her first book came out, Girl, Wash Your Face,  and Rachel is very Christian. And she said it was funny, the people that were closest to her, people who were other Christians, other Christian women beat her up more than anybody else. She’s like, “These are the people I was called to serve. I was trying to help. The people that I’m trying to help, the people like me were the most brutal.” And beat her up the most.

And it’s interesting I got a message in my other box again from someone who’s husband started studying my things, so she got nervous and started following me and followed my instagram. And she’s like, “Because I looked at your account and you follow some people on Instagram who..” anyway, who she disagreed with. So she forbid her husband from following me anymore because she didn’t agree with some of the people I follow on Instagram. And I was like, “What?”

I was so confused at first. So I went to my friends list, and I don’t have a ton of friends on Instagram, and I’m looking and I’m scrolling through it. And if you guys know what I do for my business, obviously, I’m a marketing guy and I help coach people in every market. So I help tons of people in the financial market, tons of people in the health and fitness market, tons of people in supplements, all these different things. So I follow the people that I coach and I also follow a lot of the influencers in all these different spaces because I want to understand the market so I can be a good coach and good mentor for these people that I work with.

So I’m looking through it, and yes, some of the people I follow in the health and fitness space, some of my clients and my friends, they post pictures of them flexing at competitions, and some of them are bikini contests and they flex onstage and these things, and stuff like that. I’m like, “Is that what’s negative or something else?” I was looking at the OUR and there’s Tim Ballard sharing pictures of kids they’ve saved, like that. And I’m like,”Is that what it is?”

I couldn’t find what was so negative but she was so upset about someone I was following because of whatever, I still don’t understand the reason. And she was like, “I’m an LDS.” So she’s Mormon like me and she’s like, “I’m just like you, and I can’t believe another LDS man would follow these people. So I’m forbidding my husband to learn from you because of that.” I’m just like, “I’m so confused.” It’s just so hard.

So I think, a couple things. Number one, for all of us listening, stop judging each other. Everyone is here on a different mission, different calling, different thing they’re trying to do, love them and support them. Number two, quit judging people because of stupid stuff. Judging me because I follow some of my friends and clients on Instagram because I’m trying to coach them and help them and show them how they can increase their ads and things like that, and judging me because you didn’t like those people. That’s so weird and so against everything I believe in and you believe in and we should all believe in.

And then the seconds side, which is kind of the more focal point of this, is just understanding. It happens to me, it happens to everyone. The fact that you start talking and sharing and publishing stuff, you’re going to get beat up a little bit. It’s going to be hard at first. I would encourage you to try and delete things, ignore them. Don’t rely upon it until your skin gets thicker and thicker. Because if you’re not careful it will stop you from continuing your mission, which is the biggest tragedy. You’re here to try and change some people’s lives, and if the people that are fighting against you, if they keep you from doing that, then they won.

So while you’re waiting, while you’re getting your skin thicker, just delete those things, ignore them, forget about them, don’t focus on them. Focus on the positive. Focus on the people that are getting the right messages. Focus on the things that, you know, the positive reinforcements you get from your work.

For me, I take pictures on my phone of every single positive thing that someone says about me, and I have a folder in my google images, and I have on Voxer, I star all the ones that people send me positive feedback. And on those days where I get beat up or I’m tired and I’m like, ‘Ah, why am I doing this?” I go back and I listen to them and I read them and those are the things that fuel me and keep me moving forward.

So just be aware of that. It happens to the best of us, for everything. For me having too many kids I get beat up. For me using a plastic fork I get beat up, for me following my friends on Instagram, I get beat up. For every little thing, you’re going to get beat up. So just ignore it because it doesn’t matter. It’s not them that matters, it’s the people that are listening to you whose lives are being changed because of your message, your mission and the things you’re putting out there. So keep doing it, don’t stop. We need you, we need your voice, we need your message, your people are waiting to hear from you, so don’t stop. Keep doing it and it’ll be worth it in the end, I promise you that.

With that said, I appreciate you all, thanks so much for listening, for paying attention and I’ll talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody.