A Side Effect of the Main Process

Inherent in being proactive and trying things and not waiting to be told what to do is the fact that you’re going to fail, you’re going to make mistakes, and you’re probably going to piss people off. And if you’re not pissing people off, if you don’t have haters, if you’re not putting yourself in a situation that has some risks associated with it, you’re probably not going to realize your full potential.

Gina Bianchini

Your goals, job, content-creation (maybe those are all the same thing) can rub colleagues / managers / readers / etc. the wrong way, especially if you take the risks and measures that have to be done to get to where you want to be.

At first I was thinking of this in terms of looking back on my past jobs working in technology and also in filmmaking. I’ve had people literally stomp away down the road never to be seen again. But this just as well applies to content creators, including blog writers. And auxiliary texts like Twitter.

According to sports writer Ethan Strauss:

We are in this odd phase where the word “contrarian” is slung by media professionals as some sort of epithet, as though there’s an obvious virtue in conformity. In the social media era, a divergent opinion is also regarded as a cynical form of negative attention-seeking, in addition to being morally wrong. So, not only are you bad, but you’re pretending to be bad for clicks. Or something.

In his post, “An Uncontroversial Guide to Being Controversial,” Strauss explains his rules for minimizing backlash and lost customers to just those unavoidable situations dealing with the topics that he specifically presents. And as for Twitter, he said:

It’s really hard to be an active participant without finding yourself on a team, and thus alienating people outside that team.

With that wisdom, I should augment the title of this post so that it:

Does not mean you have to piss people off…

But it’s quite likely that you will piss some people off…

And that’s ok..

But if you fall into traps where you’re knee-jerk reacting too much…

Or if the focus has been lost in a shift to provoking others…

That’s a whole other game and is certainly not something I’d recommend, unless your goal is to be a professional troll.