As a person who receives a lot of feedback from folks online – and not always kind, generous, or even coherent – I often have to decide how to respond.
Listen closely, because this took me a long time to learn this lesson, but it has served me well:
The non-response is oftentimes the best response.
It’s hard to resist the desire to fire back upon receiving a scathing email or caustic message on social media. As a two-time state debate champion and lover of arguments, it sometimes takes all of my strength to resist engaging in verbal combat, but a non-response is usually best, for three very good reasons:
- I have a choice: I can use my time to fight a small minded troll or uninformed reader, or I can make something new. Something of value. Something original and perhaps wonderful. I should almost always choose the latter. We all should.
- The non-response is loud. It’s endlessly echoing in the mind of someone trying to battle you online. The non-response is dismissive. It renders your detractor’s attack inert and meaningless. It’s painful to be ignored, so ignore your haters and remind yourself of how relentlessly annoying your non-response must be for them. It’s almost always far more painful and frustrating than any response could possibly be.
- Defending yourself against your attackers is almost never necessary. You may feel publicly attacked when someone goes after you on social media, but no one remembers or even cares. Your audience is never anxiously awaiting for your response. They have moved on, forgotten it already, and are busy looking at home prices or shopping for shoes or watching a YouTube video on gardening. What feels visceral and all encompassing to you is a forgotten breadcrumb to most.
I offer this advice (and much more) in my new book, Someday Is Today, as a means of reducing negativity in your life and recapturing precious time.
We need both things – less negativity and more time – if we hope to make our dreams come true.
The nonresponse affords us both of those things and defeats our detractors in the process, making it both incredibly easy and highly effective.
