YOU DO YOU, LET THEM DO THEM

GOOOOOD MORNIN! How ya FREAKIN doin? I hope good. I hope Halloween was good to everyone and that you ate a lot of candy. I didn’t this year, unfortunately, I don’t know why but I am slightly bummed out about it. I just might meander on down to Wal-Mart and pick up some of the 50% off bags of candies.

No one should be left out of candy eating on Halloween. NO ONE. Especially me! My opinion, of course.

We are jumping right into the topic today, because I’m a little jazzed up about this particular subject. You saw it in the title, but here is again.

YOU DO YOU, LET THEM DO THEM.

This goes for 100% everyone, but it was the writing world that sparked this post. I recently saw a YouTube video by an author who shall not be named, and she made an entire video criticizing another author because of they way she is choosing to run her book business.

She called her disrespectful, and repulsive because the way she does things is different than the norm.

What is disrespectful in my eyes is that you’re so incredibly jealous of someone, who has created a huge amount of success for herself in a very short time, that you would take a bunch of time out of your life away from your kids and husband to make a slander video.

Why? What did she ever do to you? Did things slightly different which resulted in more success than you’ve had in half the time?

The answer is she’s done nothing wrong. And that is almost always the answer when you ask someone what the person they are targeting ever did to them. In most cases, they’ve never even met the person! Yet they are going out of their way to try to create roadblocks for them.

This video is just the tip of the ice berg. We live in a world today where everyone is tearing everyone else down. Most people spend more time wandering around in the business of others than they do in their own lives.

To me, it is infuriating. Why can’t we just leave each other be? We are all living this life, and we are all trying to do the best we can with what we have. We all come from different places with different backgrounds and different outlooks on things.

IT’S OKAY TO BE DIFFERENT. It is okay to not follow the norms. It is okay to go outside the lines.

We let things get to us way too easily anymore. Who cares what so-and-so down the street is doing? You don’t like it? Okay, then don’t do that. Boom. End of story. Yet, it doesn’t end there. It goes on and on and on. Then we create a hashtag for it so we can get our issue to “trend”.

Look, I understand feeling extremely passionate about something and I am not, by any means, saying that people shouldn’t be able to express the things they stand behind. Especially when there are ethical or moral issues involved in something.

Those types of things REQUIRE good people to stand behind good things or ideas.

I am speaking to the elementary stuff. Calling someone out on Instagram for using a filter. Trashing someone’s website or content because it’s different from your own. Creating a thirty-minute YouTube video bashing someone because they are finding success in something they love.

These things aren’t helping anything, in fact, they are making our world worse. We live in a negative enough society as it is without creating more of it for no reason other than being so uncomfortable in your own skin and life that you have to go and try to mess with someone else’s.

If that is your reason for taking a shot at someone, because they are somehow doing better than you in your mind, or because you think they shouldn’t have the success that they do since you don’t, then shame on you. Shame on you. 

If this is you, you need to knock it off. Stop worrying so much about someone who is doing better than you or who has more than you have and start worrying more about you.

It’s not their fault you’re not more successful, it’s yours. It isn’t their fault that you aren’t further ahead than where you are, it’s yours. It’s not their fault that they’re happy and you’re not, it’s yours.

You don’t like that someone has these things and you don’t? Quit being a cry-baby and go fix it. Go change it. Instead of bitching and moaning on social media about how awful your life is and how so-and-so doesn’t deserve what they have, go make your life not awful.

You have total control over your life. It may not feel like it, but you do. You can change your mood. You can change your attitude. You can change how you treat people and you can change your life.

Here’s the thing though, I PROMISE you, your life will not change, and it sure as hell won’t get better, by tearing someone else down. It will not get better by perpetuating the negativity in our world. Cycling through the negative stuff daily and constantly sitting in a woe-is-me state feeling sorry for yourself will only bring more negativity to your own life.

Try something for me. For one day, just be positive. Be nice. Instead of criticizing someone, give them a compliment. Lift them up. Be a cheerleader for someone.

It will absolutely amaze you how different your world will look when you embrace positivity and drown out negativity.

Some of you are rolling your eyes at me “Oh here we go, Mr. Positivity here to save the day” and that is okay. I’m gonna LET YOU BE YOU. If you don’t want to heed this advice, I am not going to hate you and I certainly am not going to bash you for it.

I will go on being positive and finding success because of it.

I’ll end with this. When I am having a crappy day, 100% of the time I catch myself being negative about something or someone. And 100% of the time, when I CHOOSE to knock it off, my day gets better almost immediately.

If you’re having a rough day, or a rough few months, or you’re going through a rough patch, the key is not in making everyone else feel your pain. The key is fixing your pain. There is always a way, you just have to find it. So, find it.

Keep pushing forward. Keep improving. Never stop getting better and don’t let petty things get in your way! Let them roll to the side and focus on you. You are all you have!