Never Get Angry with Idiots (Advice for Entrepreneurs)

In this video I want to talk about anger and how to avoid getting angry. Now if you are an entrepreneur or if you are doing anything at all in your life, there will be plenty of situations where you might get a little bit angry. And the anger usually comes from stupidity of people, right? It doesn't come from other situations which is outside of people's control. And why does that anger come to us in the first place? Why can't we be just peaceful all the time? Like Sophie here, right? So here you can see Sophie always being peaceful, always kind of just chilling out. And why can't we just be like Sophie? The reason is that we try to think that other people will behave just like us. And we expect them to have the same level of intelligence as we have, right? So to give you a small example of why this happens, imagine you are driving down the road. And while you are driving down the road, there is a buffalo crossing the road in a very slow pace. Or there is a buffalo right in the middle of the road. You have to slow down your car. You have to probably wait for the buffalo to move or go around it. Do you get angry in such a situation? Mostly not, right? Because the buffalo is not human. And that's all the intelligence it has. It is just sitting there in the middle of the road. And in fact it's we humans who have kind of ended up deforesting and started taking up natural space. The buffalo doesn't have a place to go in the city. It doesn't have an open field to graze. In fact it's the buffalo that should be angry on us for taking over the entire space by building the city. However, if there is a human who is crossing the road and he is not looking at the passage of vehicles on the road and he is just jaywalking, you know there is a term for it, it's called jaywalking. So if he is not using a zebra crossing or if this human is not using a skywalk and he is just crossing the road and let's say he is looking somewhere else and immediately you have to stop your car or slow down your car otherwise he would hit the human. Then you get angry at the human, right? You get like a stupid idiot and sometimes people put down their windows and scream or show the middle finger to him. And this happens because you think that that human is as intelligent as you. That if you were in that situation, you would not be crossing the road without looking left, right. Or even if you are crossing the road at least if a car is coming, you will kind of like hurry up. But we often see humans who don't even hurry up, right? They kind of go around on the middle of the road at their own pace. And there is this natural reaction of anger and it happens because you put yourself in that situation and you are thinking that if it was you, you wouldn't behave like that. So you get angry that that human is behaving like that. But what if that human is an animal? What if you consider that that human is an idiot? Then you won't get angry, right? And the reality is that most of the people are stupids, most of the people are idiots. And once you understand this fact and once you realize this fact, you won't get angry at all. Because you will only be, see we have one idiot honking on the road while I see it's a highway and there is no need to keep honking. One truck driver is honking and you know going on an open highway. So see, idiots all around us, right? So there are 7 billion people on this planet earth and we are soaking in a pool of idiots. And if you try to imagine that all of these people are intelligent human beings, then that's when you get angry. If you understand that these people are idiots, then it's just a situation that you need to handle, right? Like for example, if something happens because of a natural incident, right? You won't have any anger. Like for example, let's say you are driving in a guard section of the road and there is suddenly a small hill slide and let's say one big boulder rolls over and it comes and falls on your car and damages your car. You are just going to claim insurance. You are not going to go ahead and get angry at the boulder or get angry at nature itself, right? So at the same time, if somebody hits your car and your car gets damaged, you will get angry because it's a human. You are not just dealing with the situation as you have to deal with the situation. You have seen that several times on the road, right? Somebody hits someone and they start fighting. They start getting angry. They start like, come to the police station. Sometimes they get into a fist fight also and that happens because the other person is a human. See, if I am going on the road and if somebody comes and hits me, I just look at the situation and see how I can handle it. If it's a damage which is a small scratch, then I let it go. Or if it is something that has to be replaced, like there is a huge dent or something, I will just go ahead and claim insurance. Like for example, if you have parked the car somewhere and if the car gets damaged, you will just go ahead and claim insurance, right? Why get angry on that human? He is a stupid guy. And if you start thinking that way, then life can be much, much more peaceful. And another incident I want to tell about in my business is that, you know, fortunately as of now we have a great team. But there was a time where we had stupid team members in our team. We had a girl who would, you know, not work at all. And she would just sit at the office and I told her that, hey, don't, like, you know, leave early. Leave by 6 o'clock maybe, you know, just work. And then she would like sharply start packing her bags at 5.59 and leave at 6. And, you know, it's a very easy option for entrepreneurs to get angry at such people. But eventually we have made sure that we hire only very good people. You know, if my intuition says that this person might be acting in a stupid way and making me angry, I don't let them into the garden of Eden, which is our company. First of all, so right now we have an excellent team. I don't need to get angry at my employees. But at the same time, when we have customers in the thousands, there is a very good chance that once in a while a stupid customer comes along. And a lot of entrepreneurs face situations where they have to get angry at their customers, angry at their clients and stuff like that. So we had this one customer who joined our three month digital marketing training program. And we usually have a terms and conditions that we don't give a refund. But in extreme cases, we give a refund, right? Extreme cases in the sense if some medical emergency or something, if the reason is valid. And even though we have like 9.5 out of 10 ratings for our product, this customer said that, hey, I don't like the product. And even though most of the customers say that my videos are filled with positivity, this customer was saying that it's filled with negativity. And he was like shouting at the top of his lungs. He was calling and mailing all of our team members, tweeting. And I was like, OK, refund kar do yaar. Because this is just a pain in the ass customer. Some people, you cannot make them happy ever. And my support person ended up issuing a refund for this customer. But when you issue the refund via payment gateway, it takes five to seven days for the refund to be credited to the bank account of that customer. And the refund was issued. The payment gateway sent a notification to them that the refund has been issued. But after that, he was again complaining that the refund has not come to his bank account immediately. He apparently wanted the refund on the same day. And he was saying that I have another course to join. I won't have money for it. I can't wait seven days. You are wasting my time. And then we ended up actually paying him another, you know, almost ₹20,000 back to him. While we have already issued a refund of ₹20,000 which will take another seven days for him to credit. So we were at a risk of ₹20,000. And then we decided that we will follow up with this customer and get back that ₹20,000 once the payment gateway refund goes to him. So payment gateway se refund ho gaya. We also ended up paying him another ₹20,000 so that he can get the refund immediately. And then we had to follow up with this customer for one and a half months to get that ₹20,000 back. But in this entire process, I was just looking at this incident as a statistic. If we have 10,000 customers, then according to probability and statistics, if you have an average of one customer for every 10,000 customers who is going to be like a major chutiya, then it means that by the time we get our next 10,000 customers, we are literally expecting that another chutiya like him will come along. And it will also happen that if we end up getting 1 lakh customers, some 10 chutiya customers will come along. It is a part of a statistic that you have to expect it. You can't like feel like surprised. Oh, wow. Okay. How can he behave like that? And any entrepreneur who does not have enough maturity in handling situations will get extremely angry at such situations. And for me, anger is a cost of peace of mind. If I'm getting angry with a tough customer and I'm wasting 2 hours in it, I could have spent that 2 hours reading a book, enjoying something, spending time with family. And those 2 hours could also end up productive where in that 2 hours, I might end up creating value worth ₹30,000 or ₹50,000. We all have limited amount of time. And we need to be miserly with our time. I'm not too miserly with money but I'm very miserly with my time. I don't give my time to people so easily. And I don't get worked up getting angry about people's behavior so easily. And unless you have the strong mental fortitude of just handling the situations in a very pragmatic way without getting emotional, you cannot become a successful entrepreneur, right? If I have 10 problems right now at this stage of my business, I will have 100 problems when my business grows, right? If we end up becoming like a 1000 crore company or a 100 crore company, 100 crore revenue per year company which will be a 1000 crore valuation company let's say, then there will be 100x problems than what I have right now. And I cannot get there without having the mental fortitude to deal with problems 100x in a better way, right? So look at all human behavior as part of a statistic, right? Expect it. Don't be surprised about it. If you have 10 friends who asked for money, there will definitely be 2 friends who will not return that money. Don't get angry about it. If you have lent money to someone, they are not returning it and they are costing your mental peace by constantly telling some reason, then forget that money. It's not worth your peace of mind especially if it is like 5000 or 10,000 rupees types. So prioritize peace of mind. That's the only way we can become like a successful entrepreneur and never get angry. And if you think of people as idiots by default, be surprised when a person does not act as an idiot, right? Don't be surprised when a person acts like an idiot. Be surprised when a person does not act as an idiot and assume that most of the people are idiots which is very true. And those are the people, I am kind of confidently saying that people are idiots because those idiots will probably not have the patience to watch this video until this point, right? If you are having the patience to watch this video and kind of connecting with me and kind of relating to what I am saying, you are definitely not an idiot. So you are not going to get pissed off at what I am saying. And I don't care about the other idiots because they are not watching this video. So be peaceful. Kind of always prioritize that mental peace. That is the only way to become a successful entrepreneur as you grow. Treat every incident as a statistic and be like Sophie. So before I end this video, Sophie, come here. I can just go ahead and maybe interact with Sophie. Sometimes she is a bad girl, doesn't obey me because I am not the master. Sophie, Sophie come here. So she has just gone somewhere. So maybe in the next video, you can have more of Sophie. And that's about it for this video. So I will see you in the next video guys. Go ahead and leave a comment below about what you think about this. And I will see you in the next video. I think she is here now. Sophie! She is eating something. So she is probably not so easily distracted. Sophie! Come here. Ah, she is here. She has run away. Sophie, come. Look at the camera. See, you have an audience here. She is just running away. Like mad. She is like 8 years old. But she acts like a 2 year old. So yeah, anyway, bye bye. And I will see you in the next video.