Motivational speakers, gurus, luminaries of all kinds, will talk your ear off about how important it is to keep a positive mindset and push negative thoughts away. Only by staying positive, they say, can you achieve anything. This often carries with it – to the sorts of people who tend to write about this sort of thing – that you should dismiss criticism, that people who would question your course of action are simply “haters.” I was first accused of being a hater by a student in the Fall of 2010. I admitted to it immediately. In many ways, one could easily say that I still am. The student, needless to say, didn’t know how to respond. Apparently, to be a “hater” was the worst thing in the world, and someone taking that title and made a badge out of it was not something that he was really prepared to consider.

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