On trying to people-please your way to awesomeness
I’m definitely not the first to quote Brett Kelly’s “The Four Cold, Hard Realities of Creating Something Awesome,” but I doubt I’ll be the last. It’s a great piece in its entirety, but here’s one bit that I think is particularly important:
Even if your project is to make a thousand patchwork quilts to be donated to local homeless shelters for distribution to needy children, somebody will probably send you an email informing you that your quilt is so awful that it would be insulting to their cocker spaniel’s feces if they crapped on it and that you should very seriously consider chopping off your dominant hand. Hopefully, these types of people will be in the minority among your audience, but be prepared for some people to lash out at you and to a totally inappropriate degree. On the plus side, this can actually be pretty funny once you realize that they’re not actually angry with you so much as they’re just angry. Either way, start thickening your skin now.
As hard as it is to make something awesome, it’s even harder to please everyone, and it's a fool's mission to try. The Syrian writer Publilius Syrus figured that out over 2,000 years ago. Of course, all he had to deal with was a tyrannical Roman empire. Web trolls are much more of a pain.