Trolls suck. It’s true.

But what sucks even more is letting them influence, alter, and detract from your work before you even release it, maybe before you even begin to create it.

Pay enough attention to the trolls and before you even sit down to your keyboard, canvas, or wherever else you create your work, you’re thinking through all the potential criticisms, all the ways in which your work may not deliver.

Pretty soon you find yourself wrapped up not in creating work that matters, that can inspire, that can change people, but in editing work that was previously daring, new, and thought-provoking into something that strives only to be as inoffensive as possible.

It’s not just the irrational trolls you alter your work for either, the ones who will find something to criticize no matter what you (or anyone else) does.

Just as often you’ll end up editing, altering and dumbing down your work any time you find yourself going out on a limb and making a statement that you don’t know for certain is 100% factual.

You couch your statements with “I think”s, “it seems like”s, “probably”s, “maybe”s and any number of other ways to convey your lack of commitment to your ideas in an effort to appease the trolls, or at least lessen their vitriol should it arise.

But here’s the thing.

Your work is not meant to be the irrefutable truth of the universe.

Your work is a statement of your world view, your personal beliefs, your personal truths, and if you believe in them, and your work, you owe it to your work to express them with conviction.

Better than endlessly editing, dumbing down, and homogenizing, what if you decided to create work that steps outside your comfort zone, and while it might not always be 100% “right”, is thought-provoking, fresh, and unique?

You might get called out from time to time, and in those cases, you might learn something new that ultimately improves your future work.

If your goal is to create work that changes people, work that creates an impact, you must create work that causes them to think differently than they have to this point.

This means you have to show up generously, step into the arena with a new, thought-provoking idea and ask, “what about this?”

You’ll definitely get some trolls, you’ll definitely get some haters. But you’ll also get some people who resonate with what you’re saying and lean in to hear more.

In the end, these are the people you’re creating your work for. Do it for them, and forget the ones who don’t get it.

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