“Indifference is the enemy of growth. I’d rather be hated than ignored.” — Steven Bartlett
One of the most common mistakes brands, leaders, and creators make is trying to be liked by everyone. The resulting strategy — say nothing controversial, offend no one, optimise for maximum approval — feels safe but achieves exactly the opposite of its intention.
A brand designed to offend nobody ends up mattering to nobody. A leader who never stakes out a controversial position has no followers, only observers. Content engineered to generate zero negative reactions generates zero strong reactions of any kind — and zero strong reactions is zero engagement.
Steven Bartlett’s challenge to this comfortable consensus: you must be willing to piss people off.
Strong emotions — positive or negative — drive sharing, commenting, and engagement. Neutral content generates almost no response regardless of its quality. Content that makes people intensely agree or intensely disagree gets spread. The emotion, not the quality, is the distribution mechanism. Understanding this is not cynical — it is strategic.
This law is not a licence for gratuitous provocation, cruelty, or manufactured controversy. Bartlett is making a more nuanced and more important point.
Polarisation is an inevitable byproduct of authenticity. When you genuinely stand for something, some people will disagree. When you have a real point of view, some people will push back. When you make a bold commitment, some people will doubt. This is not failure — it is signal.
The presence of strong negative reactions means two things:
The absence of negative reactions means you have said nothing worth responding to.
Indifference is your real enemy, not criticism. Take real positions, make bold commitments, and accept that anyone who stands for something will repel some people. The repulsion is the price of the attraction.
Most people understand this principle intellectually and fail to act on it because of a deeply wired fear: social rejection. The human brain’s threat-response system treats social disapproval as a survival risk — a remnant of evolutionary periods when exclusion from the tribe meant death.
This fear is now maladaptive. In a world of seven billion people and global distribution through the internet, the tribe you need is not the tribe immediately around you. The right audience is somewhere out there, and they will never find you if you disguise yourself as everyone else.
Identify one strongly held belief about your industry, your work, or your area of expertise that you have been reluctant to express publicly. Then:
Every iconic brand has haters. Apple users and Android users are mutually exclusive tribes. Nike took a risk on Colin Kaepernick that half their market despised — and their sales soared because the other half felt deeply seen. Oatly was aggressively weird in a category of sameness and built a cult following precisely because some people found them irritating.
The haters are not a problem to be solved. They are evidence that the brand means something.