Lessons From Being A Public Figure

By Leo Gura - February 11, 2026

Over the last 13 years I’ve read nearly every negative thing that’s ever been written or said about me. Why? Because I am serious about feedback. Being open to feedback as you become successful and famous is very important, otherwise you quickly fall into self-deception. Feedback keeps you honest. Surrounding yourself with yes-men is a big trap.

Here’s the biggest thing I learned from being a public figure and dealing with near-daily criticism for 13 years:

The key is to be non-reactive. As soon as you react emotionally, you’ve failed. As a public figure, you will get criticized a lot, no matter what you do. You will never please everyone. Many will love you, and some will hate you. Low consciousness, low development people will try to bait you into traps. The trap is emotional reactivity. You will be tempted to react to their negativity, judgment, ignorance, gaslighting, immaturity, low intelligence, and unconsciousness. The key is to not even take their negativity seriously. Whatever you do, if you react emotionally, you’ve failed the test. Don’t respond on their level. You have to not be emotionally reactive. However, this does not mean that you don’t read or listen to feedback. You take in all the comments, but you never react to it emotionally and you never try to wrestle with negativity. Do not wrestle with pigs because they win just by hijacking your attention and breaking your poise. As any kind of public figure you have to be wise to this mega-trap. Your job is to maintain poise. Poise is a powerful concept in this work. It’s a game of maintaining poise.

You need to be open to feedback without breaking poise. That’s very challenging because your instinct is to react emotionally. This require years of overriding that instinct just to become non-reactive. The more famous you become, the more ignorant and unconscious people will shit-test you.

But remember, ignorant people will try to abuse your openness to feedback. They will use your openness to gaslight you even further. So this gets very tricky.

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