Rant no more

Rant or ranting is a way of talking about something in a bad way, in an angry mood. Ranting usually happens when you’re not happy about something and you’re angry about it (bad customer support experience, feeling cheated, feeling neglected, hurt ego… etc.) and when you’re a blogger there is a tendency to among us to just blog about it and let the energy go…. and even see if maybe someone will cheer us in our rant or rant with us. After all, misery loves company… right? No. It’s time to stop. I will not rant on this blog again. Ever. And you shouldn’t rant on yours too. Here’s why:

If you rant, you keep up and re-live your negative energy

Negative energy is very… negative. And should be quickly exchanged for a positive one. Whenever someone shouts at me or in any other way does something bad to me, I try to shift and think about something good that recently happened to me and I actually try to sympathize with the guy and feel sorry for them, thinking about my wonderful life and how this incident doesn’t matter.

The negative incident doesn’t really matter

When you rant, you re-live the incident and give it a bigger significance than it deserves. Small incidents that make you angry really don’t matter and when you compare them to your happiness, your family, your love, your life… they are insignificant. Really. They don’t matter.

When you put it “out there”… it’s there forever

Back in 2009 I wasn’t quite happy with how one of the startup hubs (Seedcamp) worked and wrote a rant about it. It’s been one of my most successful posts ever, but in a bad way. It stirred a good discussion (check the comments there) but the blog post is now irrelevant as I don’t really feel the way I felt then anymore and I might have hurt folks at Seedcamp in some way without real merit. I shouldn’t have written that rant.

Instead of being critical, pro-actively focus on solutions

Instead of ranting you should focus your energy on suggestions how to solve a problem you just saw. Get rid of the bad energy and stimulate your brain cells to come up with a solution to a problem and ask your community for advice. Focus on the good and not on the bad. Ranting is focusing on the bad. And it’s bad.

If you really need to rant, write it but don’t post it.

If it’s the only way for you to get rid of the negative energy, just write about it, save it somewhere in your computer and schedule it for deletion. Don’t post it online and pass the negative energy on to others. Don’t re-read it again. Just write it, save it and delete without reading it again. Be brave.

I will rant here no more

There, I’ve said it - on this blog I’m introducing a strict “rant no more” policy and will not rant about anything. I will seek improvements and solutions but I will not focus on the bad nor describe it nor explain it. I will focus on the good. We’re here to make the world a better place. Ranting makes us even more miserable. We don’t need that.

Do you tend to rant? How do you deal with with these incidents that make you angry?