The thing that Jimmy Fallon wasn’t prepared for when he became famous after joining Saturday Night Live in 1998 was that some people would always dislike him.
“It’s the worst,” Fallon said Monday on The Diary of a CEO podcast. “Yes, it is the absolute worst. I hate it. I want everyone to like me. I can’t stand it. I go, ‘Oh, my gosh. What can I do to make you like me?’ I think the answer is you can’t. You can’t make everyone like you. You just have to do what you do. And do the best that you can at what you do. And be happy with yourself.”
Other bummers he hadn’t known about: “Getting rejection. Getting your sketches cut. Being told you’re not funny.”
He was grateful that it was before Twitter was around to capture the hatred.
“You think that it’s just going to be, ‘Oh, this is cool. Everyone will be great.’ But then not everyone’s rooting for you,” Fallon said. “Some people want you to fail. People’s jobs are to take me down and to put bad press out and stuff. That’s their job, and you’re just like, ‘Ooh.’ I don’t live in that world. I don’t believe that it’s real, but it kind of is real and you go, ‘Oh, people are just kind of being mean.'”
The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon host explained that his way of dealing with the hate was to do his best to ignore it.
“You gotta, again, just toughen up and get through it and just keep your head down and keep being funny,” he said. “And just keep doing things and keep being creative. If you move that out, you realize it’s not even real. It’s real, but it’s noise and it doesn’t affect you. You can only believe in yourself and know that you have to keep going and, if you keep scoring, that will show. Your work will show. That stuff I wasn’t prepared for, of overcoming that. Overcoming hating on you or saying you’re not good or something. You don’t think that’s going to happen. But it will if you’re successful, because someone’s not going to like you, no matter what.”
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Fallon said he relied on the wise words of the Beastie Boys to get him through.
“I loved the Beastie Boys growing up, and there’s that one line Mike D says: ‘Be true to yourself, and you will never fall. It kind of is the move. Just be true to yourself. Then everyone can say whatever they want, [but] it’s like, ‘That’s who I am.'”
Watch their full conversation above.
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