Steve Jobs said, “If you want to make everyone happy, don’t be a leader. Sell ice cream”—here’s why real success often means being disliked

The first time I made a decision that upset people, I lost sleep for three nights.

It wasn’t dramatic. No headlines. Just a call to cancel a project that looked good on paper but would have drained the team.

Two people were furious. A few more were quietly disappointed. Part of me wanted to backpedal, smooth it over, and pretend the decision made itself.

That’s the reflex most of us are trained into: be agreeable, keep the peace, don’t rock the boat.

Then I heard that Steve Jobs line again—if you want universal approval, sell ice cream—and it landed differently.

Leadership, at any scale (a team, a family, your own calendar), means trading short-term harmony for long-term integrity. If you’re doing it right, someone won’t like it. And that has to be okay.

We don’t talk enough about the emotional cost of choosing well. It’s not just spreadsheets and strategy — it’s stomach knots and second-guessing.

You will be misunderstood. You will be called difficult when you’re simply being clear. The point isn’t to stop caring what people think. It’s to stop letting approval decide for you.

Why our brains chase approval (and why it’s a trap)

From a psychological perspective, wanting to be liked is not vanity — it’s survival coding.

Your brain treats social exclusion like pain. That’s why criticism stings more than praise soothes (thanks, negativity bias), and why one unhappy comment can drown out ten thank-yous.

Add the spotlight effect — we overestimate how much people think about us — and you’ve got a perfect storm: we contort ourselves to avoid judgments others will forget by lunch.

Here’s the trap:

When approval becomes the metric, decisions get weird. We choose consensus over clarity, optics over outcomes, speed over standards. In the short run, people applaud. In the long run, trust erodes, because trust is built on consistent values, not on who smiles at you after a meeting.

Confidence, personal or organizational, comes from alignment—what we say matches what we do—even when that alignment irritates someone today.

Kindness is not the same as niceness

Niceness aims to be liked. Kindness aims to be useful.

Niceness avoids discomfort. Kindness risks it for the sake of the truth.

The kindest manager I ever had gave me a piece of feedback that made me wince for a week—and then changed my career. Niceness would have compliment-sandwiched it to death.

Kindness gave me a clear mirror and stayed in the room while I processed.

If you conflate the two, you’ll either bulldoze people in the name of “truth” or swallow every hard word to keep the vibe light.

Neither builds anything worth keeping. Compassion isn’t coddling. It’s clarity with care. And it sounds like: “We’re going this direction. I know that disappoints you. I’m here for questions. The decision stands.”

Saying no is a strategy, not a mood

Most organizations (and most lives) don’t fail from a lack of options; they fail from a lack of focus.

“No” is the steering wheel. And yet “no” is the word most guaranteed to make someone like you less—at least for a while. That’s why we hedge it: “maybe later,” “circling back,” “let’s revisit in Q4.”

I’ve talked about this before, but the longer you delay a real no, the messier it gets. You end up paying interest on your avoidance: wasted time, half-started projects, relationships strained by false hope.

A useful frame: every “yes” inherits a workload. If you can’t name the workload and where it goes, you can’t afford it. Leaders who understand that become boringly consistent.

They disappoint early and cleanly so they can deliver on what remains. People don’t have to love that. They just have to be able to rely on it.

The courage to be misunderstood

We love the story where courage is applauded in real time. In reality, there’s a lag. You make the hard call at 9 a.m. and the applause—if it ever comes—shows up months later as results.

In the gap, you live with other people’s projections. That’s where equanimity matters—the Buddhist quality of staying steady without going numb. It doesn’t mean you stop feeling. It means you don’t hand your steering wheel to every passing opinion.

Epictetus put it sharply: “If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” That line isn’t a dare to be arrogant.

It’s permission to stop over-explaining yourself to audiences who are committed to misunderstanding you. Make the best decision you can with the information you have.

Record your reasoning. Iterate as new data arrives. That’s adulthood. It’s also leadership.

Decision hygiene beats charisma

Charisma can sell a bad idea. Hygiene prevents it.

By hygiene, I mean a repeatable way of choosing that reduces bias and drama: write the problem statement, list criteria (including the uncomfortable ones), run a premortem (“If this fails, why?”), invite dissent you will actually consider, and time-box the decision so it doesn’t rot in committee.

Then choose, communicate, and implement.

When people dislike your decision, let them dislike the decision—not your process.

If stakeholders know you heard them, weighed trade-offs, and tied the call to shared principles, the temperature drops. They still might be unhappy. Good. That’s information about their incentives, not a referendum on your worth.

A clean “no” with a clean rationale builds more respect than a wobbly “maybe” stretched over six weeks.

Scripts for disagreeing without setting the room on fire

You don’t need to be cinematic to be clear. You need one honest sentence and a boundary.

Here are three I keep on a Post-it:

• Acknowledge → Intention → Decision. “I hear your concerns about timeline. My intention is to protect the team’s capacity and hit quality standards. So we’re not adding scope this sprint.”

• Disagree and commit. “I’m not convinced this will move the needle, but I can see the upside and I’m willing to support the experiment for two weeks with clear metrics.”

• No with a path. “We can’t take this on this quarter. If you want to re-pitch for Q3, bring X and Y so we can assess it against the other priorities.”

Notice what’s missing: apology theater. You can care about people’s feelings and still say what’s true. Those aren’t opposites.

Build a likeability budget

Everyone has a limited “likeability budget” — the number of disappointments you can inflict before you need to deposit some goodwill. Pretending the budget doesn’t exist is naive.

Worshipping it is paralysis. Smart leaders spend it where impact is highest and politics are loudest. They also replenish it intentionally: give credit publicly, share context early, escalate praise up the chain, and fight for your team when it matters.

Who gets priority in your budget?

People who carry the mission when you’re not in the room. People who tell you “no” when you need to hear it. People who trade ego for outcomes. You will still be disliked somewhere.

That’s the price of having a point of view. Pay it on purpose.

Separate reputation from image

Image is what strangers infer. Reputation is what insiders know over time. Image prefers performance; reputation prefers receipts.

You can have a flawless brand and a shaky reputation if your behavior is chaotic up close. Or you can have a modest brand and a bulletproof reputation—because you do what you said, when you said, at the quality you promised, especially when it’s inconvenient.

Aim for the second. It’s slower. It’s also durable.

When you inevitably make a call that upsets people, your reputation buys you patience. Colleagues think, “I may not like this, but I trust how they operate.”

That sentence is worth more than any PR campaign.

Use values, not vibes, to carry the weight

When your reasons are vague, criticism burrows under your skin. When your reasons are values-based, criticism still stings, but it doesn’t derail you.

Write down the principles you actually use (not the ones that belong in a poster): we ship quality over speed; we don’t trade long-term trust for short-term metrics; we don’t make promises our people have to bleed to keep.

Now test decisions against them in daylight. If you can’t connect the choice to a value, either the choice is wrong or your values aren’t real. Both are fixable.

This is where mindfulness helps. Slowing down enough to watch your motives saves you from reactive calls dressed up as “instinct.”

In my book, Hidden Secrets of Buddhism: How To Live With Maximum Impact and Minimum Ego, I wrote about non-attachment to outcomes.

It’s not passivity — it’s fierce effort paired with letting go of whether everyone applauds. You anchor to the process you respect. The outcome lands where it lands.

When being disliked is a signal—and when it’s a warning

Not all blowback is created equal. Sometimes dislike is the healthy friction of standards. Other times it’s feedback that you’ve crossed a line. A quick filter I use:

• Signal: pushback from people who benefit from the status quo you’re trying to change; discomfort because you refused scope creep; complaints that “this isn’t how we’ve always done it.”

• Warning: consistent feedback from trusted, diverse voices that your tone is contemptuous or your process excludes the right people; harm that you could have anticipated if you’d slowed down; defensiveness every time you’re challenged.

The cure for the warning side is not “try to be liked.” It’s repair and skill: apologize cleanly, adjust the process, learn the interpersonal moves you skipped. The courage to be disliked isn’t license to be careless.

Final words

You don’t have to become hard to lead. You have to become clear. That clarity will cost you some approval.

Let it.

Real success—the kind you feel in your bones—comes from living your values out loud when it’s inconvenient, telling the truth with care, and building systems that don’t require you to be the hero every Tuesday.

You will be disliked by someone for doing that. Maybe today. Maybe often. It will feel uncomfortable, and on some nights you’ll still stare at the ceiling playing conversations back in your head.

But here’s the quiet payoff: you’ll trust yourself more. Your team will know what you stand for. Your calendar will stop being a museum of other people’s priorities.

And the work will start to look like something you’d be proud to sign, even if the comments section stays spicy.

If you want to make everyone happy, sell ice cream. If you want to build something that lasts—something that doesn’t wobble every time the crowd changes its mind—accept that a little dislike is part of the price.

Then choose well, communicate cleanly, and keep moving. The goal was never applause. It was impact.