Doing the opposite of what people expect

I think Celebrities Read Mean Tweets is the best. They took something that conventional wisdom says you should downplay (negative comments, slander, malicious insults) and brought it out into the open.

The tweets were intended to sting. But when the celebrities read the tweets out loud to millions of viewers, without getting defensive (which they have a right to be), all of a sudden the mean tweets and the users who had so much power before now sound cowardly. 

When you’re watching this, it works so well that it’s easy to think, “Well of course the tweets are so absurd that you can ignore them and just laugh.”

But that shouldn’t be taken for granted. There are plenty of instances when a smirk or glare is enough to make us feel self conscious and not want to step out of our comfort zones for a while. Celebrities Read Mean Tweets shows that you really shouldn’t take comments personally sometimes.

There’s something powerful about reacting differently than how people expect you to react. If people expect you to flip out but you stay calm, and vice versa, you have the element of surprise. If people intend to hurt you by saying mean things, and you react with a shrug, it signals confidence on a whole other level.