Contents:
This article hopes to motivate and train your perspective to perceive others’ success as good news for you.
Brute forcing yourself to feel genuine happiness for others will leave you in a state worse than that of giving in to any preliminary envy you feel. Genuine happiness can’t be forced, as it seems to originate prior to the prefrontal cortex in the process of feelings guiding our thoughts and actions.
Lying to Your Subconscious Self Is Difficult
An attempt to force genuine happiness when you’re in fact not genuinely happy for someone’s success will never come off as authentic. The feelings you truly feel will still be there, as they’d naturally be more authoritative than anything you can muster in the conscious part of your brain.
Envy is powerful because it feels akin to a primal reaction. Envious feelings seem to be rooted deeper than thoughtful, logical ones. We seldom rationalize our envy, and our feelings of envy feel as reactive as the feelings of discovering a partner’s adultery.
Such reactive feelings live in the same space as anger, sadness, and depression. They are poignant to the core of our being, and simply talking ourselves out of such feelings seldom works out.
This article is an attack on envy from the perspective of redefining others’ success at the sensory phases of your unconscious interpretation. The good news, in this case, is that others’ success is a legitimate opportunity to improve your chances of experiencing success for yourself.
Information’s Relationship With Ego
The people experiencing success in any form will be primary sources of information pertaining to their success. Those who land a prestigious position at a Fortune 500 company will be the only ones who’d be able to recite what exact steps they took in becoming a successful candidate.
In experiencing success, our pride tries its best to convince our conscience that it was all our doing. Rather than acknowledging the external variables which went our way and giving thanks to any role that luck played in the matter, we tend to think of ourselves as the ones who brought success into fruition. That assumption may not be wrong, but it’s difficult to prove right.
In perceiving our successes to be the direct descendants of abilities and skills, publicizing the details behind our steps in achieving success is attractive from a prideful standpoint.
Divulging the details behind our successes becomes attractive when we trust our listeners because it satisfies our prideful assumptions. Though not necessary, it would be pleasant to tell stories of how well we answered interview questions, and how sharply we performed on any pre employment tests, for instance.
As someone watching others’ successes from the sidelines, you have valuable information channels at your disposal. To allow your envy to block your strategic inquiry into them would be to dispose of such information channels. A successful individual’s prideful yearning to share their journey in great detail is an opportunity worth seizing.
An authentic expression of joy for others’ success will do well in labeling you a trusted individual from the standpoint of sharing details about the specified bout of success. As you label yourself as someone who’s genuinely pumped in the face of those around you experiencing victories in life, they’ll grow likelier to share information pertaining to how they achieved those victories.
A President’s Success Bleeds Through to Her Vice President’s Reputation
Someone else’s success has the capacity to pull you along toward a greater goal with one caveat: your ego in the matter must be dissolved.
Though still difficult, it’s easier to feel genuine happiness for someone else’s success when their success is relatively new. Once we grow used to their achieved success and begin comparing it to achievements of our own, competitive desires start trickling in from the pores of our interpretation.
You’ll begin growing tired of being reminded of someone else’s elevated status compared to you. Especially if you once viewed the both of you to be similar in your respective levels of success and status, the newly cemented difference will be difficult to swallow and be reminded of.
Ensure you don’t give in to the muddy feelings that your ego so desperately wants to roll around in. The success you deem yourself worthy of experiencing is independent of the success someone around you has experienced themselves.
Contrary to how many act around people who are breaking through in any specified area of life, your focus should be on propelling them further along their path rather than comparing it to yours. In doing so, you’ll position yourself to be invested in their success as it trickles down to you.
Providing these individuals real value which results in them seeing even more success in their chosen fields will improve your status too. Your reputation will begin to be tied in with those experiencing success in their role. Even if by a mere matter of association, you’ll begin reaping the rewards of simply being around these individuals. Though your status and reputation will always be secondary to the one experiencing success, you’d be ahead of anyone on the outside looking in.
If you can’t rid yourself of the need to compare yourself to others, shift your focus from comparing yourself to the successful, to comparing yourself to those who don’t possess the channel that you now do. Your communicative channel with the successful ones in life introduces opportunities to set yourself apart from those who aren’t lucky enough to know anyone successful in their lives.
A Disbalance of Resources Naturally Rebalances
As information leaks to those surrounding the newly successful, material things tend to follow suite. Though it may not be a concerted effort to distribute resources, nature’s law of maintaining balance within any given microcosm tends to do the work of redistributing things itself.
Rather than this tendency being rooted in mystical notions of universal positivity and willing things into existence, it is simply a necessary process which goes unnoticed.
Simply spending enough time around the successful by establishing yourself as a safe and loyal individual will grant you access to many of the same material possessions that they’d have access to. You’d be invited to their social gatherings, you’d be given rides in their nice cars, you’d drink what they drink, and eat the foods they eat.
Your physical proximity to those with a disbalanced amount of resources compared to you will naturally encourage the rebalancing act of those resources in your favor.
Simply put, the happier you are for someone’s success the more often you’d find yourself around them. With physical proximity come the perks of the successful being likelier to foot the bill.
Though these acts of wealth and material redistribution may be insignificant at any given instance, their cumulative effects are capable of playing a powerful role in your psychological interpretation of what it looks like to lead a successful life (as defined by you). You’ll lose the magical intrigue that the average individual holds toward shiny things; a gift from a strategic sense. You’ll be able to strategize on a grander scale without growing intimidated by what others so desperately desire. You’ll get a peek behind the curtain and will discover how it’s hung.
If you’re interpreting the perk of being on the receiving end of the nice things successful people share as being solely materialistic, then you have to think bigger.
The actual perk of being on the receiving end of nicer things in life is growing used to them being around you. The difference between liking nice things and growing comfortable around nice things is a distinction you should focus on and study.