We assume the people in our lives, our family, our friends, our colleagues are rooting for our success. It's nice to think that isn't it? Unfortunately, it's simply not true.
Of course there will always be people in your life that genuinely wish for your success, but much more often than we'd like to think, even the people who love you the most, may wish for your failure and in some cases even try to sabotage you (before you get mad, give me a chance to explain...)
There are two reasons for this:
1. They don't want to lose you. Often times the people around you subconsciously don't want you to succeed because they're afraid that success will take you away from them. On some level they think that you'll move on to "bigger and better things."
This happens in so many contexts, but weight loss is a common example. A woman may think she actually wants her husband to lose weight for health reasons, but subconsciously she may be terrified at the idea of him actually being successful, for fear he may leave her when other women find him more attractive.
2. It makes them feel inadequate by comparison. Think about an area in your life that you're really dissatisfied with. Let's say it's your finances (you're struggling to pay the bills). Imagine that tommorrow you get a call from a friend who tells you he just sold his company for 10 million dollars! Are you happy for him? Be honest...
You might be happy for him. But if you were really honest with yourself you may admit to being at least a little bit resentful (often times darn right jealous). Why?
When the people around us succeed, especially in an area of our life that we are currently experiencing dissatisfaction in, we are forced to evaluate ourselves by comparison. At this point we have two choices:
1. Use their success as motivation to inspire us to achieve similar success in our own lives.
or
2. Criticize and tear this person down!
Which one do you think is easier and therefore most people do? Option 2 of course. This doesn't make them a bad person...it just makes them human.
Here's the point: The people in your life love you. That's a fact. But change makes us act irrationally, and most of the time we're not even aware of it.
I'm not saying that you should go around second guessing everyone in your life, trying to determine whether they're genuinely happy for you or not. But you'd be foolish to ignore the possibility that they aren't fully rooting for you. So what should you do?
The best thing to do, is to love the people around you. Know that they really do care about you, but find your true advice and encouragement from people who you know are congruent in their support and even better: have an incentive for you to succeed (like a paid coach). This isn't a romantic notion, but it works.
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Posted by: Rumble Fighter | 03/30/2010 at 08:38 PM
Yeah. Sometimes, I also feel success of a friend might make a friend different and hurts friendship.
Posted by: pool cues | 11/09/2009 at 03:28 PM
Doesn't it bother you that all of the SAMBA posts are cloned in the Seth Godin approach and tone?
It would be nice to see some originality and a change-up in delivery. Seth makes enough posts talking at us - why don't you guys do something different?
Posted by: aion kinah | 06/11/2009 at 03:04 AM
And when you grow up you learn how to choose your friends. I have few.
Posted by: charleys | 05/14/2009 at 02:11 PM
Al, I would like to say I have not experienced this, but I have. Another key component in why this happens is that people who have known you for a long time seem to have a locked perception of who you are. No matter how much someone grows or changes, our perception of them is still stuck in the past. This is why reunions and family get togethers are so painful for some people.
A few years ago my life coach gave me a good book to read that covered this exact topic. In it the author, through allogory, uses a mother as the character's worse enemy on the path to achieving his dreams. We all fall into that trap. It is a good reminder.
And Akira, I beg to differ. Because these student are learning from Seth does not mean they are just regurgitating his take on marketing. While Seth is a genius I know his students will from time to time disagree as any one will.
Posted by: John | 05/06/2009 at 10:27 AM
Doesn't it bother you that all of the SAMBA posts are cloned in the Seth Godin approach and tone?
It would be nice to see some originality and a change-up in delivery. Seth makes enough posts talking at us - why don't you guys do something different?
Posted by: Akira | 05/05/2009 at 10:47 PM
Good points. We can choose to see our friends' success as a means of inspiration or a reason to be jealous. Professor George Lipsitz (formerly at UCSD) compares people who try to pull others down because of their success to crabs in a barrel in "American studies in a moment of danger." Lipsitz notes that merchants selling live crabs have no need of lits on the barrels. Whenever a crab makes progress escaping, another crab will hold on and pull them back in.
Posted by: Joseph Sherman | 05/04/2009 at 10:06 PM