I will admit it. There is a vindictive part of me, like I’m sure we all have some amount of, that seethes with jealousy and disdain at the success of others. Being the passive aggressive Scandehoovian that I am, I of course keep my acidic comments to myself until I am with safe company. It’s a compulsive reaction from growing up in an environment that didn’t provide a whole hell of a lot of success. I don’t blame my parents. They didn’t know what attainable success looked like either. We’re all  just one more spoke in the wheel of bitter survival that’s been spinning for eons.

I know it’s wrong to covet other people’s accomplishments. Those accolades belong to them. How they came about their successes is none of my business. Yet, sometimes, deep down, I just feel irrationally cheated, like “How come they managed to pull that off and I didn’t? What am I missing that I can’t do what they do?” If I really wanted to be honest with myself, I could do a mental checklist and find all sorts of shortcomings in how I run my life that I’m either too lazy, too stubborn, or too afraid to change. But it’s so much easier to just sneer at others and say “They’re puttin’ on airs.”

If deep down in your gut, you think someone came about a perceived success through devious means, go ahead and sneer. But if success came from insight, preparedness, organization, and just plain doing the work, make a concerted effort to give that winner their just due. Resenting that other person for succeeding where you didn’t doesn’t affect their accomplishments, but it certainly undermines your credibility.

Maybe if we all spent more time appreciating what others do and glean inspiration from their achievements, rather than wallowing in our own self righteous sense of fairness, we’d all be further along as a whole. I’m going to try to remember that next time someone tells me about this awesome thing they pulled off, when the evil little shit in my head wants to just spout, “Oh yeah, how do you rate?”

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