How To Not Be Overwhelmed By Other People's Successes

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How do you genuinely feel happy for friends, family and peers who just zoomed past you (success-wise) without feeling sad or that you need to overtake them (catch up)?

Some people try to talk down the success - oh, it's going to be temporal, they'll be back to their previous level; he's paying a much greater unsustainable price for it; and so on.

Other people try to find a balance by finding and focusing on three people who are currently struggling for every one person who has zoomed past them success-wise. They ease the pressure on themselves by saying - afterall, I am doing better than A, B & C.

A few people genuinely just don't care. 

Wanna guess which category I am in?

I used to be in the "just don't care" category. You could win a billion dollar from the lottery number I picked for you and I wouldn't care much. I would simply tell myself that it was not my time to come into such type of money or that destiny has something else in store for me or God knows best. I had a store of those type of sentences to break me from feeling envious of another person's success.

Then I went from age 20 to past age 30. My time would come no longer sounded as good as it used to.

I began seeing plenty people doing not as well as I was at a point, some even openly expressed how much they envy my state in life, zoom ahead of me. I found a convenient sentence for the first. Found another good enough sentence to dismiss the second. Can't remember on what count my sentences started failing me but I sure can tell you that I am now in the two other categories at the same time. When someone zoom ahead of me now, I first check if I can pin it to an unsustainable high price they are paying or a transient occurrence. If I can't pick a hole in the way they zoomed past me, then I switch to finding a balance in focusing on others I had zoomed past.

So how should you handle other people's successes without putting undue pressure on yourself?

That's a question I am trying to work out a refined answer for. I have an approach I am taking now and I hope that by sharing that approach with you all, I can get some feedback from you all and come into the refined answer I am seeking.

Personally, I am not a fan of "the end justifies the means". I think that regardless of the easing of the pressure that talking down another person's success achieves, it is inherently not a good thing to make a habit of. 

Finding a balance in focusing on other people who are facing some tough times is also a bad activity and sets you up for a much worse situation when one of those people zoom ahead of you in the future. 

So I am trying to modify the "just don't care" option. Now that I can't say my time will come with the confidence I used to when I was much younger, any sentence with "my destiny" in it sounds lame, and "God knows best" gives a feeling of tragedy. How then do I genuinely not care?

I found another sentence - enjoy your journey. Enjoy your own unique journey through life.

What do you think?

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