Why others’ achievements should not hurt you

In a world where you need to stand out — should you feel bad when someone achieves better?

It’s 2023, you can see the achievements of others as instant as a blink of an eye. You can just open LinkedIn and you’ll see posts like, “I am happy to share that…” or you can open Twitter where everyone seems to be very outspoken, confident, and actively engaged in the community without borders. You can also see today’s Instagram landscapes that are full of achievements-sharing and great imagery of lives.

Then you see all of these, in your bed, or during your bad days and think “why do I have such a terrible life, unlike others?”.

If you follow this rabbit hole, it could automatically lead you to the feeling of unworthiness, depression, and anxiety. Even worse, this could also give you some sense of bitterness in seeing others’ success and give you the rationale shortcuts of “they are nothing without their privileges”, “they will fail anyways..”, etc.

Now allow me to introduce myself, my name is Isti Marta, an independent final MA student doing research in Cyberterrorism and working full-time in an international tech company abroad. If I could describe myself in one word, in a glance, it would be this word: ambitious. Now given that adjective (in other words; determined, driven), this adjective does not come alone.

Being determined is also about having the constant drive to be better and you will automatically adapt to your surroundings. However, if this drive is used in the wrong way, this could lead you to whole outward/inward manifestations of feelings such as;

• Demeaning others’ success, and/or
• Demean yourself,
• Feeling inferior,
• Experiencing unimportant competitiveness with peers.

The stronger the ambition, the stronger these pressures can appear from your surrounding. In other words, it’s rather “normal” to feel such a way when you are ambitious, but there is always a way to overcome it.

Now if you’ve experienced the feelings I have mentioned, I may have several suggestions for you to re-frame these thoughts/experiences.

1. Don’t let the system consume you.

Now we can argue that it’s the structure of the socio-economic system that has nurtured us in such a way that we think everything is a zero-sum game, it’s “either him winning or I do”.

But why can’t we just win together? When it comes to the term success, everyone has their parameter, which means one’s definition of success may not be sufficient for others, and vice versa.

This has shown in many; job hunting, academic politics, and social media personas.

The system frames our vision in such a way that it seems like we are just some standing products in brick-and-mortar supermarkets, showing up our talents waiting to be “picked”. Resist.

When you give up your idea of self and subtly transform into a commodity, fitting yourself fully into something that is completely out of the sphere you genuinely want to be involved in, that is when you need to re-orientate your vision.

As I’ve mentioned being ambitious means that you constantly want to be better, as cliche as it may sound, make sure that you want to be better than your prior self and not somebody else.

There will always be someone who can do better. Always. When you see one, learn from them.

2. Everyone’s path is uniquely different

Oftentimes, when you are “beating” yourself up, you forget the fact that you and the persons you compared lives to are not even coming from similar backgrounds.

Some people worked harder than others to achieve certain points, I can confirm this. Some wake up when others are at asleep. Some have pressures, and some work relaxed. Some run 10 miles every day, and some lift weights. Every struggle is unique and different. Some have to hike the hill to get water, some have to apply sunscreen every hour, some have to wear five layers to get out of the house. Some live in a peaceful household, some do not even have families.

Everyone is not apple to apple to one another. Stop comparing.

3. Life is a never-ending quest

Progress and results are different parameters to every one of us. Some of us think one is already successful, but for them, it is just part of their progress. One of the issues that I often hear from my friends is the fear of starting over. “I am 30 and I don’t like my job”, “I feel like you’ve figured out everything and things are very abstract to me.”

No, every day I always discover a little puzzle that I’ve never seen or experienced before. My interests are like water, it’s just flowing without any strict direction. In psychoanalysis, I would say every day I am just free-associating. Development requires creativity, creativity requires a large space without walls. One day I was all about psycho-politics, the next thing I knew I was striving to learn about cloud and Linux. We are all a work in progress, a part of our quest.

Think about your part of the story, focus on building that quest mapping of yours, and never be afraid to learn from others.

You are on time, you are on your timeline.