Why You Resent Successful People

Have you ever thought about what makes you unique? What makes you ‘you’ and not someone else? It is your unique set of experiences over your lifetime and how you interpret and react to them. If you think ‘I am smart, funny, caring’ for example, you have evidence from your past that you’ve done well in school, perhaps read lots of books, had people laugh at your jokes, volunteered for charity and so on. Or ‘I’m an engineer’. You identify part of yourself with your job, your degrees, etc. This creates your sense of self, or ‘who you are’, otherwise known as your ego.

Each day you experience things that either enhance your sense of self or diminish it. If someone tells you that you did a great job your ego expands. If someone cuts you off in traffic your ego is diminished – after all, they didn’t respect ‘you’. Have you ever been slighted in some fashion and never did anything about it? Never vented to someone explaining how you were wronged and how the other person was an idiot? It is near impossible for most of us to leave our ego in a diminished (bruised) state. So this brings us to the topic of successful people.

‘Successful’ people can makes us feel diminished. They have more money, a bigger business, more homes, more cars, more happiness, more attention, more attractiveness. If they have more then we must have less. This creates an imbalance in our minds. Whenever we are diminished we need to get back on top again. The ego does not like feeling diminished. This is done by criticizing and judging those successful people, perhaps by saying ‘They are greedy, they didn’t earn the money, they had it easy, they’re not really happy’. This puts us back in a superior position temporarily, until we meet or hear about the next successful person.

This is a harmful habit because it will affect your ability or interest in being more successful because you are associating negative attributes to success, at least subconsciously. By being happy for people’s success and being grateful for what you already have you will attract more success into your own life.