To take a detour from our journey of self-improvement, take a moment to imagine someone… well, someone you don’t aspire to become.
Someone saw something with bitterness, resentment and jealousy.
Someone who hates the success of others and wants nothing more than to bring them down.
Surprise test for you:
Is this person happy, do you think?
You don’t know anything else about them, but there’s one thing you can bet solid currency on: they’re not happy.
And they’re not getting much better either.
It’s a funny quirk of human nature. You spend your time putting other people down, and all you really do is put yourself down. My theory? Your unconscious learns to treat you based on how you treat others. It looks for flaws everywhere and it will find them within you.
That’s the curse of petty jealousy: it weakens you over time.
It’s not fun for anyone.
So here’s an alternative approach.
What if you instead looked for the good, the virtuous, and the successful in others?
What if you took a moment to admire someone’s accomplishments?
Instead of cursing and muttering how luckily they got there, how would things change if you decided to admire them?
Because you can celebrate the success of others. You can admire them when they get what you want.
The benefits of this are clear.
On a superficial level, you become much happier. Instead of getting tangled up in knots of resentment, you smile, shrug, and move on.
Also, if you ever meet this person, they will find out. If you’re bitter, they’ll probably run the other way. If you’re really happy for them, they might spend some time with you. Maybe even give you some help.
But the real benefits are much deeper.
Train your mind that the successful person is in a desirable situation. What they have is what you want.
And when you start doing this, you change from the inside out.
It’s a strange thing, but soon you start to see opportunities that you would otherwise have missed. You see something and some quality reminds you of what you admire.
So you move towards him.
You explore it.
And suddenly it becomes something big and interesting.
Exactly what this looks like depends on you, your circumstances, what success looks like, and a hundred other factors.
But you’ll know when you see it.
In fact, you will have a hard time ignoring it.
Celebrating the success of others attunes your inner mind to it. Once that happens, it’s weird how “lucky” you suddenly become.