181–190 of 292 posts
Louis CK once said "The only time you should look at what's on some else's plate of food is to check if they have enough." That really put things in perspective to me. If I'm not making enough for the amount of work that I do, I will find another job.
Louis CK once said "The only time you should look at what's on some else's plate of food is to check if they have enough." That really put things in perspective to me. If I'm not making enough for the amount of work that I do, I will find another job.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I've seen happen is that people find cognitive-dissonance coping strategies like you describe and just find solace in that. They change their goals "I didn't want that anyway" "It wasn't my destiny to do that" "I'm much happier with this than if I had done that" etc... At the end of the day you either realize your goal, or you change it. You can either pretend like it was the plan all along, admit defeat and try…
Wow. Your appraisal is bleak and, fortunately, disconnected from reality. Cognitive dissonance, indeed! Think about any life goal that requires significant work, such as "I'd like to be a superstar engineer" or "I've got no savings, but I want to save up and buy a house" or "I'd like to become a black-belt martial artist" or "I'd like to publish a successful novel." How long does it take to achieve something like tha…
This is committing the straw-man fallacy. The poster that this is responding to did not elaborate on what cognitive-dissonance they are referring to.
In this case "learning and growing" is an optimistic, ego-stroking spin on "admitting defeat". I believe that AndrewKemendo has chosen his words carefully because being able to lose and fail graciously is more virtuous than trying to preserve the ego and pretend that it was a win.
However, sometimes you'll think, "What I did is better than them, but I don't get paid as much or receive as much praise". This is difficult to deal with. First you have to consider: why are their results paying off more than yours?
To be clear, even if motivated by jealousy, you should think about this. Jealousy is your mind's way of telling you that it is unhappy about some perceived lack of "fairness". If you ignore it, you mind is going to find some other way to make you deal with the problem. You don't want it doing that. Deal with the feelings as soon as you can!
The first possibility you should consider: Maybe you are wrong. Maybe what they did was actually better than what you did. If you don't think so, then try to duplicate it. If you think that it's really out of whack, then you should be able to do it. You can even tell people, "I thought what X did was really interesting and I want to see if I can do it too". If you succeed in doing it, then it will be interesting to see if you get the same results. If you do not succeed, you can learn about yourself.
Sometimes you misunderstand the challenge. For example, let's say a rival wrote a popular open source library and not only does everybody in the company use it, but it's super popular outside the company. You look at the library and think, "That's actually a piece of crap. I could do better". And you do! But it get's ignored -- not just by your company, but everywhere in the world. It is easy to overlook that the skill in making a reuse library is not in writing the library. It's in getting people to actually reuse the code in it!
Sometimes it's really the case that some people get rewarded more than they should. Sometimes it's because they are friends/relatives of the people in power. However, sometimes it's because their attitude just aligns better with the people in power.
I once had a really bad manager. I went to my year end review with a huge list of accomplishments. My manager said, "Ordinarily if I had someone with this list of accomplishments I would give them a good review. However, I just don't like you". Of course I quit. I probably should have sued the company for constructive dismissal, but when I thought hard about it I realised that my terribly manager had given me a good gift.
What was undeniable was that I had made my horrific manager's life miserable. Every time they made a terrible mistake, I told them about the mistake (Oh... it happened a lot, let me tell you). When they denied it, I waited until I had proof and then came back and showed them that it really was their cock up that made everything go pear shaped. Of course he hated me. I would have too :-). I was trying (in my own way) to help, but really I just drove the poor guy into a well of imposter syndrome and poured daily despair on his head. I didn't help him at all because I didn't help him in the way he needed to be helped.
I've found that this last thing really is the most tricky thing to get right. It's not enough to be successful. It's not enough to do good work. You also have to do it in the way that helps your management the most. Some people intuitively know what that is -- that's called talent. One of my biggest assets is that for my entire life I've lacked such talent and so I've been forced to learn through bitter experience why things work the way they do. And having done so, I can reason about it effectively, where my talented coworkers are often clueless.
So use your jealousy and learn about the world! It's fascinating. Over time, you may find (like me) that the puzzle over why some things are popular is more interesting than worrying about why your work isn't more popular. Cheer on your successful coworkers because that first success may have been a fluke. If not, though, you have an invaluable source for learning about success.
FWIW, Buddhism breaks down various mental afflictions, of which Greed is one. Afflictions are pollutants to seeing things as they are, and it helps to allot run-time bandwidth to spotting them and hopefully, discarding them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleshas_(Buddhism) Edited: The above helps a person to manage their own Kleshas. But if it is the other person's that is bothering you, then it helps to cultivate a…
I have a variety of ways to analyse this: 0) Remember that social media and the press shows the best parts of people's lives and rarely the crappy parts that everyone has. 1) You can't have it all. Often people sacrifice other parts of their lives to achieve in one area. My old boss that got promoted to a very high position never found a partner or children. Other tech friends who have earned a lot have worked thier…
> 0) Remember that social media and the press shows the best parts of people's lives and rarely the crappy parts that everyone has. When I take a picture on camera, I sometimes realize that a person looking at the picture will probably imagine something much better than reality. For example, an entire day spent with my kids who try to be as annoying as possible; then for five minutes they act cute, and I make a nice…
It's sort of off-topic, but reading his books in my early 20s was a huge revelation for me; something like "Oh, it actually doesn't get much 'easier' when you grow up. You still deal with things as they arise, and continue to sort of meander your way between the present moment and nostalgia, between joy and pain."
In a way, it was rather calming to know that "Adults" with "Kids" are just Us with 5-10 more years of good and bad decisions. Relaxing to know that we wouldn't suddenly be expected to miraculously do everything correctly. :)
It had made me more aware of the fakeness you describe, but it also compels me to marvel at those older people I meet who have consistently invested in their life’s garden: pruning and fertilizing, sowing and reaping, apparently against our natural inclinations to let it all grow wild.
If you do your own self-critique well, you can build skills and explore topics that nobody else is, and that's the kind of thing that translates to the optics of surpising outlier success. But when you only subscribe to the same feedback loops as the average, you get predictably average results - on average. There will always be people that grasp a thing a little bit easier, are a little bit more numb to the negatives, have better access to resources. You don't want to assume that is you, because it most likely isn't.
And you have to pick and choose what things you will stay average at and what things are going to be your in-depth focus, cause nobody has the time to do it all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. Your appraisal is bleak and, fortunately, disconnected from reality. Cognitive dissonance, indeed! Think about any life goal that requires significant work, such as "I'd like to be a superstar engineer" or "I've got no savings, but I want to save up and buy a house" or "I'd like to become a black-belt martial artist" or "I'd like to publish a successful novel." How long does it take to achieve something like tha…
> That's not cognitive dissonance. That's learning and growing. This is committing the straw-man fallacy. The poster that this is responding to did not elaborate on what cognitive-dissonance they are referring to. In this case "learning and growing" is an optimistic, ego-stroking spin on "admitting defeat". I believe that AndrewKemendo has chosen his words carefully because being able to lose and fail graciously is m…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Is that quote bad advice?
Perhaps he should take his own excellent advice, and compare himself to who he was when he threatened to slap Pankaj Mishra. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/23/jordan... >Why is Jordan Peterson so angry? For someone whose whole routine is based on telling men to “toughen up”, the clinical psychologist and author of the bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, who rose to prominence in th…
That being said, giving yourself the job of "going after" someone, hoarding any and all embarrassing public speeches and having people judge him using just that concentrated negativity you've managed to scrape off the walls, isn't that a little bit like the kind of envy this very thread is concerned with?