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Root for your friends

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Re: Root for your friends

#71

Post by 47282847 »

Waterluvian wrote: post #57

I’ve found my way into a small group of incredibly supportive dads. And one of the ways in which we exercise rooting for our friends is to basically commandeer “jealousy” into a positive thing. “Ah man I’m so jealous that your kids sleep so well!” “Jealousy” in a non-toxic manner feels kind of right for the task of describing wins that we all know are largely just up to random chance. Being jealous of someone’s hard…

This sounds beautiful. Thank you for sharing. I think Jealousy is a useful and important emotional state in society, and to wish it away and suppress it only makes it show up in violent ways. Like all emotions, if we allow and appreciate (and share!), it flows through us and does not fester.

Re: Root for your friends

#72

Post by InsideOutSanta »

This is probably one of the most essential bits of advice you can get. Not only is it beneficial to your friends and career, but it's also beneficial for your mental health.

It's not easy, at least initially. Jealousy is an emotion that's easy to come by and hard to dismiss. It's also an emotion that makes you unhappy, so learning to feel pride and happiness instead of jealousy made my life immeasurably better. I don't care if it's reciprocal; I do it because it's right for others and it's right for me.

Re: Root for your friends

#75

Post by stavros »

ketzo wrote: post #4

For a long time, I’ve been this person for other people, but don’t feel like I have anybody to do this for me. That’s okay — I don’t feel bitter about that or anything. And I don’t wanna overstate what a good friend I am or whatever, I just do this a decent amount. But some part of me does wish I had someone celebrating my wins. This: “No one comes to mind? Maybe you haven’t really trusted anyone with your wins yet.”…

Well, I'm glad you had this realization, and I'm excited for how this will turn out for you. Sometimes you have to show your friends you're excited about something for them to be excited in turn.

Good luck!

Re: Root for your friends

#76

Post by diggan »

pwdisswordfishz wrote: post #62

> You just shipped a side‑project that lands on the front page of Hacker News. Who’s the first person you want to tell? No one, I'd be embarrassed.

Ok, I'll bite. Why? You happen to have a sort of antagonistic relationship with HN?

Re: Root for your friends

#77

Post by stavros »

neom wrote: post #48
e40 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious about how this came out and what the fallout was. If you feel like sharing.

I'm going through a really really difficult time right now, 3 major areas of my life have broken down simultaneously over the past five months. I was ranting to this guy I've known for years about it (who is very successful but was once jr to me at work) - I would have called him a "good friend" - he was drunk and giggled out something along the lines of "makes me feel strong" - I reacted as you would expect "uh.. re…

I don't agree with the other commenters here. I used to be the same way, I'd be happy for my friends when they got a win, but I wouldn't be happy about it, because I saw it as a zero-sum game, where someone else winning meant I was somehow losing, or wasn't good enough.

One day, a friend told me about how a founder he knew had raised a round, and I said something like "damn, it's always everyone else" and my friend went "why not just be happy for them? It's not like they're hurting you".

That's when I realized that yes, I could just be happy for them, and that they indeed didn't hurt me, and that I could just be making this an overall happier event by being happy.

Since then, I'm genuinely happy when anyone wins, to the point where I'll complain to people about something that happens to me, they'll say "well if it makes you feel better, that happened to me too", and my response is "why would it make me feel better that my friend also had this bad thing happen to them?", which gets some puzzled "you're right" responses.

I think it is widespread that people feel like this, hence the "if it makes you feel better" response. I think if your friend understands that this isn't a great way to feel, it'll all be OK.

Re: Root for your friends

#78

Post by jorvi »

mierz00 wrote: post #52
neom wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going through a really really difficult time right now, 3 major areas of my life have broken down simultaneously over the past five months. I was ranting to this guy I've known for years about it (who is very successful but was once jr to me at work) - I would have called him a "good friend" - he was drunk and giggled out something along the lines of "makes me feel strong" - I reacted as you would expect "uh.. re…

I refuse to believe this is normal and I have happily cut people out of my life for this. The most painful moment was when I had a close friend almost enjoy the fact my wife had a miscarriage. It was completely insensitive and made me realise that I have no interest in being friends with someone who is willing to compete on something so ridiculous.

It is normal in the sense of for example seeing your friend accidentally slap themselves in the face with a plank, or have forgot to flush right when they're lucky enough to take a girl home. It's called schadenfreude.

Additionally, it is normal to accept derisive talk (= banter) from good friends. If a friend doesn't get a promotion, you can be very humoristically negative about it in way that would in no way be okay with a stranger.

So yes, in those ways it is normal to enjoy watching your friends mess up, and it is normal to feel more at ease with it with friends rather than strangers.

However, it is not normal to enjoy seeing your friends fail in life, at all. That goes way beyond schadenfreude and even narcissism, straight into sociopathy.

Re: Root for your friends

#79

Post by pwdisswordfishz »

diggan wrote: post #76
pwdisswordfishz wrote: post #62

> You just shipped a side‑project that lands on the front page of Hacker News. Who’s the first person you want to tell? No one, I'd be embarrassed.

Ok, I'll bite. Why? You happen to have a sort of antagonistic relationship with HN?

I'm not the poster, I'm Stavros, I just wanted to see if his username was accurate. I wonder how many people have actually done this before me.

Re: Root for your friends

#80

Post by rjmill »

foobarbecue wrote: post #31

In my first few years on the job, I would fill out peer evaluations honestly. We have peer evaluations where you rate people out of 5 on various performance elements like "innovative" and "leader" or whatever. Then I survived a couple of rounds of awful layoffs where really good people lost their livelihoods. Since then, I put 5 out of 5 on everyone for everything always, and say something nice in all the boxes.

Goodness, yes. The last time I put (genuinely constructive) criticism in a peer evaluation, it turned out to be the only non-positive thing that was said about that coworker. So it became a focus of his yearly review.

He later told me about how his review went (casually at a conference; he had no idea I was the source), and I fessed up and clarified what I actually meant. The HR process had twisted it to a much more extreme version of what I was getting at, completely undermining the utility of the feedback.

Nowadays, I'm just gonna give perfect scores and if I have feedback that needs to be given, I'll just tell the coworker directly. (And if I'm not comfortable doing that, then the feedback probably isn't important enough.)

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