Jealousy Is Your Worst Enemy

 We have all seen it before. We have all been there before. 

It's time to cut the birthday cake for someone in the family and the two kids start complaining about how one person got a bigger piece than the other person, or someone got more frosting than the other person. Maybe it is the complaining in the toy store about how someone got a toy that is bigger than someone else's toy. 

Ahh, jealousy. We love it don't we? Especially when it is happening to some other parent and we can sit back and say it NEVER happens to our kids and it NEVER happened in our lives.... (yea, right....).  But I bring this up today when it comes to you and your writing career. Jealousy of other writers is one of the worst things that can happen to you and it will destroy your own career. No, I am not saying you will lose your job. This is all about mindset.

Let's first think about where this jealousy thing is coming from. Again, return to the kids with the cake. Kid 1 is upset because Kid 2 has a bigger slice of cake. Maybe Kid 2 does, but here comes the next question. Do we know the rest of the circumstances? Is Kid 2 older? Did Kid 1 do something earlier to deserve less? Is Kid 1 diabetic and shouldn't have that much of high levels of sugar? The list goes on and on. Well, the same goes for writing. We don't know the circumstances. 

Some writers get things that you WISH you had simply because of circumstances that are out of your control and maybe beyond your reach. Consider the following list:

• They were in a publishing line that was closed and due to a contract they were signed to they were moved to a different house that you had always wanted to be in.
• They were in the right place at the right time and an editor sat down with them at a table at a luncheon and said they wanted to know about their book (you weren't at that conference).
• They had a story that was what the editor was looking for at that time.
• You were tied up with other writing projects and couldn't afford to drop those and start something new on a gamble that the project would be right.
• That person simply had a voice the editor wanted and your voice wasn't what they wanted.
• Get the idea?

We simply don't know what the circumstances are. It is not a matter of the world working against you. Sometimes, things just work out that way.

But we also have to remember that, even though you might want to be at that one big publishing house with that big fancy hard cover book, (here comes the cold hard truth so be braced for it), it might not be where you are destined to be. We have to admit, like all professions, activities, sports, hobbies, etc, some people just have inherent skills that others have. Some people just have the genes that others do not have. Look, I don't care how hard you train and swim, there is something about the genes that a Katie Ledecky or Michael Phelps, or Lebron James have that others do not have. But we can be successful in our own area.

The other thing I want us all to remember, especially as writers, is, if we want this business to continue and to compete against the mind melting streaming services and gaming platforms and get people back to reading again, we have to celebrate the successes of writers.  They got there! Applaud what they did!

And one final note. I stumbled across this as I was writing this post. Consider this as well....