The Competition No one Entered: When Envy Becomes the Enemy of Success
Why Secret Competition and Envy Are the Enemy of Your Success
“Competition can be the first nail in the coffin of success, especially when you're the only person who knows there's a competition.” — Dr. L. Phillips Coleman
There is a difference between being inspired by someone and secretly competing with them.
Inspiration says, “If she can do it, perhaps I can too.”
Healthy competition says, “Your excellence challenges me to become better.”
But envy says, “If you are succeeding, somehow I must be losing.”
And that is where success begins to die.
We live in a culture that often celebrates competition. We are taught to outperform, outwork, outshine, and outpace the person beside us. In the right environment, competition can challenge us to grow. But there is another kind of competition that is far more dangerous: the competition that exists in the mind of only one participant.
You are measuring yourself against someone who isn't measuring themselves against you.
You are keeping score with someone who doesn't know there is a game.
You are studying their progress, questioning their opportunities, minimizing their accomplishments, and wondering why their name keeps being called while yours seemingly isn't.
Meanwhile, they are simply living, working, growing, and pursuing their purpose.
That isn't competition.
That's envy wearing a competitive uniform.
Envy Changes the Question
One of the most dangerous things about envy is that it quietly changes the questions we ask ourselves.
Instead of asking, “What am I supposed to be building?” we begin asking, “How did she get that?”
Instead of asking, “What can I learn from this person?” we ask, “What makes them so special?”
Instead of asking, “How can we collaborate?” we begin wondering, “How can I prove that I am just as good, or better?”
And before we realize it, we have stopped investing our energy in our own growth and started spending it monitoring someone else's.
That is the first nail.
You Cannot Build Your Purpose While Auditing Someone Else's Progress
Success requires focus. Purpose requires intention. Growth requires enough self-awareness to recognize that someone else's success does not diminish your own potential.
Every minute spent obsessing over another person's opportunities is a minute you are not developing your own.
Every conversation spent diminishing someone's accomplishments is a conversation that could have been spent discussing your next idea.
Every effort spent trying to outshine another person redirects energy that could have illuminated your own path.
And perhaps the greatest irony is this: the person you are competing with may never have considered you competition at all.
They may have considered you a colleague.
A friend.
A potential collaborator.
An ally.
Someone they would have gladly supported.
Imagine losing access to a relationship that could have helped you grow because you were too busy trying to win a contest the other person never entered.
Collaboration Is Not a Threat to Excellence
There is enough room for more than one person to be gifted.
More than one person can lead.
More than one person can have the idea.
More than one person can receive recognition.
More than one person can occupy a space of influence.
Someone else's light does not require yours to dim.
In fact, some of the greatest opportunities are created when talented people stop guarding their individual corners and begin asking what they could build together.
Collaboration requires a mindset that envy cannot tolerate: abundance.
It requires believing that another person's success can be evidence of possibility rather than evidence of your inadequacy.
It requires enough confidence to applaud someone without questioning whether their applause somehow takes something away from you.
And it requires enough maturity to recognize that sometimes the person whose success makes you uncomfortable may actually possess something you need to learn.
Check the Coffin Before You Add Another Nail
If someone's accomplishment immediately makes you question your own worth, pay attention.
If you find yourself constantly comparing titles, recognition, relationships, income, influence, opportunities, or access, pay attention.
If you feel disappointed when someone you claim to support succeeds, pay very close attention.
Those feelings do not automatically make you a bad person. But left unchecked, they can make you a distracted one.
And distraction is expensive when you have purpose to fulfill.
Sometimes the most important question we can ask ourselves is:
“Am I building my future, or am I watching someone else's?”
Because you cannot become who you were meant to be while exhausting yourself trying to become more successful than someone else.
Your greatest competition should be with the version of yourself that has not yet reached its full potential.
Run Your Race
There will always be someone with a different title, larger platform, bigger opportunity, stronger network, longer résumé, or louder applause.
Let them have it.
Then get back to work.
Celebrate what deserves celebrating. Learn what deserves studying. Collaborate where there is alignment. And keep building what has your name and purpose attached to it.
Because success was never supposed to require someone else to fail.
And if you discover that you have been participating in a competition that no one else entered, there is good news:
You can withdraw today.
Pull the nails out.
Put comparison down.
Pick purpose back up.
And get busy building something too meaningful to be distracted by envy.
There is room for your success, but you will have a much better chance of finding it when you stop looking sideways and start looking forward.
—Dr. Laranda Phillips Coleman
