Envy is easier than gratitude
A few years into my career, a colleague earned a big promotion during performance review season. She was happy about it. People congratulated her left and right, including me. I said all the right words with my outside voice. But inside, I was consumed with envy.
I didn't mean to feel jealous. I thought she was good at her job and I wanted to feel happy for her. But in my heart of hearts, I was not happy for her. Instead of feeling grateful for my own good review and bonus, I felt bad that she had earned a promotion that I wanted and didn't get.
Why is envy so much easier than gratitude?
Adulting is hard
There are good reasons it is easier for most of us to feel envy than gratitude. The human brain evolved in part by constantly comparing its status, resources, and opportunities to other people's; noticing what you lacked had survival value, while appreciating what you already had was less urgent. Psychologists call this a combination of social comparison and the brain's negativity bias: we're naturally more sensitive to gaps, threats, and disadvantages than to existing gains and blessings.
So when we notice our colleague get a promotion, or we see someone succeed at something we have struggled with ourselves, or we (think we) see our friend's happy life as a contrast to our own, our first instinct is to feel jealous. In the background, our brains are trying to figure out how to close the gap between what we have and what we want.
While we may feel envy, most adults figure out how to compartmentalize it. To our colleague, we say, "Congratulations on your promotion!" We may silently add, "You a-hole!" in our heads, but we don't say that part out loud.
Other anti-patterns you know and love-to-hate
When you start looking for anti-patterns at work, you see them everywhere. Some of them are harder to self-censor than others.
Criticism is easier than creation. It's easier to find fault with someone else's work than to build something yourself and expose your work to scrutiny.
Outrage is easier than curiosity. It's easy to get angry when your colleague says something that triggers you. Much harder to take a beat and try to understand the disconnect.
Cynicism is easier than optimism. By the laws of physics, nearly every ambitious endeavor, whether it's a startup or a new technology or a 200-mile trek, is more likely to fail than succeed. It's easy to believe in failure. Way more difficult to do the work to make the ambition real.
Certainty is easier than learning. It is fun to be right and know everything! Which makes it feel terrible when your certainty is challenged. Even when you can see that the challenger has a point, it's hard to embrace your fallibility and dive in to learn.
Rescuing is easier than coaching. When an employee struggles with an assignment, it's tempting for the impatient manager to dive in to take it over. It takes much more patience to coach an employee through the failure.
The fact that we fall into these anti-patterns so easily is bad enough. The really wretched thing is that our instincts are terrible. Across a wide range of situations, the more difficult behavior gets the better result.
AI loves your inner child
Much has been written about the sycophantic patterns of AI chatbots. They love to reinforce the validity of our worst feelings. For a person who is feeling bad (envy, outrage, cynicism), the validation from an AI companion feels affirming. AI rewards our default settings in a way that can make us feel confused and gaslit when human colleagues hold us accountable for our behavior. Which of course takes us even further away from the mindset we need to truly feel better.
Much of adulthood, and especially leadership, is choosing the harder instinct on purpose. If a leadership behavior feels surprisingly difficult, that's often evidence it's the right one.
Kieran
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