What’s driving you?
Close your eyes, ask yourself, why are you doing this?
In Marie Kondo’s words, does this spark joy? Or is your motivation dwelling from hatred and revenge?
It does happen frequently, that someone you know underestimates you and your talents, and that hurts you. So you want to prove them wrong, you work twice as hard to do that. After all your hard work, there are two likely outcomes of the situation. Either you succeed in proving yourself worthy or you fail.
Let us dive deeper into this. The person who made you feel less valuable, probably did so unintentionally, didn’t give a second thought to it. The person probably doesn’t know you well enough to know your skills. Or the worst case scenario, they do have a personal vendetta against you. Unfortunately, the last case does happen often.
From the moment you processed the thought, and let it fuel you, you developed a sense of toxicity against the person and against the failure.
No failure is fatal, but the toxicity makes you think this failure is fatal.
According to you if you now fail, your image and reputation would be destroyed. So you are working dedicatedly to win this challenge, a challenge that only exists in your head. But this dedication is fueled by your desire to bring the other person down.
If you do end up not performing the way you wanted, you feel sad, dejected, hopeless and you start being overcritical of yourself. This was after all something you knew you could do, but you failed in achieving what you hoped for.
You start questioning yourself, your skills and talents. You start losing confidence, you could develop imposter syndrome.
What happens when you do succeed? You get a high, you feel good about yourself. But that happiness is not because of your achievement, it’s because of the other person’s loss. So when there will be no opponent, will you feel this contentment?
And if your “opponent” does have a feud against you, you have entered into a vicious cycle: they offend you->you offend them by proving them wrong-> repeat.
They will now find more ways to enter into your mind and make you feel bad about yourself and wait for that one time you actually fail.
Now, imagine how it would be if you just did things that made you happy, things that took you closer to the person you want to be. Each failure would be a setback, a lesson learned. Each win would be a stepping stone. This will not only help you grow but it will also help you avoid the ugliness of toxicity.
Doing things at your own pace will keep mental fatigue at bay. You’d be putting in the right amount of effort and time, just enough to keep you from burning out.
The people who’d be happy for you, praying for your success are the ones that should be your motivation. All the mental space that you’ll be saving by staying away from this negativity can be put to better use. You can give more time to yourself, your loved ones, to work on your hobby, to work on multiple things.
So it is up to you to decide, whether you want to be driven by love or by hatred.
