How to encourage inspiration instead of aggravation when others succeed

Recall the largeness of you

You’re bigger than your smallest response to the success of others, and reminding yourself of that can help you move toward your growth mindset. Practicing self-affirmation is helpful in switching from a threat to a challenge state, by reminding ourselves just how large and multifaceted we are and how many interpersonal resources we have.

I am not only a scientist (or a wife, or a dog mom, or a fun aunt, or a lover of Tex-Mex), I am all of these things, and you too are incredibly multifaceted. Panning back on just how broad we are—how many valued identities we have—helps to lower the percentage of our self under threat when someone else succeeds.

If I identify nearly exclusively with my role as an academic and my next grant gets rejected, it can feel as if 90 percent of me is under threat. When I widen the lens and taken in all of my various roles, that percentage shrinks substantially, giving me much-needed breathing room where I can reevaluate the situation. While I’m at it, I can also remind myself that challenge, and stretching beyond my comfort zone, grows my brain.

Recognize the actor-observer effect

When we see someone else achieve, it’s like we’re the audience in the theater while they take main stage. In our fixed mindset, we tell ourselves that they must have been born with special skills and that there’s an element of magic and mystery to their success.

In social psychology, that’s an attributional bias called the actor–observer asymmetry. When we’re the actor—when we’re the one who has succeeded—we have a good sense of the path we took to get there. We know about the many people and circumstances that influenced us, who helped us along the way, what decisions we made, the challenges we overcame, and the effort we put in.

In most cases, that journey is not available to the observer—who only sees the end result. The actor’s success seems magical or otherwise inaccessible to us when we are in the observer role.

One way we can flip this is, instead of focusing on the outcome, zeroing in on the path the actor took to get there—particularly their challenges, as these are most likely to impart insight. We’re best served building this kind of perspective into workplace culture.

For example, Atlassian uses corporate storytelling in a podcast they’ve launched, called Teamistry, to share examples of how great teams achieved success, including the challenges they experienced and what they didn’t do well along the way. Itzhak Perlman routinely asks his students what they’re struggling with—not whether anything is challenging them, but what is—thus normalizing struggle. He then shares some of his own struggle stories, including how he resolved the challenges (and what challenges him still), and he coaches the students to come up with their own solutions.

All of this underscores something critical: that other people’s successes have value for us, as well.

Recognize the value of others’ success

As Simon Sinek defines it, a worthy rival is someone who not only inspires you to up your game (not someone you want to crush at all costs), but also someone who helps you do so because they are stronger in your less developed areas. A worthy rival helps you identify areas where you can improve, along with how to do it. Notice, again, that while this idea of worthy rivals has the air of competition, at the heart it’s not about outperforming the other person, it’s about doing better, yourself.

I’ve had my own share of worthy rivals in my work, many of whom are dear friends. Back in grad school, however, I struggled with this a bit, as do many (perhaps most) in academia. When you’re emerging from your studies and toward your professional career, the awareness of the limited number of jobs in the academy can cast a pall over relationships.

I see this today among the graduate students I work with. I’ve taken to the practice of taking on two to three postdocs at a time so that they have a small cohort they can collaborate with, and inevitably, many of them become close friends. Yet when they’re about to go on the market, their fixed mindsets can start to encroach and tensions appear as they each need letters of recommendation, sometimes for the same position.

In these cases, I encourage them to talk about the awkwardness with each other to normalize these feelings and to broaden their perspective. We discuss the long-term benefits of having friends and close colleagues in the field. You can’t really have a successful career in academia if you’re the only one studying something. If you’re in such a small niche that no one else’s work relates to it, you’re in trouble.

You want your ideas to be picked up by others because they will have more reach to improve society and will be built out and expanded on in directions you would never have imagined. Also, if we let a threat assessment poison our relationships early on, we won’t have productive and collegial relationships later; this not only makes it harder for us to succeed, it also negatively impacts our quality of life. While reassuring others, tell stories illustrating that success is available for all of us, and that when we act from our growth mindset, we’re more likely to experience it.

Recognize when it’s your success that’s triggering others toward their fixed mindset

Maybe it’s happened to you: A friend or colleague became weirdly distant after you were promoted. Sometimes it’s our success that’s triggering for others. What you don’t want to do is downplay your accomplishment. Women, in particular, experience social pressure to do this, and it has a negative impact on advancement.

What we can do when we’re the source of envy is to consider the actor–observer effect: Remember that others haven’t seen our journey, and so they likely have inaccurate perceptions about what it took for us to get where we are. We can remedy that by sharing our experiences, either formally or informally. We can offer to advise or mentor a colleague. If we’re highly visible, we can speak to our journey in interviews.

In more informal settings, we can remind others of where we stumbled. “Remember when I was passed up for tenure? Back then I was so glad that others could help me identify my resources and how I might regroup and move forward strategically. If I hadn’t done that, I don’t think I’d have made the move to private industry and I never would have become a vice president.” This not only defuses the trigger, but helps to elevate others and helps them discern a path to success.

Adapted from Cultures of Growth by Mary C. Murphy, PhD, published by Simon and Schuster. Copyright © 2023 by Mary C. Murphy. Reprinted courtesy of Simon & Schuster, Inc.