Nobody wants to come right out and tell you that they’re jealous of your success; what they’ll do is ask you loaded questions.
Luck by chance
“How on earth did you manage to pull that off?”
Rarely is this question asked with genuine respect in mind. Instead, it’s a coy way of saying, “You got lucky.”
Whether you just landed a huge promotion at work or took off on a successful entrepreneurial endeavor, someone with envy will ask you this question: instead of asking about your game plan, they’ll ask how you got so fortunate.
Framing your success as luck keeps them from having to accept the reality that you put in the work.
Covert audits
“Are you sure you can actually afford that right now?”
Posed often as a sincere inquiry, this question is typically meant to review your financial situation and judge your life decisions. Whether it’s a coworker or classmate, someone will surely ask you this question with fake worry creased into their forehead immediately following your purchase of something nice.
Instead of congratulating you on your ability to buy nice things, they try to shame you into feeling bad by silently questioning your finances.
Hidden leverage
“Did someone internal give you a hand with that?”
Asking you who helped you reach your goal is their attempt at finding an angle to attribute your success to someone they know. If you tell them you just got a big-name client or a celebrity job, they want to know who sent you their way or who pulled the proverbial string for you.
It lets them devalue you because now they know your success came from privilege and not actual skill.
Involuntary sacrifices
“Don’t you ever worry about burning out or losing your personal life?”
Asking this question makes your sacrifice look like an unhealthy obsession. And this is another way critics try to cheapen your success. When someone else reaches a fitness goal you’re jealous of, instead of congratulating them, they may ask if it’s worth killing your social life by eating and working out so rigorously.
They create this idea that there’s a downside to your accomplishment that they refuse to pay because they’re too balanced.
Forming cracks
“What’s your backup plan if things suddenly fall apart?”
Asking someone about their long term stability while pretending to be concerned with logical “what ifs” is a form of trying to make someone doubt themselves.
Let’s say you tell someone about an exciting new business or creative pursuit. Your jealous friend may start listing statistics about failure and ask you, “What if you come down?” Instead of being happy for you, they’re patiently waiting for you to fall so they can feel better about themselves for not trying.
Discounted value
“Isn’t that market getting a bit oversaturated these days?”
They try to downplay your success or achievement by grouping it with things that are commonplace. When you share your excitement about starting a new creative platform, boutique store, or niche service, they may trivialize your accomplishment by questioning if everyone isn’t basically copying what everyone else is doing.
They try to downgrade your unique achievement to something that is common.
Invalidation checks
“Must be nice to have so much free time on your hands, right?”
Masked as some joke or off-handed observation, this question is posed to make you believe that your accomplishments are only possible because you’re privileged.
When you run a marathon, finish a manuscript, or learn something difficult, your contact who’s jealous of you may tell you how jealous they are that you have so much free time. The implication behind the dig is that your accomplishment came easily to you because you have fewer responsibilities.
Unsolicited origins
“Where exactly did you get the idea for that?”
If said with a sneer, this question isn’t actually seeking information about where you find inspiration. It’s instead an effort to find out who you stole your original idea from so they can accuse you of being a copycat.
Let’s say you write something that everyone loves or design something groundbreaking. Then comes the “Who did you rip off?” question. By attempting to attach your creation to someone else, the asker feeds his ego by validating that you have no real skills of your own.
Early exit strategies
“How much longer do you think you can realistically keep this pace up?”
Asking this question tries to put a finite timeline on your success. It assumes that you can’t perform at your current level forever. When things are going well for you (looking fit, hitting numbers at work, etc.), some loser is waiting for you to announce when you’ll fall back down to normal.
Instead of appreciating your continued progression, they treat your success like a bubble that will burst.
10 complaints you’ll never hear from intelligent people
Smart people get annoyed like the rest of us, but the difference is that they don’t have some of the most common complaints.
