It Doesn’t Have Anything To Do What What You’re Doing
The singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile primarily makes alternative country and folk rock music. Sometimes, when an artist who works in a more mainstream or commercial genre has “an album or song that’s particularly lauded,” Carlile said, “the people around me will get competitive about it. They’ll get into this sports mentality, where they compare my success to the other artist’s.” When this happens, Carlile said, “I always tell people, ‘Apples and oranges. Don’t waste your time getting envious or jealous about that—we’re in completely different worlds.’ So I look at really commercial music like I look at a really successful baseball team: it doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m doing.”
Not wasting your time getting envious or jealous of people in completely different worlds—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
“We Do Different Things”
There was a period in his career when Seth Rogen would feel terrible after watching a great movie. A writer, actor, and director himself, he’d burn with envy, measuring his writing, acting, and directing against the writing, acting, and directing of whatever brilliant thing he’d just watched. Then he’d go back to his own work and start twisting and turning it into something more like the thing he envied. Once, after watching some Michael Bay action movie that blew him away, he wrote a Bay-like action scene for a comedy he was working on. When he showed the pages to his writing partner Evan Goldberg, Goldberg said, “‘What Michael Bay would think of this is what we think when Michael Bay tries to be funny.’ He was just like, We do different things.’” So Rogen scrapped the action scene, and from then on, whenever he watches a great movie and catches himself “feeling like, ‘these people are better than I am,’ I go, ‘We do different things.’ That is something that I now tell myself a lot. And it is something that is very helpful for my psyche—not feeling like I’m in competition with this person, or like that person is taking away from what I’m doing. Because we do different things.”
No One’s Success Comes At Your Expense
At 27, Fran Lebowitz published her first book. After it became a big hit, she said, “there was a tremendous amount of hostility toward me.” Writers and non-writers alike were envious of her sudden success. “It really shocked me,” Lebowitz said. “The responses to the success of that book were, to me, outlandish, and even now seem outlandish. Because it was mostly writers who did other kinds of writing, or people who were simply not writers at all.” Reaching for an analogy from a world she admitted knowing nothing about, she asked, who’s a great professional basketball player? LeBron James, the interviewer replied. “It would be as if, when LeBron James has a fantastic basketball game, I was eaten alive with envy.” She does not envy LeBron James when he has a fantastic game “because I understand that I am not a basketball player, that LeBron James has nothing to do with me, and that he is not a great basketball player at my expense.”
Did You Ever Stop And Compare Your Life?
In the back of a comedy club, a struggling comedian got a chance to talk to his hero, Jerry Seinfeld. He said he’d been struggling and sacrificing for about 10 years to “make it” as a comedian. Approaching his 30s, he was beginning to question his life choices. “I see all my friends,” he said, “they’re making a lot of money. I see people making a lot of money on Wall Street.” Seinfeld makes a confused face, baffled by a comedian comparing himself to investment bankers. “I just see people moving up,” the struggling comedian says. “They’re moving up?” Seinfeld asks. “Are you out of your mind? This has nothing to do with your friends.” He points in the direction of the stage—“this is such a special thing. This has nothing to do with ‘making it.’” “But did you ever stop and compare your life and go, ‘My friends are all married, they’re all having kids, they all have houses, they have some sort of sense of normality.’” Seinfeld makes a disgusted face, shakes his head, and says, “Let me tell you a story. This is my favorite story about show business.” On a winter night, the story goes, the musicians of the Glenn Miller Orchestra are on their way to a gig. Three miles out, the bus breaks down. Dressed in their suits and carrying their instruments, they walk through a snowy field to get to the gig. In the distance, they see a little house. The lights are on and there’s a billow of smoke coming out of the chimney. The band walks up to the house and looks through the window. Inside, a man, his wife, and their two kids are sitting around the dinner table. They’re smiling and laughing. They’re enjoying a home-cooked meal. There’s a fire in the fireplace. The band members, soaked and shivering, holding their bulky instruments, stand there and take in this idyllic scene for a few quiet seconds. Then one band member turns to the others and says, How do people live like that? “That’s what it’s about,” Seinfeld says to the struggling comedian, who smiles wide and nods his head up and down again and again in recognition that the people he’d been comparing himself to had nothing to do with what he was doing.
The One Cure For All Envy And Jealousy
Usually, when we compare ourselves to someone else, we compare ourselves to a select few aspects of their life. Their house, their good looks, their professional success, the number of followers they have on social media, et cetera. Instead of comparing yourself to a few shiny aspects of someone else’s life, James Altucher writes in The One Cure For All Envy And Jealousy, “picture that you can change places in every way with them. But then it’s forever…Would you do it?” Usually—as Seinfeld’s Glenn Miller Orchestra story illustrates—the answer is…No, you wouldn’t want their whole life.
The Challenge In Life
“In life,” the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah writes, “the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you’re playing.” And to not waste your time comparing yourself to everyone playing an entirely different game.