Societal Turbulence
Wake is the product of a vessel such as a boat moving through water but an aircraft moving the air does not generate wake but instead turbulence as it passes by. When you move through your life improving who you are, you generate personal development turbulence.
The faster you move, the quicker you improve and develop, which leads you to perform more exaggerated movements and thus create more personal development turbulence. The unrest you cause affects everyone around you. When you produce turbulence in a society, you create a substantial commotion in the lives of people who are close to you that may not be welcome. Not everyone is going to enjoy the unrest generated by your growth and that instability will upset many of those people.
The problems you face from other people as you pursue your goals will come from a variety of sources and relationships.
Close Relationship Negativity
Negativity from close relationships such as family and spouse can be the most hurtful and the most damaging to our self-esteem for two very simple reasons: Our loved ones know the most about us, our strengths and weaknesses and how to mentally and emotionally hurt us the greatest. And they are the ones we expect the most support from when we do try to improve our own lives so it hurts even more when this encouragement is not received or tugged away from under our feet when least expected.
The people close to us when not in our corner are our Kryptonite weakness. The negativity is born out of envy, fear of loss and a generally pessimistic outlook on life that nothing can get better for them and their like.
Friendship Negativity
The negativity that emanates from friends is similar to that we find in our family and loved ones. The negativity is occasionally a fear of loss, but mostly due to envy and jealousy of others. Our own socio-economic standing will dictate many of the friends we keep, our income level, our manner of speech, our politics, our social activities and our outlook on life are all within a close percentage of those we associate with.
In school, I was rather academically challenged and left with no qualifications to speak of, and so did most of my friends. None of my immediate family up to that point had gone on to university for even undergraduate study. I was 17 years old, barely out of school, when I began taking the first tentative steps into my pursuit of personal development.
At the age of 19, I decided that I would like to begin improving my education on my own terms as the video games industry began to slowly change and more companies began asking for computer science degrees. When I decided to advance my education even the merest amount and explaining the reason why to friends, i.e. to pursue a degree, the response I got went through various stages from asking “why even bother,” to “you’ll never see it through to the end,” all the way to “you’re so dumb you’ll just fail.” As a matter of fact I did not fail, and as I improved my education, I gained new friends and dropped many of my older friends who no longer meshed with my goals and the new direction my life was taking. I found that studying in a college and in adult classes where many of the students were far older than I was a much more interesting and rewarding experience than I had ever encountered during my regular school years.
A few years in to my furthering education, at the age of 22, I decided that the reason to get a degree was not just for the academic achievement and to maintain my desirability to game development companies, but to actually open up new career opportunities that I would not have access to otherwise.
My idea was simply that after I graduated from the degree course that I look in to the possibility of seeking work in either Japan or America. When I discussed these possible, very indefinite plans with friends both in and out of college, the universal response was “Don’t do it, you’ll hate it.”
Within time, I secured a job in California but right up until the very day that I was to leave I had friends telling me that it was not worth the effort, that I would fail, that there was no point to going and that I would hate the place. Even the counter staff at the local Chinese Takeaway, who I was on good friendly terms with, would say, “Why would you want to do that? There’s nothing there that you can’t get here.” Now if you have the second generation of Chinese immigrants saying that to you, you know that something is screwy with society’s outlook.
Co-Worker Negativity
Negativity also comes from your co-workers and this is where it has only one root cause: pure and simple professional jealousy. The jealousy will not just stem from your direct peers but also from your boss too. This jealousy can seriously influence your emotional state as you are made to feel you do not deserve whatever it is you have earned or are striving towards.
The jealousy of colleagues will come often not in direct conflict but in more subtle ways such as passive-aggressive behaviours, sabotaging your work, doing the minimum necessary to not get reported if they are working directly with you on a project that you have some control over, delays in delivering components of a project to you that will make your own work late, and other unprofessional conduct in the work place.
Just shortly after graduating on my degree, I held two short-term contract positions at two different companies as I worked on finding a job in either Japan or America. On both of those separate contract jobs, I made it clear to the hiring manager and my immediate supervisors that I would not be seeking a long term position with the company before I was hired, they were both short-term contracts after all. I made sure that everyone involved in the project understood that I was there to do just that job.
The first contract job I took was for a year, but unfortunately the company that I was working for did not have sufficient funds to continue developing the product I was working on so I left on amicable terms with many of the people there. On my day of departure, my immediate supervisor and I were discussing where we would find work next. I mentioned once more that I was working on finding a job in America (I had narrowed it down from Japan or America by then) and already had a tentative job lined up but the company was having some difficulty getting the visa dealt with due to the H1B cap. My now ex-supervisor scoffed loudly at that, deriding my decision to pursue my goal and stating, “It’ll never happen in a month of Sundays.”
I met that self same supervisor a little under a year later at the Computer Game Developers Conference (now called the Game Developers Conference) in the San Jose area as I was walking around the expo floor. He had managed to scrape together the funds to pay his own way from England to California and get to the conference, as it was something he had wanted to do for a few years but could never afford it. I had just taken a cheap flight up from Los Angeles and the company I was contracting for was picking up the rest of the tab. I must admit it was gratifying to see the look on his face knowing that I had succeeded in my goal whereas he was still doing the same old thing for an unappreciative company.
The second job I worked, my immediate supervisor threatened to call up the American embassy and make outrageous unfounded claims as to my character if I did not postpone leaving the country for another six months. I want you to understand that the job I was hired on to perform was for not more than six weeks and I completed the small project in less time than that. But… let us just say this is the average, run-of-the-mill development company that is poorly managed and there was always one more task that needed to be taken care of on a completely different project. Me, being the affable and helpful kind of guy that I am, was always pressed upon by management to help out, and I did so, where I could, without trying to let it jeopardise my own goals.
My point is, when you know you are doing the right thing, when you are pursuing your goals, many co-workers will be jealous of you and attempt to do the wrong thing by you. Yes, their envy and jealousy will bring you down with them but it is borne of their sickness, not yours. They are doing wrong by you because they know you are succeeding by doing only just a little more than they are, something that they could be doing themselves but for whatever personal reasons, they choose not to do.
Casual Acquaintance Negativity
Negativity emanating from casual acquaintances is generally not hurtful unless you allow it to be. Casual acquaintances do not know you well enough to make invective remarks that can psychologically hurt you. Other than the usual slings and arrows that they randomly hurl, the negativity will merely slow down your personal development. Only if you let it, will the negativity from your acquaintances affect your actual mental well-being.
People Who Only Know Of You Negativity
There is a world of difference between knowing you and knowing of you.
I know my friends, my girlfriend and my family.
I know of Richard Branson, Bill Gates, and Barack Obama.
I can form reasonably valid character evaluations of people that I know. However, any opinions I form of people that I know of are merely just that, opinions. Moreover, my opinions will be based on partial facts, half-truths, third hand accounts, and a public persona.
As you pursue your personal development, during your journey to success, you will attract the negativity of people who do not even know of you. You personally have never done anything to them or had any sort of impact upon their lives in any way, shape or form, but they will find something to dislike you for. Every village has its gossipmonger. It is why I have little patience with people who say “Nothing to hide, nothing to fear.”
Those that state such a thing have obviously never lived in a village full of narrow-minded people, nor been remotely successful enough to warrant the attention of a crowd. No matter how unblemished your character is, no matter how virtuous you are, when you are even slightly successful or slightly different there will be someone that hates you for what you are, what you have done or what you are attempting to do.
Jealousy, envy, racism, sexism, character flaw; call it what you will but someone, somewhere will hate you for all they are worth simply because you have succeeded where they cannot. It is one thing to suffer random misfortune but it is quite another to have it thrust upon you by someone who knows nothing of you or about you, they will persecute you for the simple act of what you have done with your life whilst they did not. It is a fact in life that no matter how carefully you tread there will always be someone, somewhere annoyed at what you do, say or think.
There is an old quote, written by Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC, Greek Philosopher) and again later by Elbert Hubbard (1856 – 1915, American writer, publisher, and philosopher) that I will paraphrase here:”To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, achieve nothing.”
It is a fine quote but it is also a quote born in naivety of the human mind for there will always be someone annoyed at you for something, even if all you have to offer the world is the good grace to live an average life and die a quiet death.
Three Reasons For Negativity
For casual acquaintances and people that only know of you in some vague way the negativity comes from three sources.
The least important reason is the general malaise that large parts of the population suffer from, this melancholy is to be found throughout the world but fortunately, it does little to you on a day-to-day basis other than a general projected gloominess that may alter your mood. On certain days, it may be difficult to insulate yourself from the pessimism of others but maintaining a healthy outlook and positive, upbeat attitude to your own mental state and having solid goals to pursue will insulate you from most of the damaging effects.
The second source of negativity from people that do not know you is pervasive in everyone, those that know you and those that know of you, this source is dissatisfaction with their life, a life that for large parts of the populace is sub-standard. Think about it, if you believe that right now you lead an average life, and you live in a small city of 100,000 people, even if you plot on a bell-curve, 50,000 people have a worse life than you do, even if only marginally so. If you have the audacity to climb above that 50,000 people, moving yourself from the left of the bell-curve to the right, you will only be showing them how bad their own lives are. It will be a slap across the face, even if only gently, that someone, somewhere, is doing better than they are, and human nature being what it is, this will breed jealousy and resentment borne of discontent.
The third reason that people who do not know you will have a negative reaction to you is because you are different and anything different is to be feared and eradicated. It does not matter what the difference is, it just has to be different in the wrong way. A funny accent, an odd walk, long hair, the incorrect clothes, preferring to quietly study instead of getting drunk every night, going on to college instead of working in the mine, anything and everything is open to derision and negativity.
There is a microcosm of these feelings and reactions visible on the school playground every day. Multiply that microcosm by a thousand or a million or more so that it encompasses a large part of the population and as you move forward in your personal development gaining more and more successes, this negativity from people that only know of you will increase right along with it. It takes a lot of self-discipline and knowing your own mind and not allowing yourself to be swayed from your intended goals to deal with this accumulation of negativity that gathers all around you as you improve your life.
How to deal with that negativity I intend to cover in future articles but just being able to identify who will put up roadblocks to prevent you achieving your goals and how they will do it is a powerful tool available to you.