Every day, success is making the world turn. Maybe it’s making your world turn, too. Yet for every story of success, there is this potential dark cloud that lingers, and you might be familiar with it. This dark cloud is the aura of jealousy that some people have around them when others achieve. Perhaps somebody is looking on and wishing your good things were happening to them.
But often, this jealousy has little to do with you and everything to do with the individual themselves. Their life experiences, their neurology, and their mindset. So next time you hit your goals and feel proud of yourself, and you notice somebody not clapping for you, there’s a good chance it’s going to be down to one of these ten psychological reasons.
1. Having a fixed mindset.
It’s common yet problematic for jealous people to believe nothing outside their current mindset can be achieved. It’s something renowned psychologist Dr. Carol Dweck coined as a fixed mindset. The idea that your personal qualities, such as intelligence and talent, are something you are born with and cannot be changed.
If you think about it, it’s an incredibly rigid way to live; your thoughts and abilities remain still, without the willingness to explore ways to improve or even replace them.
Sadly, this describes many jealous people to a tee. They believe others have success because they were born with the innate skills, rather than through dedication, effort, and learning from mistakes (known as a growth mindset). And what happens as a result? You guessed it – they then become stuck in the same spot, where they’ve probably burned a little hole in the ground by now.
If somebody thinks this way, it makes perfect sense that they’d be jealous of you. You’re going out and making things happen for yourself because you’re willing to try, and they’re wishing they could do the same but believing they can’t.
2. Failing at something in the past and not getting the encouragement they needed to learn from it.
Remember what you were told as a kid? “It’s okay to make mistakes.” At least, I hope that’s what you were told. Even better if you were encouraged to look at what went wrong, so you could explore ways to improve and try again next time. Through that approach, we learn.
Unfortunately, for many jealous people, that wasn’t the case. Often, nobody told them it was okay to stumble (or worse, berated them when they did), so instead of learning from their falls, they simply learned to be afraid of them.
It’s not that successful people don’t make mistakes; it’s that they will have used their errors as springboards to get to their goal. You fall, you get up, dust yourself off, and keep moving. In contrast, when failure makes somebody refuse to try again, stagnation occurs, but jealousy grows like Japanese Knotweed.
3. Lacking their own direction.
No roadmap, no compass, and no clue which direction to turn. That is often how jealous people can live their lives, and unfortunately, because they have no idea what to do next, it means you have to suffer their envy.
Success generally comes from taking chances and stepping into the unknown, although a little luck does sometimes come in handy! And sure, there’s a little fear that goes along with that, but that is what should drive you, rather than keep you hiding. After all, what’s the worst that can happen? For a jealous person, everything, so they’d rather stay put and deny they have a problem.
It’s worth remembering that this aimlessness rarely comes from laziness. More often than not, it comes from a place of deep-rooted fear, where past disappointments or that lack of encouragement we talked about have convinced them that choosing a direction is just setting themselves up to fail.
4. Fear they will get left behind.
What’s so scary about others doing well? For jealous people, a lot. And it’s usually underpinned by the fear of getting left behind.
They’re doing so much.
Why am I not progressing as fast as they are?
I’m scared I’ll never step forward.
Unfortunately for jealous people, these thoughts don’t manifest into action; they manifest into envy. “I want what you have” can come out as, “Why are you racing ahead of me?” But the cruel irony is that by never trying, jealous people guarantee the very outcome they fear most.
5. A childhood that taught them to be jealous.
When someone grows up in the kind of house that boxes them up rather than inspires them to grow, they will almost certainly end up as an adult who finds it difficult to know when to celebrate other people.
Take sibling rivalry, for example. Perhaps you had a brother or sister who did everything right, yet whatever you did was never good enough. That’s often how jealousy develops over time in people who were taught that someone else being successful meant they were a failure. In those who weren’t taught to clap when others win.
Success doesn’t have to look like you vs. them, but it’s hard trying to tell that to somebody who was conditioned to believe otherwise. I’ve tried!
6. Getting stuck in the comparison trap.
Perhaps you lived on the same street, or you went to the same school as somebody who is now fully jealous of your achievements. You’re practically the same age, yet you went in two different directions. You worked hard and built a platform for yourself, and the jealous person didn’t or wasn’t able to for one reason or another, and now resents you for it.
Sure, some success is down to sheer luck, starting from the place, family, and genetics you are born into. There’s no denying that our unique circumstances play a big role, and it would be wrong to ignore the very real barriers that some people face, barriers that others never even have to think about.
But still, there are people born into privilege who sit back and do nothing, and those from disadvantaged or difficult backgrounds who push through those barriers regardless. Doing so takes time and energy that some people simply aren’t open or willing to dig for.
Instead, they sit back and ask, “Why them, not me?”
But really, the question should be: Why not you, too?
7. Perfectionism.
Nothing kills a dream more than a perfectionist with a plan! Two steps forward, and then a step back. They sit for a little bit, then take a step forward again, but it’s still not quite right. Perfectionists hover like this, never really knowing when to draw the line and go for things they want.
Real life happens. Minds change. Finances ebb and flow. Health fluctuates. Success never comes from waiting for the perfect conditions; it comes from starting and learning as you grow. But seeing as nothing will ever be right for a perfectionist, success will always be much harder to grasp hold of for them. So when they see somebody else achieving what they’ve been endlessly planning and preparing for, that frustration has to go somewhere. More often than not, it goes in the direction of comparison and jealousy.
8. Fear of losing attention based on others’ success.
I’m scared your success is giving you all the attention, and I’m getting nothing.
Insecure people often struggle with having zero attention. Often, as we touched on earlier, this stems from childhood environments where praise and recognition were in short supply, leaving some people feeling like they constantly need external validation to feel worthy.
When people applaud your achievement, the spotlight naturally shifts onto you. And that means the jealous person is out there, left in darkness, at least in their mind. Because they don’t have a secure sense of themselves and their worth, they begin to think that people will suddenly forget about them, or that the things they’re good at will be erased from memory. It’s a bold assumption, and it’s one that’s rarely based in reality, but it’s something that jealous people often ruminate over.
9. A reminder of their own unmet goals.
Get that dream job. Complete your diploma. Get married. All great goals and dreams, if that’s what you’re chasing. But when you have a dream, you’re never going to make it come true unless you take care of it. Nobody plants seeds without good soil, regular light, and water. If they did, that seed would never grow.
It’s the same for success. If you want it, you have to take care of it. We all have the power to do that, at least to some extent, but only some are consistent. Then, of course, there are always life circumstances that can get in our way, even with the best effort. Sometimes life simply doesn’t go to plan.
But whether it’s through a lack of effort or something beyond an individual’s control, a reminder that someone else is achieving the goals they themselves weren’t able to, can stir up jealousy that’s hard to suppress.
10. The belief that success is scarce.
You know the saying: if you believe it, you become it. And unfortunately, some people hold the mindset “That kind of success would never happen to me.”
Jealousy is rife within scarcity-type mindsets, and it often boils down to not believing that we can all achieve with a little get-go and gumption. If everybody had a slice of cake, we would all be able to taste the sweetness and appreciate the treat. But jealous people sometimes believe that whole cakes are meant for some, while they’re meant just for the crumbs.
This belief wasn’t something they arrived at alone. It’s often shaped by environment, by growing up in households or communities where resources really were scarce, or where the message “people like us don’t get things like that” was spoken or unspoken but ever-present. Unfortunately, those kinds of experiences can leave a lasting imprint. An imprint that both increases jealousy and reduces the chance of success.
Final thoughts…
Jealousy isn’t easy to deal with, for either party. For those who are jealous, it’s an ongoing struggle. Their reasons often stem from early conditioning that they just can’t shake without support.
And for those whose success is causing the jealous reactions, it can be hard to experience, especially when it comes from someone you care about or whose opinion means a lot to you. Just remember, if somebody isn’t offering you a pat on the back when you do well, that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with what you’re doing. Instead, give yourself that pat. You deserve it.
