Success isn’t just the best revenge, it’s the only good kind

I watched a show last night I hadn’t seen before called This Is Us, and one scene struck me. In the episode, titled “Our Little Island Girl, Part II,” ballet instructor Beth Pearson, called a former teacher of hers on the phone maybe 20 years later. He hadn’t been supportive of her during a time of crisis (her father had just died), and had replaced her as his star performer.

It had been a huge blow to her, so she was calling him to tell him she was now head of recruiting for a ballet school in Philadelphia. Pretty impressive stuff. She’d obviously turned the lemons he’d squeezed over her head into lemonade.

But she didn’t stop there. She went on to tell him how hurtful he’d been and how damaging his lack of support had been to her life at that point. I found myself asking the TV screen (yes, I knew it wouldn’t answer), “Why bother?” This guy won’t give a damn and will probably just get defensive, which is, in fact, exactly what he did.

This got me thinking. I’ve been on the receiving end of what I consider hurtful and unsupportive behavior, but I probably wouldn’t have called the guy in her situation, and if I had, I would have just told him about my career success. Full stop.

Why? First off, because I wouldn’t really care what he thought. People who aren’t supportive demonstrate one thing: They don’t care about you. So why should you care about them? More to the point, if they didn’t recognize your talent or character in the first place, spelling it out for them isn’t going to change that. Why waste your breath?

Owning your success

Most often, we think of revenge as something that creates a negative feeling in someone else. We’re trying to control their reaction, often because they’ve made US feel out of control. But no matter how much we may want to, or feel justified in attempting to, controlling someone else’s feelings is a losing proposition. Plus, more importantly, it just distracts you from doing the only thing that will heal you: continuing to succeed.

And, selfishly, it’s not about the assholes who discouraged you, it’s about how you proved them wrong – but not to them, to yourself.

By succeeding, you’ve rendered them irrelevant to your life. You’ve silenced that critical voice of theirs that’s been echoing in your head. You don’t NEED to try to make them regret their judgments or feel bad about their behavior because their judgments no longer matter. Bringing them back into the equation just makes them matter again when they don’t need to, and if they were so bad the first time, what makes you think they’ll be any better now?

You might think it will give you closure, but it’s far more likely to just dredge up the same feelings of inadequacy they planted in you to begin with. Then, if they don’t apologize (which they probably won’t), you’ll feel just as unheard as you did back then. Isn’t it better to associate with people who ARE supportive of you and celebrate your success with them?

Success in itself isn’t just the best revenge; it’s the only kind that’s worthwhile. It doesn’t depend on anyone else but you, and that’s amazingly empowering. You realize you don’t need them, and you never did. You can scrape them off the bottom of your shoe and go on to bigger and better things than they could ever have imagined – the things YOU were imagining before they tricked you into believing you couldn’t do it.

In that same show, the ballet instructor portrayed by Susan Kelechi Watson winds up being incredibly supportive of one of her own students. She tells the girl, who has just fallen, that she has her unconditional support. But she also tells the girl and the rest of her students something even more important: She tells them to look in the mirror and say, “I can, and I will.”

She empowers them.

That’s the perfect message. The person in the mirror is the only one who matters. Your achievements are yours, so own them! Regardless of what anyone told you, you could and you did succeed. And you’re going to keep right on succeeding on your own terms until the naysayers no longer mean anything to you. It will be as though they never even existed.

That is the perfect revenge.

Stephen H. Provost is the author of more than 40 books, all of which are available on Amazon.