jealousy

Kristine Kathryn Rusch on surviving jealousy - not romantic, but jealousy of other's success at work. One of the examples she gives of someone being jealous:

[A] woman came up to me after a panel [at a con] and screamed at me for ten minutes, calling me every single name in the book. [...S]he believed she was a better writer than I was, and she deserved “fame” more than I did.

Finally one of the convention security people pulled her out of the room. My other panelists were shaken. I was surprised that the screaming had nothing to do with my editorship (as it had other times, mostly because I rejected someone’s story), but with my writing.

I had never met this woman before, although I’ve seen her since.

She also talks a bit about how she has been able to turn the beginnings of her own jealousy of another's success into inspiration:

When I was twenty and still in college, I met a man who wrote part-time for the same organization I wrote for. He was also a nonfiction freelancer. He paid for his apartment, his food, his car, and his clothing out of his nonfiction income. I saw his product at work. He had a great voice and a lot of talent, but he couldn’t spell his own name and his manuscripts were almost unreadably sloppy.

I figured if he could succeed in the cutthroat nonfiction world with those messy manuscripts, then I could with my clean manuscripts. I wasn’t the wordsmith he was, but I was more professional.

My analysis of his work got me started. I wrote for some of the same places he did, and began to wonder how he funded his lifestyle. I wasn’t getting paid enough per article to pay for my apartment and my expenses. Eventually, I moved to larger and larger publications, publications that paid me a month’s worth of expenses per article. It wasn’t until later that I found out that he had supplemented his income writing term papers for students, and (ahem) dealing cocaine. (It was 1980, after all.)

I didn’t take the negative view—that you can never make a living at writing; that you need to deal drugs to make any money at all. Instead, I saw that he was succeeding as a freelancer, getting work published even when he wasn’t trying hard. And that inspired me even more.

Because I hadn’t been trying at all.

I note that Kris' reaction wasn't to hate her coworker, or want to destroy him. Instead she decided to try to improve on how he was doing things, and to work harder.

(I do like that she also found out that his life wasn't fully funded by his writing. Because sometimes you really don't know everything.)