The announcement went out at four.
It is somebody you like,
and that makes it worse,
because you cannot even
have a clean opinion about it.
For about an hour
you will hold two beliefs at once.
That the decision was political.
And that you were never good enough
and everyone has always known.
Both feel like insight.
Neither is.
They are the two ways
your head has of getting you
through the first evening,
and if you act on either one
the following year is decided.
Act on the first
and you stop trying,
carefully, invisibly,
and call it realism.
Act on the second
and you shrink,
stop asking for anything,
and remove yourself from the next decision
before anyone else has to.
What is worth doing is slower
and considerably less satisfying.
Wait a week.
Then ask the person who decided
what the gap was,
once, plainly,
without any of the case for yourself
that you have been rehearsing.
If they cannot name a gap,
you have learned something real
about where you are.
If they can,
you have been handed
the thing people spend years
trying to guess.
And go and look properly
at what the other person did.
Not their talent.
Their work.
Usually you find something
you had decided was beneath you.
The dull coordination.
The project nobody wanted.
The relationship with the team
everyone else complains about.
They were not luckier than you.
They were visible in a place
you had chosen not to stand.
One more thing,
and it is the one people skip.
The envy is information.
Not about them, about you.
You now know exactly
what you want,
which is more than you knew
at lunchtime,
and far more than the people
who did not want it
and are being kind to you today.
Feel it for a week.
Then use it,
because it is fuel,
and it goes off.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
