Four weeks ago, I wrote about the Four Horsemen of Career Doldrums: Obligation, Inertia, Fear of Change, and Shortsightedness. Four forces that keep capable people stuck. Four horsemen, four posts.
It was a clever conceit — but there is a Fifth Horseman. And it is the worst of the five.
I left it out. Intentionally. Because this Horseman does not work like the others. The first four keep you stuck. This one puts spokes in your tires while you’re riding.
Bitterness.
This Horseman has two flavors. Envy, or by another name, the LinkedIn effect. Regret: why didn’t I make better choices?
You know the feeling. You are having a perfectly fine Tuesday afternoon. Then you open your LinkedIn feed, and a former classmate just made partner. Someone 10 years your junior just raised a round. Someone (you see as) less capable than you is “thrilled to announce” a new role.
Then you ask yourself: why not me? And your fine Tuesday curdles.
Here is the lie bitterness tells: that this is zero-sum. That their promotion is somehow your demotion. That someone else’s greener grass came out of your yard. That your past missteps have undermined what could have been.
None of that is true. There is no scoreboard where their points come off your total. But bitterness keeps score anyway, and it always has you losing.
I am not above this. I have caught myself doomscrolling LinkedIn on my phone more times than I would like to admit. It would send me down a path of second-guessing my past decisions: what did I do wrong? Doing so has never once made me better at my job — or happier in my life.
Not once.
I worked with a client who was years into a demanding career she was very good at and quietly done with. Bright. Accomplished. Stuck. When we dug into why she felt stuck, she landed somewhere she did not expect. She said her whole sense of success was pinned to outcomes and external factors, and to what she thought others thought of her: things she could not actually control.
“Maybe I need a different definition of success,” she told me. Maybe the problem was not that she was failing. It was that she was measuring with someone else’s ruler.
That’s the crux.
Bitterness only works if you let the world define success for you. The titles, the raises, the announcements — someone else’s yardstick, laid over your one life. And by that measure there will always, always be someone ahead of you. That is not pessimism. That is just math.
The only way off that scoreboard is to build your own. To define success on your own terms, in your own words, against the life you actually want and not the one performing well in your feed.
My own business card says “Founder and Father,” in that order. Success for me starts with whether I was patient today, with my kids, my clients, and my friends. It will not show up in my bank account. That is sort of the point.
You cannot out-earn bitterness. You cannot out-achieve it. You can only stop playing its game.
So: whose definition of success have you been using? And what would it look like to write your own?
I would like to hear from you in the comments.
#careerdoldrums #bitterness #careercoaching #makeworkwork #careercalibration