Success Secret #1: Be a Hater — or Be Greater
By Tom Kagy | 31 Jul, 2025

Resist the easy lure of false narratives and emerge a winner in the game of life.

It's a sad fact of life that success in others breeds envy and insecurity, which in turn inspires false narratives projected onto the successful.  Those false narratives are deadly — not for the successful, who mostly have learned to take them in stride and relegate them to a lower plane of consciousness — but for the haters/projectors who become the primary victims of their own false narratives.

Avoiding the easy temptation of envy-driven projection is a vital lesson of life as the mindset that separates winners from losers.  Even the Bible (which I read not as religious text but as fascinating accounts of a different era of civilization) names envy as one of the seven deadly sins for good reason.

Our society creates yardsticks with which to measure success starting from our earliest school years.  Typically it begins with grades, talent in art and sports, standing in key activities, attractiveness as measured by boyfriends or girlfriends.  

At each stage kids learn the art of creating false narratives that either excuse their own lack of success or dismiss the successful as being actually losers who embody the characteristics the projectors most scorn in themselves.  Both types of narratives are just excuses, deadly excuses, as we will discuss a bit later.  If someone gets top grades, the false narrative portrays him as a bore, a nerd, a dork.  If someone wins high office, she's an asskisser, a witch, a slut.  If someone lands a great girlfriend, he's a weasel, a sleaze, a fairy.

This sad aspect of life had never entered my consciousness until the summer following eighth grade when a friend told me what other kids had been saying about me.  I was, first, bewildered that people actually spent time discussing me at all.  I had been so busy with being the school's top student, senior patrol leader of our Boy Scout troop, editor in chief of the school newspaper, president of the Travel and Culture Club, and novice boyfriend to a blue-eyed cutie with blonde curls to have the bandwidth to notice what others were saying about me.

Second, I was deeply shaken that people would distort reality and make up malicious nonsense.  The need to do that was alien to me.  In my own little narrowly focused world my only concern had always been achieving whatever goals I had set.  The consciousness that a malicious green-monster pervaded all of life was shocking, disturbing.  Not to be overly dramatic, but at that age hateful envy seemed to me evil incarnate.  

The awareness of that evil became something of a burden as I continued pursuing goals in high school, college, law school and my professional and entrepreneurial careers.  By then I no longer needed anyone to tell me what others were saying as I was now seeing clearly the anatomy of society, like one of those plexiglass models that let you see organs, bones, blood vessels, muscles.  I came to understand that in the grand scheme of life there were those who worked toward success and those who excused themselves from even making the effort by concocting false narratives which, I have come to see, are generally just projections onto others of their own insecurities.

Over time I became desensitized to that undercurrent of malice and resentment from those who felt diminished by my achievements and felt the need to excuse themselves with false narratives.  But in the beginning it was difficult for me to escape my own resentment toward the projectors and their destructive emotional jiujitsu.  

What helped me achieve empathy toward the unfortunates who project their insecurity onto others was a conversation at a BYOB party at the apartment of a classmate from American literature.  Another male classmate, who had been consistently antagonistic toward me, confessed drunkenly the reason for his hostility.  

"You have a big future ahead of you," he said, raising his bottle in a mock toast.  "Your're smart.  The girls are always after you.  But me, when this year is over, I'm going back to my hometown to work at my father's maintenance company."  When I began to express my sympathy, he quickly raised a hand to stop me.  "Hey, life ain't fair.  I just wanted you to feel some of that unfairness."  He finished with a big drunken laugh.

I don't remember what, if anything, I said in response to my classmate's confession.  But if I were to find myself back at that college party with him, I would tell him, "Yes, life sure seems unfair at times, but in the long run it's mostly what you make of it.  So make something of your own instead of hating what others have."

I may have continued by pointing out that instead of projecting your insecurities onto others, it's better to project into ourselves the qualities of the successful people we secretly admire.  The practice of projecting our insecurities as though they're some immutable part of ourselves is deadly because it blocks from our own minds precisely the qualities that make life fruitful.  Projecting your own insecurities as false narratives aimed at others preserves your insecurities in your own mind the way insects get preserved in amber — for all time.

Over the years I've come to understand and even empathize with the sense of futility and confusion that keeps projectors from even trying to achieve a full and meaningful life.  Such people are deserving of some of our pity but certainly not much of our attention.