Putting Your Friends On

When we talk about sharing opportunities (something we most times call giving updates) to friends and family about certain things that we feel could make their life better, there is a certain part of it that we don't talk about a lot.

_{photo by Megan Watson}

A couple of days ago, I read a tweet where someone was talking about a content creator who helped his friends become famous by constantly featuring them on his videos, and how that friend has surpassed him (the guy who was helping) in the amount of followers that they have. And although I don't agree with the message the guy who made that tweet was trying to pass (he basically was saying that sometimes its a bad idea to help your friends because they could end up getting better than you), I could relate to how the guy who helped his friend could be feeling, if what he's feeling happens to be jealousy.

I say I understand it because I've been in that position before, where someone I helped to get into something ended up becoming better at that thing than me. Luckily for me, I was able to deal with the jealousy that came with it before it grew into anything bigger, because if I had allowed it to breathe for even a second, I would have found myself in a position where I would no longer want to put my friends on to anything good ever again.

Sadly, not a lot of people knows how to handle this, and this is why I strongly advise that before you try helping anyone, you have to make sure that you're not the kind of person that would end up getting jealous when you see them progressing, because what that does at the end of the day is to ruin that friendship, and sometimes even something a lot more worse because, there's no telling to how far you will be able to go just bring that person down, so that you won't feel that jealousy anymore.

Funny enough, I think I'm about to find myself in the same situation, only that this time, I'm not the one getting jealous or being put on, I'm the cause of the jealousy. I don't know for sure but unless my barber is not the type to get jealous, he just might not like the fact that for the past couple of weeks, I've been getting my hair cut by his apprentice and not him.

And why it's funny to me is because for the longest time, he has been urging me to give his apprentice a chance to cut my hair and I've always refused. Until the day he traveled and it was just her at the shop, so I decided to give it a shot and my mind was blown away by how good she was...ever since that day, I've been asking her to cut my hair.

Now, if he's the jealous type, he might end up despising her even a little bit, if he realize that a lot of us prefer her cut to his, but if he's a good boss, he would be proud, because the only reason she's that good, is because he's a better teacher.