Who Am I Trying to Impress?

In my twenties and thirties I remember being very motivated by wanting to impress and/or outdo other people. I’ll show them, I thought to myself. I would achieve this or that, at which point those people would be forced to acknowledge they were wrong about me in one way or another.

Spite is decent motivation. The best revenge is a life well lived. For those that have wronged or disrespected you, nothing is sweeter than succeeding and rubbing it in their faces.

Except that this way of thinking is also ridiculous, immature, and ultimately hollow.

I started to realize this at some point, and made a list of the specific people I’d been working so hard to impress. Making the list was a kind of dredging of my subconscious, bringing that spite-ambition into the light of my conscious mind.

But once I completed the list, I laughed out loud at myself, at my own pettiness and the fragility of my ego. The power those people had over me was instantly diminished.

Russell was one of my first bosses. As a teenager, I worked for Russell as a cook and cashier at his food booths at various festivals and fairs. One time when we were driving to a site he asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. I told him I wanted to be a science fiction author, but was also interested in making electronic music. In addition, I wanted to share my philosophical and spiritual ideas with as many people as possible. I must have sounded all over the place, painfully idealistic and hopeful. I don’t think he laughed at me exactly, more like a dismissive chuckle. But I held it against him for a long time. I did eventually become a science fiction author. I’ve published hundreds of electronic music tracks. And I write this blog about metaprogramming and other topics. Does Russell know or care? I highly doubt it.

M was a college girlfriend. We both wanted to be writers. At one point I think we even made a bet about who would be published first. We broke up and didn’t speak for years. But eventually we became friends again. She’s a professional writer, working with business clients, and has published both memoir and nonfiction. She’s been nothing but supportive of my writing, and vice versa. All the competition dissolved decades ago. But some of it had still been lurking in my subconscious, from our college days when we both had a lot to prove.

At UC Davis I worked at a pizza parlor with a kid named Josh. He made hip-hop mix tapes on his four track. I was just getting into music myself, making bad synth music with my MacPlus and Roland D-70. Josh and I were both DJs at KDVS, the local college station. Eventually my music improved and I signed a house track to a San Francisco music label. I was really proud of myself. But Josh’s music career completely blew up. Josh Davis, aka DJ Shadow, went on to become a superstar. I was happy for him, but also envious. I always wanted to impress him, since we had similar beginnings.

There are a few other people on the list. Some of them I wanted to impress for reasons that are too embarrassing to publicly confess. But making that list helped exorcise some of those toxic emotions. Ultimately I realized that the people I care most about are already sufficiently impressed by me. And the others, like Russell and DJ Shadow, don’t think about me at all. And I’m okay with that.

Who’s on your spite-motivation list, and why?