The Best Revenge? Hint: It Isn't Success

"The best revenge is success".…How many times have you heard this? Maybe you've never heard it personally said to you before, but chances are you're familiar with some version of this idea.

Kate here, and having been in the entertainment business my entire life, this is something I've heard a million times. Whether someone was trying to give me advice after a bad breakup or a big business deal that didn't work out, it seemed like people always responded with some version of, "Oh, don't worry - the best revenge is success! Just go out and become super successful and they'll regret not treating you better or working out this deal."

Today I wanna share why I think this is the worst success advice you could ever give (or take).

Now, I can understand the philosophy behind this. it's always tempting when someone hurts us or ghosts us to immediately have the knee jerk reaction of "i'll show them!" but today I wanna talk about why this whole 'success as revenge' idea has never really worked for me and why I think it misses the mark.

I'm going to also start by saying that this is just what works for me - everyone has different things that motivate them, so you can take my take on all of this with a grain of salt. My husband, for example, is the type of person who gets amped up when someone doubts his ability to do something, and it motivates him to charge toward it and make it happen (possibly because he was a pro athlete...seems like something you'd maybe have to cultivate in that world). He always says that his drive isn’t to prove the doubters wrong, but it's to honor and prove the people who support him and believe in him right. I love this approach, and I actually think it would be a really cool subject for another post sometime.

Personally though, I tend to err on the side of feeling like garbage about myself when someone says I can't do something, and it certainly doesn’t motivate me. So that's the perspective I'm coming from here.

So with that said, here are the two main reasons I think this 'success is the best revenge' thing is bullsh*t:

Reason #1: The definition of "success" that people are using when they use this phrase is all wrong.

Look - I'm not going to pretend like landing your dream job and making millions of dollars after some idiot broke your heart wouldn't feel good - it definitely would! There's no doubt that we all love the thought of proving someone who underestimated us wrong. And I'm in no way saying that we shouldn't celebrate our wins and be insanely proud of ourselves for the things we accomplish and the dreams we make happen, because we should.

I AM saying though that I think if you go after something - a job, a title, a place on the billboard charts or a specific salary - with the main goal of making the person or people who hurt you 'jealous' and getting 'revenge' to 'show' them and prove a point - you're not really going for that job or title or salary or “success” for the right reasons. This person or group of people who hurt you are still controlling and driving your decisions and are therefore also driving your validation.

Seeking validation is something I know a whollllle lot about. As a professional singer who writes her own songs, i've basically been putting my diary out into the world for people to read and listen to for as long as I can remember. We all fall into the trap of seeking validation in some way, shape or form, but it can be very easy to confuse validation from other people as ‘success.’ When we chase that validation, we’re also chasing someone else’s definition of success without ever bothering to write our own.

It can be very easy to judge my own self-worth based on how much other people listen to my music or like it (and social media with its "likes" and "followers" has certainly not helped), and I think we all do this to some degree in life. What I realized was that if I was going after my goals because I wanted to prove someone wrong who didn’t treat me well, I was still letting that person define success for me and control whether or not I felt validated about myself.

As soon as I let go of 'success' having to mean what everybody else thinks it means and started defining 'success' for myself based on my values and what's important to me everything shifted.

Reason #2: I personally believe that doing anything with 'revenge' as the endgame is a huge waste of time and energy.

The word itself just evokes negative feelings and personally drains me of energy that I firmly believe could be better spent building a healthy and intentional life, career and mindset. I want to be clear that when I say revenge is a waste of time I'm not talking about justice. There's a big difference between those two things and obviously, if someone or a group of people have hurt you or wronged you in a particular way it's definitely justified to hold them accountable.

I think what I'm getting at is that revenge in and of itself can be a very toxic driving force for the decisions you make in your life. And it's ultimately not fulfilling. As a songwriter, I have the thesaurus website bookmarked because I use it a lot when writing, and out of curiosity I typed in "revenge" just now as I'm writing this. The antonyms, or opposites, that thesaurus dot com lists for "revenge" are literally "forgiveness" and "sympathy."

As someone who has always struggled with a term like 'forgiveness' due to its heavy association with certain rigid religious beliefs that don't align with my personal spirituality, I have admittedly often blown forgiveness off as a general concept. It's definitely not as sexy as revenge, or as fun. And forgiveness doesn't typically make for a great superhero movie plot the way revenge does.

But Jen Sincero frames the concept of forgiveness so perfectly in her You Are A Badass Book (which is one of our 7 favorite self-help books for dreamers) when she says, "Forgiveness is all about taking care of you, not the person you need to forgive. It's about putting your desire to feel good before your desire to be right."

Forgiveness and sympathy toward people you don't like who have hurt you strangely frees you in a way that getting revenge and 'showing' them never really does. It doesn't mean you now have to like these people, ever see them again or stop acknowledging that what they did sucked, but it does mean you're free of the weight of all that garbage.

So ultimately what I'm saying is that for me, success can indeed be the best "revenge," but it has to be MY definition of success and the 'revenge' part can't be the driving force behind why I'm pursuing that success. I want to be going after the things that are most important to me in my life and not what everybody else (especially the people I don't like or who treated me wrong) thinks success should look like for me.

It reminds me of a quote from Robert Quillen that I love so much - “Too many people spend money they haven’t earned to buy things they don’t want to impress people they don’t like.” I would say that people also spend time they don't have to waste pursuing a version of success they don't actually want to impress or 'show' people they don't like. I have without a doubt been guilty of this.

I remember working with an acting coach who used this 'the best revenge is success' phrase a lot, and it used to give me this crazy anxiety that if I didn't attain massive success as an actress it somehow meant that I hadn't proven myself or 'gotten revenge' in a way that would free me from the bad experiences I'd had with certain people in my acting career.

When I really stepped back and asked myself what I wanted in life, I realized that pursuing 'massive success' as an actress at all costs to 'get back at' this person or group of people was the dumbest possible thing I could do. I decided that if I was going to audition, it was going to be for something that inspires me and lights me up, not for any and everything that I think will skyrocket my career in the quickest way possible in order to prove something to people I don't like or respect. Waste. Of. Time.

I think the best possible way we can move on from something painful is to acknowledge the pain, work through it in whatever healthy way we need to, then turn the damn page and focus on going after the things that light us up in life. Just for ourselves, not for anyone else, and certainly not to 'show' or get revenge on anyone else.

What are your thoughts on this idea of success as the best revenge??