Everything has two sides — Advantage and Disadvantage of having a super good family background
A team member decided to leave this week. She has been a very good team member, delivering quality work and learning fast with very positive attitude. We have high expectations for her and invested quite a bit of time coaching her. We were also discussing about her promotion.
Her departure surely saddens us.
While discussing her next step, I got to know that her family is super powerful and thus super rich and she surely enjoys the privileges commoners like me could barely imagine.
- She joined this company largely because her father was classmates with the CEO, so no interview was conducted.
- She stays alone and rents a 200+ square meter flat in the center of the city, because it is close to the office, and she has a full-time helper, which costs roughly 10 times her current salary.
- She probably enjoys many other privileges beyond my imagination
- And her next step was of course also arranged by her family. The new job is in a different city with great privileges and work-life balance. Her family thinks that it is best for her. She largely agrees. However, it is not totally unnoticeable that she also feels a bit pity giving up what she has come to in this position (It could be that she was just trying to make me feel better.)
To be honest, when I got to know all this, I felt a bit wired. I could not really describe. Maybe I was envious or even jealous, maybe I was a bit irritated. She had everything I was fighting so hard for and so much more, simply because she came from a good family.
The feelings did not affect me much, because I knew I had no choice but keep going if I want to get where I want to go. However, what really relieved me totally from the feelings was what my mentor told me.
My mentor explained to me that her past experience was not all that smooth and her future experience won’t be either as she has different problems to deal with. As a closing, my mentor told me that:
- The world is largely fair to everybody
- When you feel envious or jealous, always realize that there is probably another side that you do not see
It is true that she can avoid tons of decision-making, such as deciding between car models and prices. She could buy pretty much everything without looking at the price tag, be it clothes, bags, electrical devices, first-class tickets, best trainers, houses etc etc.
It is also true that she is exposed to a different set of choices that she needs to take, some of which might have bigger impact on one’s happiness than what we, commoners, usually worry about.
Therefore, live our own lives and be the best of ourselves.
