Today I just got rejected by someone. And it hurt.
My first reaction to that rejection was anger. I started thinking about why this person would not give it to me when it’s a really small thing and we were family. Then as the anger sunk down and I reflected upon myself I realised that the real problem… was me.
If I had asked a favour from a man on the street and got rejected, I wouldn’t have felt any pain nor anger. I would have just nodded in expectation and moved on. The only difference with this other person is that he’s family and that I expected him to do it for me.
Therein lies my fucking problem: Entitlement.
Here is the problem with having a sense of entitlement:
If I dig deep into my sense of entitlement, this is how I would put it in words.
I feel like people are meant to treat me a certain way because they are _____ to me or because I have done ______ for them.
The list for this goes on throughout my life. I’ve felt entitled that someone should be a good friend to me because I think I was a good friend to that person. I’ve felt entitled that a colleague should be loyal to me because I was a good boss or manager to him or her. I’ve felt entitled to the way my wife should treat me because I am a good husband to her.
The problem with that is that it puts UNREALISTIC expectations on everyone else. Why unrealistic? Because I am not the universe in which other people happen to orbit. I’m not even a star in the universe. I’m just a speck of cells on a planet that is on one of those stars.
So when I have these kind of expectations of other people, I:
1) Get hurt when they don’t respond the way I want them to respond.
2) Lose the opportunity to change because feeling entitled also means that when I don’t get what I want, it’s not because of me but it’s because of this someone else that wasn’t acting properly.
Instead here’s what I should be telling myself:
Yo Tim,
NOBODY… and I mean NOBODY owes you SHIT. Not your parents, not your wife, not your kids, definitely not your friends, or your colleagues or your business partners or even the waitress at the restaurant taking your order for a long black. NOBODY.
Why does nobody owe you shit? Because everyone else has got their own shit to look out for and your shit ain’t important to them. So nothing is yours unless you get it yourself.
Oh and fuck you Tim!
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space