Nice Ride, Nice Stache.
How Fox McCloud and Mario showed us that letting someone else shine doesn't dim your own light
I felt myself wince as I sat between my boys in the movie theater.
We were watching the latest Super Mario Galaxy movie the kids had been dying to watch for months. My inner 10 year old beaming eager to watch a few of my favorite childhood characters spring to life on the big screen.
When Fox McCloud jumped onto the scene, my inner childhood wonder was doing barrel rolls. A large chunk of my childhood was spent playing Star Fox on Super Nintendo.
So when the time came for Mario to meet Star Fox, I braced for the moment they teased. Mario becoming envious of how cool Star Fox is. He would be worried that the Princess would like the fox more than the plumber. It would make Mario act with jealous immaturity. And surely the super cool fox would do everything he could to make Mario feel ever smaller.
Fortunately, the movie threw a curveball.
”Nice ride.”
”Nice stache.”
No jealousy. No rivalry. Just game recognizing game.
Why envy comes naturally
Envy is such an easy emotion to fall into. We’re wired for comparison. For most of human history, our standing within the group determined the likelihood of our survival.
We compare ourselves to others constantly,
often subconsciously,
not even voluntarily,
it’s our default setting,
baked into our operating system.
We have a scarcity mindset when it comes to life. It’s like we somehow believe there’s only a certain amount of good things that can happen in the world. And, if someone else has it, there might not be enough leftover for me.
We can all be awesome
Somewhere along the way, we’ve come to believe that I have to make you feel small if I want to feel big. Or that if I let you feel big, it will somehow make me shrink to be smaller. But life isn’t a zero sum game. I can know I'm enough without needing to make someone else feel small to prove it.
I haven’t always lived like this. I’ve spent most of my years comparing myself to others and wondering why I didn’t seem to measure up. But I’ve made a conscious decision as I’ve gotten older to start celebrating the people in my life. To say at Birthdays what we typically wait to say at funerals. To say the kind thing of someone when I think it instead of being paralyzed by making myself look stupid in the process.
The smart people call this having an abundance mindset. It’s the principle that success isn’t a fixed pie where someone else’s slice means less for me. The magic of living with this mindset is that I can celebrate the awesome in others freely. The world doesn’t feel smaller when I do that, it feels bigger. There’s room for all of us to be great.
Mario and Fox let each other be great. And somehow, neither of them got smaller for it. Here’s hoping my boys learn this lesson a lot earlier than their dad did.