I have a Mel Robbins problem.
Many of you might not know who she is. She’s my speaker idol. I admire her. I study her. I have spent more time than I care to admit watching how she works a room, how she packages an idea, how she has built the kind of reach that most of us spend our entire careers chasing. She didn’t lead an organization. She isn’t an academic. She has built an empire anyway. Without any of the things we’re told you need to build one.
And yet.
She has the audience. She has the cultural footprint. And when I’m being honest with myself, I want what she has built. Not to be her — I don’t want to be her. I want to close the gap between where I am and where she is. That’s a different and more honest thing to admit.
A while back, a story broke suggesting Mel had plagiarized her “Let Them” theory from a poet. And for a moment — just a flash of a moment — I felt something lift. A quiet, private satisfaction that I am not proud of. There’s a word for that feeling. Schadenfreude. The pleasure you take in someone else’s misfortune.
Then I caught myself. Because “Let Them” isn’t original to anyone. The central idea is that we cannot control others’ negative behavior and should instead focus on ourselves. It’s stoicism. It’s been written about for thousands of years by highly credentialed people. Mel didn’t steal anything. And even if the story had been true, what exactly was I hoping for? That she’d be exposed as a fraud so I could stop measuring myself against her? That the gap would just disappear because she didn’t deserve to be on the other side of it?
That’s what I was doing. Looking for a reason to dismiss her so I could feel like enough without doing the work of closing the distance. This was odd, because I genuinely adore her.
I sat with that for a while. The self-disgust that followed the schadenfreude was worse than the schadenfreude itself. Because I knew better. And I felt it anyway.
That’s a me problem.
And I suspect you have one too.
You’re mad at the person who got the promotion. You’ve built a whole case for why it wasn’t deserved — the politics, the favoritism, the fact that they were better at performing competence than actually possessing it. Maybe some of that is even true. But underneath the case you’ve constructed is something simpler and harder to say out loud. You wanted it. You worked for it. You watched someone else get it. And that hurt in a way that’s easier to convert into contempt than to just sit with.
You scroll past the happy couple on Instagram and feel something you’d never call envy. You call it skepticism. You’ve seen enough to know that what people post isn’t what’s real, that curated joy is a performance, that nobody’s relationship actually looks like that. That’s not cynicism talking. That’s armor. You put it on so fast you don’t even notice you’re doing it.
You make fun of the person who gets up before the sun. Who tracks their food. Who orders the black coffee while you’re adding a third pump of vanilla and a cloud of whipped cream. You call them obsessed. Rigid. An almond mom. You say it with an eye roll and just enough humor that it lands as a joke instead of what it actually is. But late at night, in the quiet, you know the truth. You want the discipline. You want to be the person who has built that kind of consistency and commitment. It’s easier to make it ridiculous than to admit you haven’t built it yourself.
And then there are the people who put themselves out there. Fully. Publicly. Without apology. You watch them and something tightens. You call it performative. You say they’re doing it for attention. Maybe. But they showed up in a way you haven’t. And somewhere underneath the commentary is the quieter truth — it’s not that you think less of them. It’s that you think less of yourself for not doing the same.
So you judge first.
Here’s what I’ve learned about contempt. It almost never means what it pretends to mean.
Contempt feels like a verdict. It feels like you’ve assessed someone, found them lacking, and moved on with your dignity intact. But contempt directed at someone who is doing the thing you want to do isn’t a verdict. It’s a mirror. It’s the gap between where you are and where you actually want to go, wearing the face of someone who got there first.
I am someone’s Mel Robbins. So are you. Right now, somewhere, someone is watching what you’ve built and feeling that same tightening in their chest. And instead of using it as fuel, they’re cataloging your deficits. Telling themselves you got lucky, that it isn’t deserved, waiting quietly for the story to break.
We are all both sides of this.
The next time you feel contempt rise up — before you reach for the eye roll, before you build the case, before you make the joke — pause. Get curious. Ask yourself what it’s pointing at. Because contempt dressed up as judgment is almost always just envy that hasn’t introduced itself yet.
And envy, if you’re willing to be honest with yourself, is just a compass.
It knows exactly where you want to go.
