Jealousy.

Professional jealousy is a real thing, and pretending it isn’t will not help you cope with it, ensure your happiness, or get you better deals. Failing to acknowledge and resolve it when you feel it will, however, tend to alienate the very colleagues whose acquaintance you should be cultivating, because if you stay in the industry those people are going to be working with you and around you for a very, very long time.

Making more enemies than you absolutely have to in a business that still runs on relationships is a pretty epic self-own.

Everybody’s career runs at a different speed. Moreover, you can’t control what speed your career happens at. (You can’t, in fact, control if it ever happens at all, but that’s a topic for a different column. There are things you can do to maximize your chances of it happening, and that’s a different column, still. Stay tuned.)

Your colleagues—your peers, the people in your writing group, the people in your MFA program or writing workshop, the writers you hang out with in that slack or discord—these people do not owe it to you to fail. You are not entitled to a better career than all of your friends.