Wishing for someone else to fail is, Innocent suggests, a small and immature impulse — and a self-defeating one. We live tangled together: the phone you’re reading this on, the clothes you’re wearing, the food you ate, almost none of it made by you. Other people’s success is quietly holding up your day.

So he points the energy elsewhere. “I do not wish for anyone’s downfall. The world needs successful people. I just think of ways to add more value to myself, and wish that my adversaries would do the same.”

Even rivals, in this light, are better to you succeeding than failing. Rather than pull anyone down, make yourself — and, by extension, the world around you — more valuable.