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Originally Posted by horn
and i'm guessing it didn't increase the means by which you could achieve these ends? i.e. it increased your personal expectations but not your means to attain them. this is a recipe for low self-esteem.
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I wouldn't use the word expectations as I rarely "expect" anything. It did increase my desire to do well though, which is in turn linked to my own personal will-power. For many things your own personal will-power will be the number one means you have to get what you want.
If I want to earn more money because my friend is earning more than me than I could go and get a second job, or I could put in more hours and look for a promotion, etc. In fact, I can't think of many things that I ever seriously could say I "want" which wasn't at least partially under my control. Sure, if I want to be the most beautiful boy in the world then day-dreaming then wanting it more is unlikely to have much of an effect. But then I am sensible enough not to dwell on these things, if they even occur to me.
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which is why it's a good thing to hang around with people of lesser or at least similar success to you.
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Only if you're not planning on doing anything about it. If you want to do nothing with your life, then I would certainly recommend those with low levels of achievement. If however, you're the sort of person who would respond to a challenge then you should try to surround yourselves with people who will inspire such a challenge. Of course, there will be people who are better than you at a particular field (and always will be) but respecting a diverse level of intellectual fields is an important lesson to learn.
There are undoubtedly people with high self-esteem who maintain this by being a big fish in a small pond and continuously outshining their peers, but I'm not sure I'd like to be one of those people. Most of the people who have (imho) justified levels of high self-esteem surround themselves with other talented people who inevitably surpass them in certain areas.
Of those people I've encountered who did have real losers for friends I don't think any of them were particularly happy or had a particularly good self-image.