Confelicity: Choosing Joy in Other People's Wins

A word you didn't know you needed

There's a word for the opposite of schadenfreude: confelicity.

Where schadenfreude is pleasure derived from another's misfortune, confelicity is joy derived from another's joy. Happiness in someone else's happiness. Delight in their success.

It's not a common word. Most people have never heard it. Which says something, I think, about what we've normalised.

The pattern I noticed

I spent years in enterprise environments. Big organisations with big budgets and big problems. I've got scar tissue from a lot of different projects in a lot of different places: difficult stakeholders, dysfunctional teams, political minefields. I navigated all of it. Delivered anyway. And somewhere along the way, I noticed a pattern in myself.

A colleague would get a plum job. My first thought wasn't "good for them." It was "why not me?"

A project would succeed. Instead of celebration, there was calculation. Who gets credit? How does this affect my position? What does this mean for the next reshuffle?

Someone would share good news (a win, a milestone, a breakthrough) and I'd feel... nothing. Or worse, a flicker of resentment.

I noticed it. That self-awareness is important. It means the pattern hasn't won. But toxic cultures are infectious. I'm not saying every enterprise is like this. But the pattern shows up often enough that you start to recognise it. They reshape how you think without you noticing. Over time... slowly.

How bad culture kills confelicity

This zero-sum thinking doesn't come from nowhere. It's trained into you by:

1. Stack ranking and forced curves. When only 10% can be "exceeds expectations," your colleague's success literally costs you. Their great review means yours looks worse by comparison.
2. Credit hoarding. When visibility matters more than outcomes, you learn to position yourself, not the work. Taking credit becomes survival. Sharing it becomes risky.
3. Punishment for failure, indifference to success. When mistakes get you hauled into meetings but wins get a Teams emoji, you learn to play defence. Risk-aversion beats ambition. Keeping your head down beats building something great.
4. Political promotion. When advancement comes from relationships with the right people rather than the quality of your work, you optimise for politics. Your colleagues become competitors, not collaborators.

It's beyond a joke, honestly. After enough years in this, you stop spending energy on confelicity. You're too busy spending it on political survival, on watching your back, on making sure you get credit for your work. The capacity is still there. You're just directing it elsewhere. And eventually, you forget what it felt like to use it.

The asymmetry that breaks people

There's a particular poison in some enterprise IT organisations that deserves its own section: you're not rewarded for success, but you're punished for failure.

Think about the last five years of your career. How many times were you celebrated for a successful deployment? A system that didn't go down? A migration that went smoothly? Now think about the failures. The outages. The bugs that made it to production. The projects that ran over.

Which list is longer in your memory? Which list is longer in your manager's memory? Which list shows up in your performance review?

The balance sheet doesn't reflect the wins. Successes are expected. That's what you're paid for, right? But failures are catalogued, remembered, held against teams and departments for years. "Remember when the rollout had issues for the users in 2019?" Yes, everyone remembers those 100 users. Nobody remembers the 12,000 users that were fine.

The unknowns outnumber the knowns

In IT, risks are often unknown. You're building complex systems with incomplete information. You're integrating with third-party services that change without notice. Dealing with crap vendor software. You're working with legacy code written by people who left years ago. Failure isn't a sign of incompetence. It's the price of doing business in a domain where the unknowns outnumber the knowns by a massive margin.

What actually matters is how you respond. How quickly you detect issues. How effectively you communicate during incidents. How you prevent recurrence. It's about how you get up after getting knocked down.

And here's what toxic cultures miss: this is how growth happens.

The individual who debugs a production incident at 2am learns more in those four hours than in four months of normal work. The team that runs a blameless post-mortem builds trust and shared understanding. The group that implements monitoring after an outage becomes more resilient than one that never failed. The division that treats incidents as learning opportunities builds institutional knowledge that compounds over years.

"Continuous improvement" and "lessons learned" are well understood. Everyone nods along. But they're treated as box-ticking exercises, something for the retro doc that nobody reads, right? There's always something more urgent. And fixing process doesn't get you promoted. So the lessons stay unlearned.

Failure, handled well, is the engine of growth. At every level: individual, team, group, division. The people and organisations that get good at responding to failure become genuinely excellent. Not despite the failures, but because of them.

The compounding they miss

And here's the tragedy that toxic cultures create: they don't just miss one learning opportunity. They miss the compounding.

Growth compounds. The lesson you learn from one incident makes you better at handling the next. The trust built in one blameless post-mortem makes the next conversation more honest. The monitoring you add after one outage catches the next problem earlier. Fix the gap that caused one outage, and you've prevented the next five.

When you punish failure instead of learning from it, you lose every lesson that would have built on it. Five years of punishing failure versus five years of learning from it. The gap isn't linear. It's exponential.

The learned helplessness

But risk-averse cultures don't see it that way. They see failure as something to be avoided at all costs. So people stop taking risks. They over-engineer. They delay. They say "no" by default. They protect themselves instead of building great things.

And the memory of failure lasts. One outage follows you for years. One bad project becomes your identity. The wins? Forgotten by next quarter. The failures? Brought up in every portfolio planning session for the next five years.

This asymmetry is corrosive. When success is invisible and failure is permanent, you learn to optimise for not-failing rather than succeeding. And it's not just you. The whole organisation learns this. It becomes the culture. Avoid risk. Hide problems. Protect yourself.

And you definitely don't celebrate others' successes. Because success doesn't count. Only failure counts. So why would you feel joy in something that doesn't matter?

What I remembered when I started building

I made a choice. After years of delivering in difficult environments (and I could have kept doing it), I took time to build my own things. Small tools. Products that solve problems I understand. Not as a side project. As my focus.

And something shifted. I started caring about users again.

Not "caring" in the corporate sense: the net promoter scores, the customer satisfaction metrics, the "we put the customer first" all-hands slides that everyone sits through and nobody believes. Actually caring. About individuals. Using things I made. Getting value from them.

The first time someone told me my tool saved them hours of tedious work, I felt something I hadn't felt in years. Pure, uncomplicated happiness that something I built made someone's day better.

That's confelicity. Joy in their joy.

The reorientation

In enterprise, we obsess over the building. The architecture. The process. The endless governance meetings. The sprint velocity. The technical elegance. We build things to impress other builders.

But users don't care about your architecture. They don't care about your governance process or your elegant solution. They don't care how clever you were. They care whether it works. That's it. And when it does, when you watch someone use your creation and their face lights up because it works, that's the feeling.

That's what got lost in enterprise. We were so focused on internal metrics, internal politics, internal recognition, that we forgot the point. The point is someone, somewhere, having a better day because of what you made.

Chase that feeling. Your team should too. Your whole organisation should.

Where I relearned it

I'm not saying solo work is the answer. I'm saying it's where I relearned this.

When you're building alone or in a small team, there's nowhere to hide from users. No product managers to abstract away the feedback. No customer success teams to filter the complaints. Just you and the people using your work.

This is terrifying and wonderful.

Terrifying because you feel every failure personally. Wonderful because you feel every success personally too.

When a user says "this is exactly what I needed," you made that. Not your team. Not your organisation. You. The feedback loop is direct and unmediated. It's raw.

And because there's no internal competition (no stack ranking, no credit hoarding, no political promotion), there's no reason not to feel confelicity. When someone else ships something great (a fellow builder, a colleague, even a competitor), it doesn't have to cost you anything. You can just... be happy for them. What a concept.

But here's the thing: this insight doesn't require staying solo forever. It travels with you. Back into enterprise. Into your next team. Wherever you go.

The practical part

This isn't just philosophy. Confelicity is practical. It's actually better for your work.

When you feel joy in users' success, you build better products. You're not optimising for metrics or stakeholder approval. You're optimising for that feeling, the one where someone's life gets a little easier because of what you made.

When you can celebrate others' wins, you build better relationships. Colleagues become collaborators, not competitors. Other teams become allies, not threats. You share knowledge freely. The community (whether that's indie makers, your department, or your whole organisation) lifts everyone.

When you're not playing zero-sum games, you have more energy. Political manoeuvring is exhausting. Genuine enthusiasm is energising. Same hours, different output.

Redirecting the energy

If you've been in toxic environments long enough, confelicity doesn't come back automatically. You've been spending that energy on survival. Now you need to redirect it.

Some things that helped me:

The unlearning

The hardest part is unlearning the zero-sum mindset. Years in enterprise taught me to operate as if resources are scarce, recognition is scarcer, and I need to compete for both. That served me well in those environments. I delivered, I survived, I advanced.

But that's not true everywhere. It's not true in indie making. It's not true in healthy teams. It's not even true in some large organisations.

The pie can grow. Your colleague's promotion doesn't prevent yours. Someone else's success doesn't diminish your own. Their joy can be your joy, if you let it.

Confelicity is the word for what that feels like. And if it's been a while since you felt it, that might be a sign. Not about you, about where you're working.

For leaders: you set the tone

If you're leading a team, this isn't just about you. You have the power to create environments where confelicity is possible, or where it gets crushed.

Celebrate wins publicly. When someone on your team succeeds, make it visible. Not a Teams emoji. Actual recognition. Say their name. Describe what they did. Let the team see you being genuinely happy about it.

Share credit actively. Don't just avoid taking credit. Push it outward. "This was Sarah's insight." "James caught this before it became a problem." Make it obvious that wins belong to the people who created them.

Respond to failure with curiosity, not blame. When things go wrong, your team is watching. If you punish failure, they learn to hide problems. If your first response is "huh, that's interesting, I didn't expect that" (genuine curiosity about what happened), they learn to surface issues early. The lessons come from the curiosity, not the other way around.

Model the flinch check. When a peer team succeeds, when a colleague gets promoted, let your team see you respond with genuine congratulations. They're learning from you what's acceptable. Show them confelicity is not just acceptable. It's expected.

The teams I've seen work best are the ones where people genuinely want each other to succeed. Where someone's win is celebrated, not calculated. Where the leader demonstrates, every day, that this is how we operate here.

You can't mandate that culture. You can only model it. Start with yourself. Your team will follow.

The invitation

If you recognise this pattern in yourself, you're not broken. You're adapted. You've learned to survive in a system that rewards political calculation over genuine collaboration. That's not weakness. That's rational response to irrational incentives.

But it doesn't have to be permanent. And you don't have to leave enterprise to fix it.

I'm taking time right now to build tools. It's not a side project. It's my focus. And when I go back to enterprise (and I might), I'll carry this with me. The patterns I didn't like haven't changed. But I have. I see them now. And seeing them means I can choose differently.

You can redirect that energy wherever you are. You can find pockets of confelicity even in difficult environments. You can build things, even inside organisations, where the feedback loop is direct and the joy is real.

Confelicity isn't naïve. It's not ignoring competition or pretending everyone succeeds equally. It's recognising that someone else's win doesn't have to be your loss. That their joy can add to yours, not subtract from it.

And if you're a leader, if you have any influence over how your team operates, you have a responsibility. Not just to find confelicity yourself, but to create the conditions where your team can find it too. Model it. Demonstrate it. Change the culture, starting with you.

Isn't that a better way to work? Surely it's a better way to lead.

I write about practical project management at reportinglines.com. If this piece resonated, I'd like to hear from you — find me on LinkedIn.