Stop Letting People Take the Credit

What should we do when a nefarious ne'er-do-well exploits our kind and humble nature to take all the credit for themselves?


We tend to put others first and downplay our roles. Humbleness is treated as virtue.

Yet people take advantage of this fact every day. Even non-super villains manipulate this.

There’s credit snatchers, false humility peddlers, and gratitude vampires.

Credit Snatchers

Credit snatchers take what you do and somehow turn it into a big victory: sometimes not just for themselves. Sometimes your achievements are played up for the “team” or group or other entity. This is particularly annoying when “the entire department gets a win.” A VP gets promoted or something, and you’re just told to chill.

Humility Peddlers

That said, it’s easy to understand why misaligned incentives and selfishness lead to snatching credit from others. But peddling false humility is the worst because it’s right in your face, and it’s annoying as hell.

Humility peddlers are masters of false modesty. They’ll downplay their own achievements while subtly fishing for compliments or recognition.

You may have heard them say things like, “Oh, it was nothing, really,” when they know full well it was a significant accomplishment.

 By itself, that could be considered some harmless attention seeking, but this is often used to diminish the success of others or the team.

Gratitude Vampires

Gratitude vampires just suck the life out of every achievement to the point where you don’t even want to have one. They make your wins so insufferable you’d prefer to lose just to not deal with them.

They use “gratitude” to undermine your achievement, which can make you feel guilty about celebrating your wins.

The very worst gratitude vampire is the type who hoists credit onto you for things you didn’t want to do, or perhaps even makes you look incompetent. But how can you say anything when they’re “lifting you up”?

How to Deal With Absolute Nonsense

I am a cordial person who wants to be nice to others. Everyone deserves a baseline level of respect, until they prove otherwise. Of course, still be kind. You don’t have to be bitter to ensure people aren’t putting you down.

The real issue is that people consistently prove to you over and over again when they don’t deserve respect, and you keep letting them get away with it. You keep letting them trounce over your boundaries, or you never set them to begin with.

Stop betraying yourself. We’ve been humble enough of our lives to make up for probably ten lives of karmic balance.

What You Can Do

So let’s start with a simple boundary. If you’re going to take credit for this thing, I am not going to do this thing I was going out of my way to help you with. Remember, the people we work with are not necessarily our friends. In many ways, it is uncomfortable to set boundaries, but most of the time the people causing these problems aren’t your boss. They have no claim over your time to begin with.

If they are your boss, many suggest just quitting. But that doesn’t help pay the bills and oversimplifies your complex situation (maybe you otherwise like the job, maybe this is a recent change, maybe you can’t find another job, maybe there is some other important reason, or you think it will soon change).

In this case, stop taking on extras. When no one is respecting you or your time, you aren’t gonna be up for promotion anyway. And if “extras” are required, then start pulling away or do less in the other areas until you can get to the right spot. Take that extra time for self-care or find ways out of the situation.

And, of course, this all applies to personal relationships as well.

So, please, for your own sake—set one boundary this week. You can even start with a safer person who you know will be receptive. Some people are toxic, and they definitely don’t take well to boundary setting. It is very likely they won’t respect your boundary: however, this means you just follow through. If you don’t respect X, I will do Y. So stop doing the Y. 

However, I understand that there may be NO safe people. Let’s talk about it.

Nuance, or when to keep on keeping on

While I prefer direct, honest, transparent communication, toxic environments don’t always allow for a straightforward approach. Don’t put yourself in a bad situation. Sometimes you gotta finagle it.

Or worse: there may be no person to actually set the boundary with. Sometimes you can’t change the environment you are in immediately. If it’s that bad, focus on getting out or minimizing the surface area that you are exposed to.

I also admit that being assertive and overcoming a lot of these things is not simple or easy. Trust.

If you struggle with assertiveness or self-confidence, that makes it even more difficult to approach these situations. We let people walk over us, and perhaps the only time we can be fully assertive is when it comes to a boiling point. Sometime in the next week, I’ll share strategies for increasing your assertiveness in a more comfortable way.

Cutting the Cord

Perhaps a bit of an extreme example: at my first job out of college, I poured my entire life force into the work, logging far too many hours and taking on extra projects with the promise of a full-time offer. The offer finally came—6 months too late and at $20k less than promised. That was the day I handed in my resignation.

Remember, you are a human being and you deserve not to be treated like shit. You deserve to feel like you matter. At the very least, you are entitled to respect. And while I wish we could all be humble all the time, it can’t come at the expense of your sanity and career growth. We tell other people how to treat us by what we are willing to accept. We do not need to be accepting to people who literally use us as pawns and treat us as subhuman.

So it’s time to put yourself first. In the immortal words of Kanye West, “I’d rather be a dick than a swallower.”

Peace,

Lucas