You Can’t Envy Someone’s Success Without Recognizing Their Suffering
When you see someone standing at the top of the mountain - at the pinnacle of success - you automatically ignore the treacherous path they took to get there. Why? Because you can’t see it! All you see is the victory. And what’s hidden are the thousands of failures they suffered along the way.
That’s why envy and jealousy are such useless emotions. It’s a desperate feeling of “I want that” without even knowing what it is you’re actually looking at. You can’t envy someone’s success without recognizing the suffering (past and present) it took the person to get it.
When You See Someone At The Top, You Forget They Were Ever At The Bottom.
When someone “hits” - gets rich, builds a successful business, becomes famous, goes viral permanently - you forget that for most of their lives, this person was at the bottom trying to climb up.
One reason you forget this so quickly is because of recency bias. Humans tend to give more weight to new information, and forget older info that may have been valid for longer. So when you see someone achieve something great, you assume they’ve been there for longer than they have.
The other reason you forget that someone wasn’t always successful is an asymmetry between what you can see (the success) and what you don’t see (the failures). The success is obvious to you - the outside observer - but you don’t see the many failures they suffered along the way.
So when you see someone get their break, consider what it took them to get there. Don’t be envious. Be curious about the sacrifices they made, and ask yourself if you’re willing to do the same.
PS. If you want a trick to overcome jealousy forever, check out the article I wrote here.
Many Rich People are Miserable.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the skill sets it takes to get rich (and then stay rich), are very different than the skillset to be happy.
Many rich people are miserable. They’ve built these pathways in their brain that allow them to withstand tremendous amounts of stress, uncertainty, and risk. But then once they “win,” those pathways continue to fire. There’s no easy way to turn them off.
Here’s Naval talking about this in The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant:
“I know many very wealthy people who are unhappy. Most of the time, the person you have to become to make money is a high-anxiety, high-stress, hard-working, competitive person. When you have done that for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years, and you suddenly make money, you can’t turn it off. You’ve trained yourself to be a high-anxiety person. Then, you have to learn how to be happy.”
Meditation is one way I know of to rewire the brain to overcome a runaway, anxious mind. I’ve been meditating daily for four years now, and it’s changed how my brain works. I’m calmer, happier, and still able to take on tremendous amounts of uncertainty. Try it.
It Takes A Decade To Become An Overnight Success.
“Overnight success” is a myth. Most people who seem to have skyrocketed to fame or fortune actually spent years, if not decades refining their craft outside the spotlight.
In the entertainment industry, I see this play out up close. One of my best friends wrote a movie that just recently became the #1 movie in the U.S. on Netflix. To anyone observing from the outside, it looks like literally overnight, he became a “known” writer with a #1 movie.
The truth is, he wrote the screenplay over a decade ago. It got made 5 years ago, was released in 2019, was mostly ignored for 4 years… and now, having switched platforms, is now BOOM #1 in the country. And he’s been writing movies solidly for over ten years.
There is no overnight success. There is only constant, slow improvement in your craft, playing iterated games over time, and surviving long enough in the game to eventually win BIG.
So start now.
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SOURCES
Jorgenson, Eric. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness. Magrathea Publishing. Kindle Edition.