• Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

The Money Habit

Your Path To Incredibly Early Retirement

  • Start Here
  • How Much Bloggers Make
  • Recommended Tools
  • Blog
    • Best Posts
    • Strategies and Blueprints
    • Invest Money
    • Make Money
    • Save Money
    • Pay Less Taxes
    • Early Retirement
    • Money Mindset
  • Contact
  • Search
  • Best Posts
  • Strategies and Blueprints
    • Money Mindset
  • Make Money
  • Save Money
  • Invest Money
  • Pay Less Taxes
  • Early Retirement
  • What It’s Like To Be Retired
  • Categories
    • Best Posts
    • Make Money
    • Featured
    • Invest Money
    • Money Mindset
    • Save Money

Money and Jealousy: Harnessing The Beast

16 Comments -- Reading Time: 8 Min

 

If you’ve ever felt jealousy creeping up on you  when hearing about someone’s amazing success – or compared it to your own life – don’t worry. You’re only human. Here’s how to harness that energy for productive use.

 

It’s raining today as I write this, which always puts me in a contemplative mood. That means it’s time to talk about one of the lesser-discussed aspects of the financial journey. Jealousy.

 

For the exactly seven people in this world who have never felt an ounce of jealousy in their life, this article is not for you. We appreciate your sunshine and rainbows and would like you to revisit next week to share your unbridled enthusiasm for others’ well-being. For literally every other person on the planet, settle in.

 

Jealousy: A Natural Product of Circumstance

 

We have talked in the past about how important it is to be getting constant exposure to new ideas. In fact, it’s the ideas you don’t know about that are costing you more from your financial future than all the mistakes that are currently on your radar combined. That means one of the most important things you can do to secure your financial well-being is to be sniffing out success stories: Ragingly successful people who retired at half your age. Or niche experts who can tell you about a technique that earned them thousands of dollars that you frankly missed out on for 20 years. It means joining communities that celebrate their knowledge of things you were ignorant of for years. You can start to see the problem here…

 

That information is fantastic for your future self. But it’s a constant beating for your pride.

 

Will you feel jealous? Heck yeah, you will! Who wouldn’t?

 

It’s not a good feeling. Many people try and avoid the whole mess by eliminating any inputs that could trigger their jealousy. They don’t want to hear any stories about people doing better than them. But that’s a sad reaction. It makes their lives smaller. It cuts them off from valuable knowledge that could better their circumstances.

 

So knowing that you are deliberately putting yourself in the path of these feelings (for the greater good), is there any way to mitigate the negative aspects of the jealousy beast?

 

Harnessing The Beast

 

    

       How Jealousy Feels  vs  What It’s Actually Like

 

You can absolutely make the beast work for you. Left to its own devices, it’ll happily trample all over your self-esteem and your happiness. You just need to give it a job, and it will direct its energy towards a more productive use.

 

When you hear about someone’s crazy success, your mind starts to generate a cloud of questions. Why not me? What privilege did they have that allows me to discount this story? Did I miss the memo? Am I a failure?

 

Literally none of these questions are helpful.

 

You can disarm them by taking control of the conversation in your brain. Your brain can only hold onto one thought at a time. Substitute these spontaneously-generated questions with a deliberate regimen.

 

Ask yourself two questions:

 

  • Am I better off than I was 6 months, 1 year, 2 years ago?
  • If I’m not, were there extenuating circumstances (i.e. health issue, etc.) that would excuse a lack of progress?

 

This gets your brain focused on the comparison that really matters: You vs Past You.

 

What does your personal progress look like? And are you happy with the pace of that progress? It doesn’t matter if someone out there retired with $10 million at age 32. It doesn’t matter if your brother-in-law is a surgeon making $400k a year. Not a single penny of their fortune is going to better your life. But fortunately, every single penny of your own nest egg will. So focus on that.

 

If the answer to the first question is resounding yes of progress, hopefully you are feeling a little calmer. If the answer to question 1 was no, and you move onto question two and the answer is still no, then you have some real problems you need to account for. In this case, the jealousy is a wake up call that you need to fix a real problem in your life. Thank goodness it got you to focus on this gaping hole.

 

Now that you’re firmly back in the mindset of you and how your life is going, you can ask yourself some factually-based questions that allow you to derive value from the story you’re hearing.

 

  • What new ideas are they implementing that I might like to explore?
  • Did anything about this story challenge the way I think about how to achieve success in this world?

 

For example, maybe your buddy is telling you of their acquaintance that used multi-family real estate investments to retire with a few million at 35. Aside from wishing you also had millions at 35, had you considered multi-family real estate investments? Might that be worth some research given this interesting story and outsized outcome you just heard about?

 

You take the impatience that jealousy has created, and you channel it into action that will push you forward in your own journey.

 

A Few Examples

 

I won’t pretend that this transition from slavering, angry jealousy beast to rational optimizer comes easily. But I can say it gets smoother over time. With more practice, the steps come more quickly.

 

How would I know? I’ve spent my life surrounded by insanely successful people. I chose a school full of future Nobel prize winners, US Presidents, and Fortune 500 CEOS. I then spent years in an industry that put me in regular day to day contact with financiers and CEO’s worth $50+ million each. I have plenty of experience being the small fry in the room. I had to deal with feelings of jealousy and inferiority all the time.  And you know what’s encouraging to remember? Literally every incredibly successful person does. It’s a natural byproduct of constantly trying to expose yourself to good ideas and best practices.

 

Here are a few stories of how a jealousy-inducing story was disarmed and made to accelerate my own path to financial independence.

 

In College

 

Towards the end of my time in college, I attended a one week exchange program in Asia. One of the speakers they had arranged for us to hear from was a successful local entrepreneur. I later had the chance to catch up with him over coffee one-on-one, and the stories he shared were incredible. He had built a successful overseas shipping company that did a few million in revenue annually. He had also just raised a $50 million venture capital fund of his own. He was 34. His girlfriend, he told me, also ran her own business, and had made her first million just before her 30th birthday.

 

As an eager 21 year-old who had done basically nothing of real note in life besides binge-read bad books when I should have been studying for midterms, I was floored. I was initially eaten by all sorts of ugly feelings. I was about to start my own adult journey. Was I going to get anywhere near close to that level of success?

 

After I had stewed in my own jealousy for a while, I started to ask myself the questions above. It was cool that I had heard these stories so young. Maybe these two had gotten started earlier than I had, but if I started now, I might shave years off the plan I had initially set for myself. These stories made me appreciate the benefits of owning one’s own business much more than I had before. After all, while he had been clear the first few years were absolute hell, he and his girlfriend both got to enjoy the benefits of a thriving asset that continued to throw off huge amounts of cash, even when they wanted to turn their attentions to other activities like starting a venture capital fund.

 

If I hadn’t been intrigued by the idea of starting my own company then, I certainly was now. And later when an opportunity I hadn’t considered came up – working at an investment firm – I recognized it as a particularly intriguing path in finance, whereas most of the jobs in the field were not relevant to my journey. After all, as an investor, you owned chunks of exactly these assets that had ongoing value, but you didn’t do the hard work of building them. Your hard work was finding and making the investment happen. This success story sparked jealousy in me, but it also gave me valuable information I could use in my own life to great impact. To this day, I think of choosing that first job in the investment space as one of the three best decisions I’ve ever made in my life.

 

At Work

 

A few years later, working as an investor, I spent a lot of time in meetings with the CEO’s of successful businesses. Many of them were founder-CEO’s – folks who had started the business themselves – and a lot of them were young. Like, 26-29 years old young.

 

I would leave these meetings and go home to my boyfriend (now-husband) and complain. Look at these wunderkinds! I was so behind. I wasn’t worth $20 million. Even if I buckled down now, I surely wouldn’t have a majorly successful business to show for myself by the time I was 26-29!

 

But here’s the thing.

 

I asked myself how hard they were working, and whether I had it in me to do so as well. I asked myself what level of risk they were taking, and whether I had the appetite to do so myself. It was time to put up or shut up.

 

Over the years I worked as an investor, I developed a new appreciation for starting a business, and realized that most businesses were not ones I’d want to run myself. I don’t like managing people. I don’t like selling. And the risk they took so early in life went against my own appetite in a way I hadn’t really had to confront. Here I was kvetching about their success when really I should be thanking them for the valuable insights they gave me – their war stories showed me that I probably did not want to start a start-up the way I thought I did when I first graduated. I later discovered there were avenues like blogging that were also entrepreneurial that fit my personality, but I was seriously considering starting an internet start-up when I graduated, and I’m so glad I dodged that bullet. I was exactly the wrong sort of person to start that kind of start-up. Their stories helped me refine my own path without having to go through their pain.

 

Perhaps even more important, these regular meetings made me come to terms with how hard these extremely successful people worked. Most of these entrepreneurs would tell me about how they worked 12 hour days, 7 days a week. How they hadn’t taken a vacation the first four years of the business. How even now, they can’t go anywhere without their email and smartphone attached to their hip.

 

How many hours was I working? When I clocked out on a Monday night, had I done anything exceptional to convince my firm I should get promoted or get a raise? Was there another person in my class who had done more? I’m a daydreamer. I like to loaf, and think big thoughts, and generally lay on the couch thinking about doing things but not necessarily doing them. This regular diet of constant reminders of how hard others were working prodded me into accomplishing a lot more than I would have on my own.

 

Bottom line, you can turn the energy of jealousy into spurring yourself to greater action. Jealousy is impatience for more, sooner. Use that impatience to get you to invest more into your own progress. Put in the extra hour at work. Read that extra blog article on Roth IRAs. Jealousy is a helpful companion when you strip it of its power but use its reserve of energy.

 

Conclusion

 

In order to achieve your greatest potential success in life, you need to be exposing yourself to new and upgraded ideas compared to your old life. Climbing a higher rung of success necessarily means exposing yourself to others who have achieved more than you, with techniques more spectacular than yours. While you may feel that the jealousy this creates is a liability, it is actually an employee that can be harnessed to help you achieve faster progress. The faster you can get used to jealousy and make it work for you, the quicker your road to success will be.

 

What do you think? Have you been able to harness the impatience created by jealousy to work harder on your own goals?

 

 

 

Enjoyed This Post?
Join 15,000+ readers and get new posts every Tuesday and Thursday that will help you earn, save, or grow your money by thousands of dollars. Plus, get access to The Money Habit's FREE Library which includes The Quick Start Guide to Early Retirement.
No spam. We respect your privacy.

Share with a friend:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)

Related

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Elsa says

    October 10, 2017 at 1:41 pm

    Thanks for this. For the past couple weeks, I’ve been so jealous of the success stories of friends and family members who had more childcare while they worked on their business or more money to contribute to their start up and I realized I have a small amount of money from an old account that I can invest. No childcare needed!

    Reply
    • JP Livingston says

      October 10, 2017 at 3:01 pm

      Very nice!

      Reply
  2. Dave says

    October 10, 2017 at 1:51 pm

    An article with excellent points to ponder.

    Reply
    • JP Livingston says

      October 10, 2017 at 3:00 pm

      Thanks Dave. Glad you liked it.

      Reply
  3. DRD says

    October 10, 2017 at 3:17 pm

    Your article comes at an amazingly spectacular time in my personal journey. I constantly have to overcome the stinging agony of when I think about person X and his successful startup career while I’m only starting to lay the foundation for mine. It definitely helps to compare apples to apples; I would not want to do what he’s doing despite the glory, and am much happier with the work/life model I’m setting up for myself in my venture. Furthermore the stinging pain actually helps solidify my venture idea by reinforcing why I’m doing it in the first place!

    Reply
    • JP Livingston says

      October 11, 2017 at 2:31 am

      Glad it works for you as well. Honestly, I find that confronting the jealousy and sifting through what I am and am not willing to do as compared to others is really helpful in helping me find gratitude in my own life. It shows me I am crafting my life with a balance that really works for me. And like oyu said, it also gives me the kick in the pants that I need to start working on the things I say I care about. 🙂

      Reply
  4. Tom says

    October 10, 2017 at 3:47 pm

    Oh boy, I can relate to the daydreaming/big thoughts thing.
    All my ideas right now are way too big/crazy to start, it feels like I am at step 9 rather than step 1.
    I know I want to start and build something myself, so I need to be looking for step 1 ideas ?

    Reply
    • JP Livingston says

      October 11, 2017 at 2:29 am

      Luckily knowing your tendency is more than half the battle. Now that you’re aware of it, you can course correct. Good luck!

      Reply
  5. Tian says

    October 11, 2017 at 11:32 am

    All your advice is really relatable. I love your blog!

    Reply
    • JP Livingston says

      October 11, 2017 at 2:34 pm

      Thanks Tian. :o)

      Reply
  6. dailychangeofhabit says

    October 11, 2017 at 11:31 pm

    Thanks so much for sharing this. I’m at a strange point in life where about half of my friends appear to be “making it,” while the other half continue to amble about cluelessly like they did when we were in college. I don’t particularly want to compare myself to either group. If I compare myself to the party people, I feel super-industrious and proud of myself, even though I haven’t done much in the grand scheme of things. However, if I compare myself to the fastidious ones who’ve had the right amount of luck alongside their hard work, I feel like a chump.

    I don’t have a career mapped out. I have clusters of interests that could take me interesting places, but I don’t yet know what to do. I want to do the digging now to make sure that I lay the right foundation for myself. If I’m going to work incredibly hard to set up a life a life, I want to be damn sure I don’t get stuck in something that’s not right for me. So I’m at peace with the fact that I’m exploring for the right reasons, but it’s scary to have no roadmap towards a decent income. I’m an age where entry level work is appropriate, and so that’s what I’m doing, but I don’t want to be at entry level pay forever. Especially when there are so many people out there circumventing “the system,” making their own rules, and earning a good living while doing it.

    If you have any recommendations on where to go to get nice and jealous (so that I can learn as much as possible about what makes me tick and follow that scent), please share!

    Reply
  7. gofi says

    October 12, 2017 at 1:58 pm

    Financial success and happiness go hand on hand only to a certain point. I read a few years back that the threshold is 75K – I think it was Angus Deaton.

    I was top 2 in my class for most of my life. Two guys five or six ranks below me are now successful doctors. The girl who beat me all the time and I are lowly analysts. A few others have wonderful facebook pictures. But I’m pretty sure I have the most wonderful wife. And that’s enough for me.

    Reply
  8. MoneyPsych says

    October 14, 2017 at 6:42 pm

    I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but you have shown an excellent example of what we psychologists call cognitive disputation (a phrase I’m fairly sure one of us made up). It’s a central component of cognitive therapy, where we take a thought that is somehow distorted and/or unhelpful, and we challenge it in order to make it more accurate and/or helpful to our lives.

    The specific type of cognitive distortion (as those thoughts are called) that you were discussing sounds a lot like ‘should statements’. They frequently take the shape of “I should have already accomplished more”, or “They should have offered that job to me!” If left unchecked, they can demoralize and/or anger us, and frequently cause us to get ‘stuck’ in the negativity of whatever is upsetting us. One of the best ways to dispute it is to acknowledge the reality of the situation and then ask, “What do I want to do about it?”

    I enjoy your blog, especially since you acknowledge and address the psychological component of financial issues, and I wish you further success as you continue to grow it!

    Reply
    • JP Livingston says

      October 15, 2017 at 11:23 am

      Interesting. I didn’t realize there was a term for it, though I’ve noticed it’s a pattern that recurs a lot. Thanks for the tip and the well wishes!

      Reply
  9. DearFinances says

    November 10, 2017 at 7:41 pm

    Great post J.P. thank you for sharing! Have you ever felt like this with regards to your blog versus others? I just started mine and have been trying to appreciate and take in as much as I can from successful bloggers and am seeing it is much more of a community and everyone wants each other to be successful rather than seeing them as a competitor, what do you think?

    Reply
    • JP Livingston says

      November 12, 2017 at 4:02 pm

      I think it’s normal to have this reaction to anything you are engaged in and care about, be it a blog or any other activity. I’ve definitely compared my blog to others’. Generally my reaction on this particular front is more of a “wow, I really should invest more time/attention/effort” because I spend about 5 hours on the blog per week where for others it can be a full-time job. But it’s all about setting goals that are realistic for the set of priorities you have; my goals for the blog in 2018 are set based on the fact that I am unwilling to spend much more than 5 hours a week on the blog as I have other priorities competing for my time (have a baby coming, enjoy loafing time, etc. and can’t do this full time). Bottom line, yes I have, I think it’s normal, and it’s a sign you care! It just needs to be overcome and the energy put to productive use.

      I have found the community to generally have a mindset of abundance rather than competition/scarcity as you’ve said.

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

  • Popular Posts
  • Classic Reads

How Much Can You Actually Make Blogging?

Two Metrics You Must Track To Achieve Extreme Wealth

2017 Income Report: How I Made $62,326 Blogging 5 Hours A Week

All About Index Fund Investing: How To Generate 8-10% Returns

Above Average Net Worth – By Age

Teardown: How Much Do You Need To Retire?

A Professional Investor Spills: How To Fall In Love With Investing

Why Normal People Need Prenups

blueprint retirement

Four-Step Blueprint to Retirement: Part 1

Teardown: How to Build an Airtight Retirement Budget

Welcome to The Money Habit

As a retiree at 28, I've discovered that early retirement doesn't require you to be a genius or have an incredibly unique skill set. It can be achieved without you becoming an emotionless robot. Showing up every day is what counts. Incremental improvement - a Money Habit - trumps everything else. This blog will teach you how to get there.

Want To Retire Earlier?
Keep building your own Money Habit. Get new posts every Tuesday and Thursday that will help you earn, save, and grow your money by thousands of dollars.

Blog Categories


Best Posts

Save Money

Make Money

Invest Money

Money Mindset

Early Retirement

Strategies & Blueprints

What It’s Like To Be Retired

My Favorite Tools

Free Net Worth and Expense Tracker


Main Brokerage Account


Best Blog Hosting



Footer

The Money Habit

Written by someone who retired at 28, The Money Habit is a personal finance site that focuses on investing, saving, and earning strategies to help you achieve financial security. 15 minutes a week to extreme, early wealth.

Affiliate Links

Some posts may include affiliate links, which share a commission with the blog at no additional cost to you. We only recommend products we believe in; if they have an affiliate program, we add it, and if they don’t we share and recommend them anyway. Being a good human being > promoting crappy products.

Categories

  • Best Posts
  • Early Retirement
  • Featured
  • Invest Money
  • Make Money
  • Money Mindset
  • Pay Less Taxes

  • Early Retirement
  • Other
  • Save Money
  • Strategies and Blueprints
  • What It's Like To Be Retired

Disclaimer

Posts represent my opinions and experiences and are for educational purposes only. I am not a financial advisor and these posts do not represent formal financial advice.

Privacy Policy

We take privacy very seriously at The Money Habit. From one  normal person to another, we get that no one wants their information handed out willy nilly. So check out our privacy policy over here.

Copyright © 2021 The Money Habit