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Ask HN: How do you deal with professional envy?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with professional envy?

#221

Post by 2sk21 »

mesarvagya wrote: post #173

I know this will get lost in lots of comments. But the medicine to any problem is * Mental Peace *. Try following steps: 1. Take a deep breath, let all your thoughts flow naturally. 2. See what's happening with your thoughts as a second person's perspective. 3. Know that you aren't your thoughts. It is you who can change any thought. 4. Remind yourself that nothing last forever. Even if you had all the money in world…

Number 5 especially. I've beem working towards financial independence to enable this.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with professional envy?

#222

Post by mikekchar »

alltakendamned wrote: post #201
mikekchar wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a cool article I saw quite a while ago where a father of 2 and sole provider for his family found that it was next to impossible to survive comfortably in London on half a million GBP per year. He went through all the numbers and showed how it just couldn't be done. Of course he was making 10x what would be considered a good wage in London. It wasn't his salary, it was his minimum standard that was out of w…

If you can find back the link, I'd like to read this

Looking for it. BTW... I am never going back to Huffington Post. Wow... the "privacy controls" are sooooo broken....

Sorry. Can't find it. It was really interesting, though. I found a similar article here: $500K and scraping by - https://www.financialsamurai.com/scraping-by-on-500000-a-yea...

It's interesting how they justify $23K a year for food for a family of 4. But the thing is, I know lots of people who spend that kind of money on food and can't imagine being able to spend less.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with professional envy?

#223

Post by 2sk21 »

mikekchar wrote: post #185

Success, praise and even salary are not a zero sum game. You will never have a job where they say, "You're such a good employee, we'll give you all of the money". You get a portion and that portion is really negotiable. It's the same with praise. If you do something amazing then people will probably notice, even if someone else is also doing something amazing. If you are on a baseball team and your rival hits 100 hom…

Fascinating story about your manager! Its great that you have the self-awareness to recognize your own contribution to the situation.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with professional envy?

#224

Post by DonHopkins »

nurettin wrote: post #190
DonHopkins wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps he should take his own excellent advice, and compare himself to who he was when he threatened to slap Pankaj Mishra. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/23/jordan... >Why is Jordan Peterson so angry? For someone whose whole routine is based on telling men to “toughen up”, the clinical psychologist and author of the bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, who rose to prominence in th…

I am not a fan, and indeed, I would have preferred never to have heard of the canadian psychotherapist with lots of snake oil to sell. That being said, giving yourself the job of "going after" someone, hoarding any and all embarrassing public speeches and having people judge him using just that concentrated negativity you've managed to scrape off the walls, isn't that a little bit like the kind of envy this very thre…

Doesn't envy require me wanting to be like him?

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with professional envy?

#225

Post by billman »

DonHopkins wrote: post #105
klenwell wrote: post #101

I'm reminded of an apocryphal story I read somewhere about an exchange between Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller that was supposed to have taken place at a fancy party hosted by a successful hedge fund manager. Google reveals various versions and sources of the exchange. Here's mine: Vonnegut: Can you believe this guy? He makes more money in a single day than we'll make in our entire lives. And you wrote Catch-22! Hell…

Conversely, there's a humble brag my grandfather loved to tell: "I'm working on my second million!" (pause for people to act impressed, while secretly loathing you) "I gave up on my first."

+1 for Vonnegut

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with professional envy?

#227

Post by JohnBooty »

ludston wrote: post #205
JohnBooty wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. As a kid I wanted to make video games and (like many) this lead me to pursue software development as a career. By the time I made it through college in the 90s I'd learned more and more about the games industry and learned that it's generally not a very happy place to work. Certainly not a place for me. So I chose a different path. With several decades of following the game industry under my belt I feel I…

You set a goal (make video games) then gave up on it (didn't make video games), thus failing that goal. It isn't madness, nor is it rocket surgery. It's pure semantics. I guess you have chosen a path that is not mentioned, "give up and try something new, but then pretend that isn't what you did"? "I don't call it giving up... I call it learning."

If you walked into your kitchen with the goal of making a sandwich and decided you wanted some oatmeal instead, would you call that a "failure?" Did you experience a "defeat?"

Most wouldn't say that you "failed" at making a sandwich unless you truly attempted to assemble a sandwich and were unable to do so.

Most would not consider me to have "failed" to become a game developer unless I'd made a true attempt at doing so: applying for jobs and failing to obtain one, or perhaps obtaining jobs and failing at those. Just as very few would consider me to have failed at becoming an astronaut or a professional hockey player, two other things I wanted to be as a child.

Strict definitions of "failure" aside, though, what I found really bizarre and bleak was the parent poster's claim that enjoying one's newly chosen goal+outcome to require an act of willful cognitive dissonance.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with professional envy?

#228

Post by JohnBooty »

krageon wrote: post #213
JohnBooty wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My post's not straw man. I responded to precisely what the parent poster said. They were very specific about the cognitive dissonance they perceived. If we're pointing out actual logical fallacies... to lose and fail graciously is more virtuous than trying to preserve the ego and pretend that it was a win In a universe where those are the only two possibilities? Sure. You and OP are presenting a false dichotomy. Pare…

I think the point they were driving at was not that nobody can change their goals. It is just inconceivable to them that that is not failure. To set a different goal, you must first fail at the last one (if you did not achieve it). That is of course a way to look at your life that is perfectly okay, but it certainly wouldn't be my preference.

What an unfortunate way for them to view life. It's a bit heartbreaking to think about people viewing life in those terms. If I walk into the store intending to buy a shirt and decide I'd rather buy some pants instead, it would be very odd to consider that "a failure" to buy a shirt.

And even odder for somebody to accuse me of "cognitive dissonance" to be happy with my pants instead of admitting "defeat."

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with professional envy?

#229

Post by dusted »

I don't think that's happened.. Now, you're not saying WHY they make more money/get more acclaim/praise, but assuming it's justified, I look up to them and respect them. I don't strive to become like them, I'm me, and they're them. Now, people who's getting credit for something they didn't do, or that I did, that's another matter, but then I guess it no longer qualifies as envy.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with professional envy?

#230

Post by naikas »

I think that the comments have covered pretty much everything to break the problem into fundamentals. I would just like to add that: - professional envy is futile - use the opportunity to step aside for a while, and think of a another route to get ahead of the person you are jealous of

This way you would not just stop wasting time in constant comparison, but also likely to find a constructive mechanism to beat your competition.

In my little career, whenever I found myself being jealous of others, I thought harder to differentiate myself, isolate from comparison/competition, and always learnt something new to get ahead.

In the end, I don't know if my own narrative of professional journey would reach my milestones, but I am 100% sure that I wouldn't be too jealous.

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