Control your emotions or they will control you - Chinese proverb
Ask HN: How can I stop being jealous of people who succeed before me?
21–30 of 65 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can I stop being jealous of people who succeed before me?
#22Don't worry. Even achieving more than the people you are currently jealous of, there will be a whole new group of people to be jealous of. It will never end until you die or understand.
Hope this helps put things in perspective.
Re: Ask HN: How can I stop being jealous of people who succeed before me?
#23Eventually, you realize life is just a fucked up series of events that, once in a while, have no meaning, are cruel, or don't happen in a logical or fair way!
For example, the people behind the Yo app spent a few hours on the weekend building it as a side project, reaped tons of press and attention, and eventually landed themselves a boatload of VC money.
Is that fair to the people out there like yourself and myself, who are slaving away to make Real Change happen in this world? No!
But, that's life. Life is cruel, it's weird, sometimes it doesn't make sense, and sometimes it just comes down to a little bit (or alot) of dumb luck. It's shitty and raw to think about, but it's reality.
My advice is to use your jealousy as a motivator, but don't allow it get to you. Seek your own happiness and your own success, according to your own benchmarks for both.
Keep pushing, keep hustling, and keep hoping that, one day, luck swings in your favor and you land that massive success and or payday, too. And, all the while, remember in the back of your head that you may die before that day ever comes.
No matter what though: retain your sanity and defend your own happiness... forget all else.
EDIT - Your perception of 'success' may also have little, or transient meaning. For example, lots of people think the current 'success' of the tech industry is a facade, and we're due for a bubble-like collapse (er, 'contraction'). If that happens, all of those successful acquaintances you currently look up to don't sound so successful now, do they?
Re: Ask HN: How can I stop being jealous of people who succeed before me?
#24Someday (very soon, geologically speaking) you'll be dead and even if you're successful (personally and/or publicly) enough to be remembered past your death entropy will eventually win out. On a long enough timeline nothing you ever do will actually matter. So don't worry about it. Have fun. Do what makes you happy.
You have a point, but your supporting assumptions don't make it. "In the long term things don't matter" doesn't matter unless you're going to be around in the long term to see them matter.
Either way, I wholeheartedly disagree with you. "Have fun, do what makes you happy" helps ensure that what you do doesn't even matter now -- never-mind it not mattering later. You are basically saying "since you can't be a god, you might as well not even try hard." It's black-and-white thinking at its worst.
You should do what you know matters; what your experiences are telling you is important. And even if 'you' die, the you that is a generic human with basic human needs and social identity will not die. It will live on in other people. You're not that different from humans that lived 50,000 years ago. The important parts of what you were then haven't died in that time. Make the world a better place for those who would live 50,000 years in the future -- because someone very much like you might want to know what you had to teach.
That person might even be an exact replica of you. Surely someone will generally want what you want and feel what you feel. Care for that person: they are your second chance.
Re: Ask HN: How can I stop being jealous of people who succeed before me?
#25I was a successful kid. I was the valedictorian of my high school class. I had my pick of the best colleges in the country. If you'd have asked anyone to guess who'd grow up to be the most successful person in my circle, most people would have guessed me. I was "successful" at that age because I was smart, but more important, because I literally did nothing but study, study, work, and study some more. This was a fantastic strategy for succeeding in a highly structured, grade-based environment. Unfortunately, the world is not as highly structured. The world doesn't give you letter grades. In school, there is a direct correlation between effort and reward. In life, the correlation is certainly there, but it's indirect and messy. Luck also plays a big role.
Flash forward to today. While I am modestly successful, I am far from the most successful person I grew up with. Two of my elementary-school friends are huge movie stars (one of them has been Oscar-nominated, and will probably win at some point). One of my high-school friends is a phenomenally successful musician, who also stars on a highly rated TV show. One of my early colleagues, from when I was fresh out of college, is now the #2 production executive at the world's most successful movie studio; his name is listed in the credits, as Executive Producer, of almost every $1B+ movie released in the last six or seven years. Many of my friends are TV writers, and some of them earn millions of dollars a year. (In case it's not clear at this point, I grew up in LA!). At least one of my friends is a tech entrepreneur worth close to half a billion dollars. An ex-girlfriend (ouch!) was an early Google employee.
These people make me jealous as fuck. I'm not going to lie about it, and I'm not going to sugarcoat it. If you're the competitive type, you'll always feel a pang of envy over the success of your peers. Doubly so when your peers are successful beyond their wildest dreams (or yours).
The first thing I'd recommend is accepting the jealousy, and recognizing it for what it is. If you're a smart and introspective person, you won't be able to bullshit yourself -- to will the jealousy away through new-agey mantras and mind tricks. Instead, try to mine the envy for productive lessons. What about these people made them as successful as they are? Are there any operative takeaways for you?
Second, and much more important, is learning to be genuinely happy for the success of others. Especially the success of your dear friends. First, because it's awesome when good things happen to people you like. Second, because even from a highly cynical standpoint, wouldn't you rather be friends with all these fabulously successful people? I don't know about you, but it does me absolutely no good when my friends are struggling. Schadenfreude is a terrible investment strategy. Its ROI sucks.
I'd also recommend some light reading on the concept of "EQ" and management of emotions. Emotional self-regulation doesn't always come naturally to me. I had to study and practice. Like everything else in life. Most of the literature will tell you that there's no use in hiding from, avoiding, or pretending your emotions don't exist. Acknowledge them, be mindful of them, and actively attempt to short-circuit them, to channel them in more productive directions, or to move to their adjacent (and often more beneficial) emotional correlates. Jealousy, for instance, seems somewhat adjacent to ambition on the emotional color wheel. When you find yourself feeling jealous, don't try to make the leap from jealous to happy. It doesn't work that way. Instead, move from jealous to driven.
Finally, some of the best advice I've received on the topic of envy comes from pop culture: "Do you." You can't control whether your best friend wins the lottery, or your second cousin sells his startup to Facebook. You can control what you want to do, and how you're doing it.
Re: Ask HN: How can I stop being jealous of people who succeed before me?
#26A quote from This is Water, the commencement address given by David Foster Wallace:
“Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.”
This is not an attempt to convert you to religion. I recommend reading or listening to the entire piece. Reflect on your motivations for doing what you do, and consider if they are even congruent to not being envious of others.
Re: Ask HN: How can I stop being jealous of people who succeed before me?
#27Someday (very soon, geologically speaking) you'll be dead and even if you're successful (personally and/or publicly) enough to be remembered past your death entropy will eventually win out. On a long enough timeline nothing you ever do will actually matter. So don't worry about it. Have fun. Do what makes you happy.
> So don't worry about it. Have fun. Do what makes you happy.
i find it very hard to keep this attitude and also believe that i ll be successful. its either one or the other. i am doing what makes me happy, mostly, but there are also lots of things i simply have to do to be successful, one day. but i can't "not worry about it", i can't "have fun" when i know that i have to work harder now to be successful and to be able to do the other two things later.
Re: Ask HN: How can I stop being jealous of people who succeed before me?
#28I think you can comfort yourself with the fact that there is so much success in this industry.
Imagine what it must be like for someone who is the best in a field where there's no money or success to be had. No thanks. Every time I see a big payout I think, "Good for them. This is a signal that I'm in the right business."
If my peers didn't have anything I could be jealous of, I'd start worrying.
Re: Ask HN: How can I stop being jealous of people who succeed before me?
#29Would you be more envious if there was a million people that are better at whatever you're envious at or if there was exactly one such person?
Re: Ask HN: How can I stop being jealous of people who succeed before me?
#30I will tell you quick story when I had same problem as you.
I was once extremely successfully person in my field of expertise. It was specific niche, small market (global, but still small considering there was estimated 10K possible leads in it). At the peak I would manage a bit short of 100 people working for me as contractors and I have tapped around 6-7% of global market (per estimates top providers of service shared with itself). Everything was going extremely well, I was doing amazing financially. But the issues began rising within me. I felt I wasn't ready for this. I hit the ceiling. I couldn't scale anymore. I was blind and my decisions in other fields were extremely poor (it took some balls to acknowledge this - since I didnt liked to critique my business methods).
It was strange - depression like feeling. I didn't expect to get it AFTER I got so successful. Living the dream (I moved to remote location in tropical paradise) I would sit all day at home with shutters closed. I couldn't go forward. I didnt expected that I couldn't grow any more. My market was limited and my ambition was hurt. The success came too easy to me and I wasn't ready for it.
Upon a lot of thinking and stressing I would finally close my company within a week, let go all contractors after giving them away all my leads to them so they could offer the service directly to customers, and would move to different country while "burning all the bridges". With enough money to sustain myself for 6 months I would do something completely stupid just to prove myself I wasnt that good, that I was doing it all wrong - I have created company in a market I didnt know anything about, market that was over-saturated and hostile.
After few months of barely having any revenue I run out of my money and was left with scraps. Got in to deep depression, being mad at myself that I hurted one person I cared about - my partner, as I have dragged her with me in to this (but with her agreeing this was best for us, so at least it was our choice, not just mine).
Got back to my home town, moved back to my parents house and started rethinking everything from basics - why I am who I am. I understood how many lies are in entrepreneurship world and how "survival of the fittest" is the most important lesson. Good taste is everything in online biz world, and as with failed startups people wont tell you you are wrong, they wont tell you the true way of doing business. They will say "Great Idea! I love it! I would use it anytime! Now join me in Twitter, like XXX pages and pay back b*tch for me being nice to you!" Circle of narcissistic, spoiled kids.
After 6 months I was ready, I opened new business with €100 investment for domain and hosting I had left after spending rest for food (I refused anyone to help me financially) and quickly started making revenue and getting back on track. I removed all limits, I do not limit myself any more. I do not think of "making $XX.XXX profit target" which is counter-productive. Who cares whats the profit? Is it better to have $100K company and make $60K profit, or have $100Mil company and make $3K profit a month?
You cannot succeed - go above your targets because you are limiting yourself. People will tell you some BS like "its not you" - dont listen to this. Every single problem you might have right now will have root inside you and way you are doing this. You will need to learn how to remove those limits now by failing, or by really going back in your life and trying to understand yourself and judging/reviewing every single action that lead you to position you are in. Perfectly both though.
Once you remove those limits you will be free and happy again and everything will come 2 times easier to you.
Good Luck!