Ask HN: How can I stop being jealous of people who succeed before me?
I am a tech entrepreneur. I've dedicated my life to technology and building products that can help people. I'm relatively smart and really hardworking. My success thus far has been modest, though I have been able to raise funding from a prestigious VC firm. My standards are high so I do not consider fundraising any kind of success. I also detest self promotion and so I have not announced the fundraise. My startup feels like it has just recently found product market fit but I'm not sure. Either way I will go for it. The problem is everytime i try to hone in on myself and focus on my goals I hear about someone I know or someone "like me" (i.e. they have similar attributes, aren't friends but are in my peer group, and are working on a similar idea or an idea i've had in the past) whose raised a bunch of money and is all over the press and in some cases has achieved real success. I have this negative feeling for hours, days sometimes that I can only assume is jealousy. Perhaps because I am competitive. Perhaps because in addition to wanting to build products and help people, I am human and I want to be the "first" or the "best" in my peer group. I don't like feeling this feeling though because I know that I genuinely wish this people well and that if i myself were successful I wouldn't feel this way...or maybe I would? I'd love your help and advice on how I can do away with this feeling and focus on being a world class entrepreneur. I am not OK with being OK with failure and I do not accept being mediocre, but there has to be a way of being competitive in a healthy way without having to unfollow every stream of social media from peers that succeed and without having to feel envious of others. Sorry for the long rant but I'd really like to turn the leaf in the new year and I appreciate your help!
64 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadWhat other people are doing have little relevance to what you are doing except that you can learn lessons from the successes and failures of others.
1) Success is a fashion, and a very dynamic and fickle one. Opinions of success (your own and everyone else's) are constantly changing. While it might seem today others are beating you, tomorrow could be your day in the press without you doing anything differently. This should help you see how little opinions of success really matter.
2) You are in control of the fashions you choose to follow and how you let them affect you.
3) Entrepreneurship is tough, and this is one of the reasons. The feeling will never get better; you'll find the more "successful" you are the worse it gets. Learn to accept this feeling and leverage it rather than fight it.
You might find it annoying to unfollow your successful acquaintances, but imagine how it feels to be on the other end, with multiple investors threatening to pull funding and kill your company when your "social media presence" is waning -- and you can't even express your frustration on Twitter because that would be company suicide.
Secondly, it gets worse because your standards of comparison change. You compare upwards to people with even more success. And, since "success" metrics are exponentially distributed, so is the gap that you feel between the people more "successful" than you.
As everything in life - YOU are the one limiting yourself. If you feel pressure from society to do or avoid some decisions, then you shouldn't be in that position in the first place. Only strongest successful people can remain their autonomy despite investors and fame.
Look what people from Uber do. Steve Jobs, E-harmony folks or even GoDaddy owner. We disagree with their decisions and even sometimes boycot their companies - but they often remain unwilling to change.
It's the people who are able to nip these jealous thoughts in the bud and plough on with single-handed determination that will have the last laugh.
-- Homer Simpson (seriously)
i'm an entrepreneur too, with some modest success. my company makes single-digit millions/year in revenue, i take home a low six figure annual salary - i don't mention specific numbers because it changes all the time.
it sounds like you need to figure out what you're actually envious of, and decide if you want to achieve it or not. otherwise you're just being pummeled helpless by your own subconscious desires, which is a type of personal hell.
personally, i don't give a shit about recognition or fame or doing a great thing for society (right now), i just want lots of money. i'm not ashamed to admit it - i tell people this in real life too. i want to make a lot of money, so i can buy a lot of cool shit and not struggle with bills (not that i ever have, but you know what i mean). i came to this conclusion after a considerable amount of thought and self-reflection, and it took a while for me to be able to admit it to myself (and others).
some people aren't in it for the money - they're in it for the fame, or recognition, or they want to prove their dad wrong, or some other completely personal reason, and the money is just a side effect since it's so pervasive in our society.
once you identify what you actually want, and admit it to yourself, you can set about on your mission of achieving it without being caught up in your own petty mental nonsense. that's just an indicator you aren't being honest with yourself (and possibly others).
Envy is a form of flattery, when I am envious of someone I tell them so! It seems to get it off my chest. Everyone I've ever said it to takes it as a compliment.
second, be aware of your feelings and emotions, don't try to suppress them. analyze them and use them as motivation.
third, learn what you can from successful people, either directly or by observation.
finally, when you get older, you will realize all that other stuff you find so distracting now has literally absolutely no bearing on whether or not YOU will succeed at your goals, so there's only one thing you can do, and that's work on your own shit. once you come to this realization, a lot of the stupid crap floating around in your head will just sort of disappear.
That said, the book also pointed out that you shouldn't ignore others success or failure, but instead use it to learn from, i.e. it isn't about the person it is about how they failed or succeeded. IMO, using another person as your measuring stick of success/failure is limiting you to their lows and highs, instead measure yourself to the goals you set, and if you are failing there be critical and fix it, but if you are winning you are golden regardless of what Jill, Jack or Danny did.
You have already done something that a very small percentage of people ever do, regardless of how it looks from the inside of the tech industry. You made a team of people believe in your idea, help you fund your idea and think it has enough merit to potentially have a great outcome. That is awesome.
BTW -- Self promotion is the hardest thing for many (if not most) intelligent, honest people to do, but what I have learned is that if you are not telling people who you are they will make assumptions and draw conclusions on their own and very likely those assumptions and conclusions will be half-truths, hearsay or made up and likely not in your favor. For whatever reason our society loves to scream negatively much louder than positively, don't let that be your fate by not being your own best advocate. Of course, balance & moderation in everything seems prudent.
There's two sides to every story. A lot of startup news articles are written after the writer has a Skype call with a founder / exec, so you're only reading what the founders choose to reveal (ie. only the positive stuff).
> I also detest self promotion and so I have not announced the fundraise.
Don't think of it as self promotion. It's company promotion.
Announcing funding can be particularly helpful if you're hiring.
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.
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.
To clarify a bit more:
If being a successful entrepreneur is what makes you happy, do that. If raising a fantastic family makes you happy, do that. If tirelessly helping the poor makes you happy, do that. Yes, these things matter in the shortish term. And by "happy" I don't mean a minute-to-minute happiness. All of the things I do that make me happiest in the end are fraught with stress, pain and hard work.
My point wasn't that you should sit around watching reality tv all day, there are very few people I know for whom that would actually make them happy. It is just meant to put things into perspective relative to long-term thinking patterns like "how am I doing vis-à-vis the Joneses". It really doesn't matter.
Actual happiness? How is that different from happiness?
My recommendation is to get good at _making decisions_. That way, should happiness be needed, you will be better able to produce it. But if you need something very different, you will be prepared to produce that, too. Happiness is just too myopic and selfish. Good decision-making will often result in happiness, but it's not the sole justification for it. (It will often result in unhappiness, too.)
Talking about long-term entropy isn't a reliable way to make decisions. If we think of 'meaning' as "that which separates signal from noise", you would be saying that -- eventually -- we will be unable to separate them. But we don't live in a reality in which that is the case: we can separate signal and noise right now. So arguing from that point is an argument from fiction. It's kind of like saying "we shouldn't build technology because someone might make the Terminator and everybody will die." Your responsibility is to make the Terminator first and design him so that he gives out hugs and candy. Or whatever else that is good.
I probably sound overly argumentative about this. You have a good point, I'm just trying to dig more deeply into it. I don't think there is a good answer to OP's concern. I would just say "don't worry, just consider your life an experiment," (as is my approach,) but then 'worry' is just part of the experiment. Maybe worrying about it is exactly what he should do. Maybe he shouldn't be happy. Maybe that's the only way to be a better person.
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.
I have found personally that the best antidote to jealousy is to accept that I have it 100%, rather than trying to suppress those feelings. The problem is not actually having the feelings of jealousy, but in not being ok with having those feelings. Once I have acknowledged those feelings fully, I often notice that they quickly pass, and I can go back to focusing on whatever I was doing before the feelings came.
If you arent,
working on personal fulfillment should be your priority going into 2015.
*spelling
Hope this helps put things in perspective.
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?
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 wan...
“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.
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.
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!
If you're always concerned that somebody is a bigger success, you'll never be happy. If you make a few million dollars you'll get to know people with tens of millions. You make tens, you'll know people with billions. Make billions, and you still won't be the new hotness for more than a few years, in all likelihood.
Just do good work. stop caring about the results of the work, care about doing the right work, and doing it well.
That said, you probably won't read this because I stated the truth a while back: that dang is an emotionally unstable asshole and he likes toxic shit on this site.
Generally, these have rather "New Age" titles: some popular ones include Core Transformation, The Work, the Sedona Method, the Wholeness Process. Tech and computer people are often rather skeptical of such things, but I would recommend giving one or more of them a try. If you don't like mystical or spiritual explanations, it's often easier for sci-math inclined minds to think of these as algorithms that you run on your own neural hardware, for the purpose of improving your subjective experience of well-being in life.
three part ohm a-o-m (aaaaaahhhhhhhh ooooooooooooooooooooooo mmmmmmm)
as low pitched as possible
That's why it's so important for YOU to set YOUR goals, because only you can know where you began and how to honestly assess where you're going. You can enlist others and get help, but ultimately, it's gonna be up to you to make those determinations.
Letting other people's accomplishments cloud where you've reached or still have yet to reach will just make you crazy.
You need to ask yourself if that's really true. If it is, then your success is easy to measure: number of people helped. If you haven't helped enough people to feel satisfied, then your course of action is also clear: help more people.
raised a bunch of money... is all over the press... in some cases has achieved real success
The root of all unhappiness is believing something that isn't true. What's more likely, that you've dedicated your life to helping people, or that your motivation is money and recognition? One litmus test is to ask whether you'd be happy making a fortune (complete with a big house, million dollar income, maybe a writeup in Forbes) writing software for, oh, I don't know, a paycheck cashing firm.
The fact is that you are selfish, greedy, egotistical. I don't say this to be mean, but to be honest - it's true for 99.9% of humans. Each of us wants to be special, to be the winner of our peer group; we all want to be envied (which is precisely how people shape their image on social media).
One possible reconciliation is to firmly assert that people spend money on things that they think will benefit them. Money is the primordial "like" button. This implies that if you have a lot of money either: 1) you've provided real value to lots of people, or 2) someone with lots of money believes you can provide lots of value to people (e.g. a raise). (This doesn't always seem to be the case; in fact, much of the wealthy people in the world don't appear to be doing much for it, although software firms are a clear exception there.)
Bon chance.
If you conflate self worth with Success, you leave your feelings up to chance. Rate yourself on stuff you can actually control. Also don't forget that personal relationships are an integral part of happiness and success throughout your entire life.