Calling Jealousy “Motivation”

This one gets a much better publicist.

Jealousy is ugly, while ambition is admirable, so we rename jealousy.

You start getting invited to rooms you have been trying to enter for years, and suddenly every networking event feels like a referendum on your own career. A business takes off, and you start sketching your own business idea before you have even worked out what problem you want to solve. Someone suddenly gets noticeably fitter, and your perfectly acceptable body becomes a personal emergency.

You tell yourself you’re motivated, but you’re still measuring yourself against that person. You are no longer asking what you actually want; you are checking whether your salary, business, body, or audience has finally caught up with theirs.

Salovey and Rodin’s research on social-comparison jealousy found that jealousy intensified when another person’s success occurred in a personally relevant domain, particularly when people had first received negative feedback about their own performance in that domain.

You beat one person, and another person appears. You finally earn more than the colleague who bothered you for years, and three months later you discover somebody else earns twice as much.

Congratulations. Your prison has excellent Wi-Fi.

A better target is your own ambition: What do I actually want? What am I trying to build? Would I still want this if nobody else knew about it?

If you need someone else to lose for you to feel successful, jealousy is still running the show. You just made it productive.