“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.

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.

Whatever you have, someone else has a better version of it. Whatever you have, someone else would kill to have it themselves.

The only way to step outside of the cycle is to start comparing yourself to yourself. Whatever it is that you do, be better at it. Be the best at it. Don't focus on improving, focus on straight up dominating. It's counter intuitive, but the best way to get to the next level is to acknowledge that you aren't very good right now. It's difficult, most successful people refuse to admit any kind of fault or regret. That's fine for the merely successful. But you should be trying to become godlike. When you aspire to that level, how much money other people raise or how often they appear in the press won't matter to you any more than the business of ants on the ground. If you want to transcend envy[0], you must transcend yourself and your current level of ambition.

It doesn't matter what anyone else is doing, or what people think of them. It doesn't matter what anyone thinks of you. Show the world something wonderful and amazing, do things that people didn't think were possible. Solve a real problem for millions of people, or just impress yourself with how cool what you've made is. Do whatever is necessary to make your name shine, whatever the cost. Everything else will take care of itself.

[0] pedantry: "envy" is the desire for what others have, "jealousy" is the fear that someone else will take what you have.

Please note I am not suggesting isolation or moving to forest for meditation ...etc. You can stay where you are but consciously allocate some time for meditation, in a room where you may not be disturbed by others for some time. Please note it is not reflection on past activities of yours or others. During meditation, just forget outside world,time,circumstances and focus on mantra. It helps in bringing mental peace, strength and this will bring change in behaviour, feelings towards others. It takes some time and practice.

Also, please understand, though we are in same place at the same time, our origins,destinations,paths all are different in this journey called life. Once you realized that, you will start some mental search on your destination and its place in this world and focus on your material goals i.e. focus on others will be reduced i.e. qualities like jealousy will be reduced over period of time. Also, during interactions with others, ensure your focus will be on positive things. Our mind is like horse and as rider, we need to preemptively focus on what we want. It won't change on its own to where/how we want to go.

Hope it helps and if you wish, let us know after some time (may be one year) on your progress. There may be many books on meditation also. They may further help.

EDIT: Minor grammar corrections.

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.

Anyway, I'd revisit your motivations for what you're doing. It sounds like you're chasing "achievement" defined by others rather than what you want.

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?

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.

Finance, Law, and Politics are more common destinations for people obsessed with finite games[1]. Best school, best firm, corner office, most socially respectable spouse, biggest bonus.

Work is more fulfilling when you wake up every morning focused on creating value for your customers, or finding a larger goal where you can make a contribution. If you focus on defeating others, you're going to be miserable.

My sole practical suggestion: once a week, find a way to help another person succeed. Even something small. You /can/ feel happy when others do well.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think there's also somewhat of a culture in tech of treating "smart" people like they're somehow innately different than "non-smart" people or that it's hard for a "non-smart" person to become a "smart" person. You could also substitute the word "smart" for "successful" in the previous sentence. Some people might disagree with this assessment, but I'm fairly confident that it's a wide-spread phenomenon.

I think a culture like that would tend to exaggerate feelings of jealousy and such. If one person is made to feel like they can't possibly achieve the same things as another, or if they suspect they're being denied opportunities on account of another person's opinion of them, that would breed resentment and jealousy. I'm not sure if that dynamic is at play in your life, but it's worth stating all the same.

Anyhow, I wish you luck in dealing with those feelings. I know how crippling they can be.

Once you realize that you'll have an easier time of it. And keep in mind that what you see in the press is quite rarely the unvarnished truth. It tends to be a lot more glossy than reality.

I don't have the answer for you, but a couple things I've done. (A lot of this might not work for you, because I'm not ambitious and I do accept being mediocre)

For my "real" friends (defined as people who would like me even if I were homeless and broke), I focus on what makes us friends: it's not technology or success, it's experiences and time spent hanging out. I emphasize those behaviors and de-emphasize "work" discussions.

For friends who just want to talk about their businesses and successes, I distance myself. It might not be nice, but I have to take care of myself emotionally first, and having my face rubbed in someone else's success doesn't make me feel good.

I also try to befriend (even just as casual acquaintances) people significantly lower on the economic scale. That way when one of my successful friends posts on Facebook about their third tropical vacation in as many months (and my default response is to get upset that I can't afford the time or money for that kind of trip), then I also have another post to read about someone who is struggling to make rent, and that gives me perspective. Really I am in a good place overall, not the best place, not anywhere close to what SV would call "successful", but there's a whole big world out there.

While we all squabble over who has covered more of the top half of Maslow's hierarchy, there are a lot of people still working on the bottom half. It's important to have a few people to put real faces on that to keep me grounded in reality.

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.

Stop reading about other startups. Instead, turn your news consumption to general news topics, or better yet - news about your industry & your customers. (If your customers are other startups, then, well, sorry...)

It sounds like a few of the ways you are measuring yourself are by raising money, being in the press, and whatever you define as "real success".

I would argue that the first two are inconsequential, and ironically, you know that too, because you haven't announced your fundraising.

If you cut out the inconsequential news from your news diet, you may find yourself feeling a bit better. It may not resolve your feelings entirely, but it may help. I know because I've been there, and this worked for me.

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.

1) You are comparing yourself to the highlights reel of many others.

2) You can't run a race whilst looking over your shoulder

Try to change your mindset when hearing of others successes. Instead of thinking 'why not me?' remind yourself you have not seen any of their struggles. When you hear of an idea being successful that is similar to yours, be glad that it proved your thought processes right and validated it for you without effort.

Wouldn't it be more dis-heartening to consistently hear of people similar to you, with similar ideas that did terribly?

All the signs of success are showing you that you are on the right path.

Hope this helps put things in perspective.

    focus on being a world class entrepreneur

If you arent,

working on personal fulfillment should be your priority going into 2015.

*spelling

What 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.

2. As a consequence: stop sprinting. Stop trying to release something inferior by a certain date out of fear of competition. There is no time pressure.

3. As a plan: work on what only you could do best.

Expect nothing. Expectation is a prison.

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.

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.

Try reading The 7 habits of highly effective people.

I'd say that your attitude toward failure is what's going to prevent you from succeeding in the first place.

Also, don't be too hard on yourself!

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.

three part ohm a-o-m (aaaaaahhhhhhhh ooooooooooooooooooooooo mmmmmmm)

as low pitched as possible

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!

-- 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).

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.

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.