how do you feel when others succeed

Summary

when someone in your industry wins, what’s your first internal reaction? not the polite one you say out loud. the first one. that reaction is your mindset, on a billboard.

1. scarcity says: their win is my loss. there’s a fixed pie. they got a slice that should have been mine. military culture trained me into this. so did early entrepreneurship.

2. abundance says: their win is proof the win exists. the pie is not fixed. their success makes my success more likely, not less. this took me years to internalize.

3. the bridge is a gratitude practice. the Five Minute Journal in the morning, every morning. and gratitude messages to specific people, specifically thanking them, sent during the week. it sounds soft. it is mechanical. you do the reps until the reaction changes.

success is your own definition. time freedom. financial independence. raising good kids. whatever it is for you. stop competing with somebody else’s definition. when they win, mean it when you say congrats. try harder.

Transcript

introduction to the episode

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. When you see someone else in your life is successful, whether this is your brother, your sister, a colleague, an old friend from high school, not like your best friend, you know, someone else, when you see them doing really well, are you genuinely happy or are you secretly pissed off and be truthful in answering that question?

discussing jealousy and success

This is the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon and let’s talk about that mindset a little bit. So if you’ve seen the movie, there will be blood. There’s a kind of a famous line in that movie. He says, there’s a competition in me. I don’t want anyone else to succeed in the great thing about writers, people who write lines like that.

They’re not pulling, you know, it’s a, it’s a fictitious character, whatever. They’re not pulling that out of thin air. It comes from human nature. There are plenty of people like that in this world who don’t want anyone else to succeed. They’re not actually happy when anyone else is doing well. They’re only happy when they’re doing well and they’re secretly happy when other people fall on hard times.

personal experiences with a scarcity mindset

I’ve seen this a lot over the years and to be honest, having dealt with all sorts of, you know, mindset issues myself between scarcity and abundance, I definitely had the, I don’t want anyone else to succeed mindset at one point in time. And I honestly think where that came from for me was being in the military when there really could only ever be one person like the number one, because everything they do in the military is a competition, whether you like it or not.

And you either have to, you know, work your ass off to become number one or, you know, try your hardest to become number one and everything’s going to get rank order. It doesn’t matter how good of friends you are, that you’re in class together. It doesn’t matter. Everyone is going to be, you know, stratified.

transitioning to an abundance mindset

You’re going to have a first place, second place, third place. And because I grew up kind of that in that environment, it made me not want other people to do well. But then as I moved to entrepreneurship, I realized how ridiculous that really was. And I really tried to root it out. And I feel like I really have, I honestly, now when people are doing well, I’m so happy for them.

I want everybody to be successful by their own measure of success. Not my measure of success, but their own measure. That means if that is an amount of free time that they have to spend with their family and they achieved that, or they have a certain level of financial freedom, whatever it is, if they’re successful in their own eyes, I am so happy for them because I know when, when things are going right and things are going well, people can be the best versions of themselves.

defining scarcity and abundance

They actually are their best, the best version of themselves. And again, it doesn’t have to be an amount of money. It could be anything. It can be time freedom. It can be, it could be anything that you deem successful. But when you get there and you feel that way, you’re able to make decisions differently.

You feel better. You feel more confident. Like everything starts to click a little bit more. And that’s why I want to see it for more people. But I don’t know what boat you’re in, right? Do you still struggle with a scarcity mindset? Because when I talk about scarcity and abundance, a lot of times people think this only has to do with finances.

how to begin changing your mindset

Like scarcity is I think money’s going to run out or abundance is there will always be more money. I can always go make more money. And that’s true. There’s a lot of like scarcity and abundance has scarcity and abundance mindsets has a ton to do with finance. But there’s this big other piece that is what we’re talking about is how do you actually feel when other people are successful?

Again, are you genuinely happy or are you secretly pissed off? And if something’s not going well for somebody, is there some deeper part of you that gets happy? It’s not good. That’s not a good place to be. So let’s talk about for all the people who may struggle with that. Maybe you have that competition in you.

introduction to gratitude practices

You just don’t want other people to do well. Maybe you’re similar to me. You have some sort of competitive sports background or military background and you do have that like deep down. I don’t think everybody out in the military or in competitive sports walks out that way because I know plenty of guys in the military who are awesome.

They’re happy when I do well. And so I’m not saying it happens to everyone. But if it has happened to you, I’m going to talk about one thing you can do. But if you’re not in that boat, you have no idea what I’m talking about. Just congratulations. This is me being legitimately happy for you because I’m so glad that you never had to deal with this kind of mindset issue before.

the impact of gratitude messages

Now for those of you who may feel like I have in the past and, you know, you don’t want anyone else to succeed. You always have to be number one. If you ever struggle with any of those kind of things and you are trying to get rid of that scarcity mindset, here’s something that has helped me a lot. Gratitude.

So not only a gratitude practice in the sense of maybe writing down what you’re grateful for every single morning, which by the way, is a phenomenal practice. If you want to get started in this, you’re not really sure where to start. You can go on Amazon. You can buy the five minute journal. It’s been around for a long time.

detailed explanation of how to personalize gratitude messages

It’s very simple. There’s a every page has the day portion and a night portion. And if you’re just now getting into like gratitude and trying to change your mindset, that’s a great place to start. So that’s the first thing I would have you do if you’re if you’re looking to, you know, start a gratitude practice, which will really help you with any kind of scarcity mindset.

The second thing you do are gratitude messages. This is something I have not been doing for very long. In comparison to like the gratitude journal side of things, I’ve been doing that for a very long time. But gratitude messages I picked up a while back. And I really think it’s a huge game changer because this isn’t writing down on a piece of paper.

the long-term benefits of mindset transformation

Yeah, I’m grateful for the food I had for breakfast or a good cup of coffee or my marriage or, you know, those things are you just kind of sitting there, you’re writing by yourself. But this gets you in the practice of celebrating other people and celebrating their wins. So gratitude messages is a message that you have to send.

You can set whatever frequency you want once a month, once a week, every single day really kind of depends on your network, your friends, whatever it is. And you just send someone in your life a message about how grateful you are for them. And I recommend that you reference one specific thing that they did.

That way, it’s not like not this generic, like, just for instance, say, or to send this to my dad. And I was like, Hey, Dad, you’ve been a great dad. You’ve always been there for me. Thank you so much. I love you. Now, granted, my dad would love that message, right? And that’s fine. You could send that to your parents or whoever in your life, but it’s not as impactful.

If you go one step further, and again, not I’m talking not for the other person I’m talking about for you specifically, because to me, a generic gratitude statement doesn’t really get to that deep subconscious level that we need to kind of change the scarcity mindset. So getting into a specific example.

So if I were to be like, Hey, Dad, you remember that one time and I was in the military and I was going through issue x, and I really needed to talk somebody, talk to somebody about it. And you were there for me every single day that I needed to talk to, talk to, you know, talk to someone about that you were there.

Thank you so much. That was such a tough time for me. And I never really told you how impactful that was in my life. So I really appreciate you being for me there in that moment. Do you see the difference in those gratitude statements? One is like a, you know, a Hallmark card that you could give to anyone.

And the other is a letter that only you could write. And again, these don’t, they don’t need to be a letter. It could be short, but get into the practice of doing this again, whatever frequency you want, put a reminder in your phone or an alarm clock once a week, every single week, every single month, something like that, put it in your calendar.

But this, these are the things, these small practices are what gets you out of the scarcity mindset. It’s what will move you from scarcity to abundance, not only in kind of the finance side where a lot of people struggle, struggle with it, but also the relationship side and that these little things, they sound silly, like they’re not going to work, but they do work.

And if you do them for long enough, you won’t even remember what it’s like to be the old version of yourself. Like me sitting here right now, I can, I can’t even really imagine going back and not being happy for somebody when they’re doing well, I guess I’m so happy when someone’s doing well, like I just want everyone in my life to do well.

I want everyone in this podcast who’s listening to this podcast right now. I want you to do well. I honestly, honestly mean that, but it’s been a long time. I didn’t always feel that way, but these small practices have worked on my mind for such a long period of time that I genuinely feel that way.

Now, these things aren’t easy and you’re going to have to do them every single day, daily over decades. And if you don’t want to do that, well, try harder.