Today I want to talk about something that really can pull everybody down, and that is jealousy in business as well as personal life. Now, by jealousy, there are two types I’m talking about: You can be jealous of others, and others can be jealous of you. In either case, it can be debilitating. I want to go through how you can prevent either one of them negatively affecting you. In actuality, I want to explain how to use jealousy in a positive way.

First, and most important is that they really do something to you both physically and mentally. They can make you angry, aggressive, depressed, etc., a whole bunch of things. As jealousy increases, your potential for success declines. Sometimes jealousy is a mental safety mechanism, in a sense, because you’re feeling a little jealous, you act as a way of realizing or accepting the fact that you’re not going to succeed in something, but let’s get that aside because we’re going for personal and business success.

First, one of the things that happens is others get desirable things that you don’t, somebody else gets something you don’t, whether it be a job, or a position, or whatever they got. First of all, life’s not fair. You’ve heard it over and over again. Get over it. But we have to go beyond that. You want to increase the odds that you’re going to get the things that you really desire. How do you increase those odds?

First of all, what is jealousy? By its very nature, if you’re jealous, it is a comparison to somebody else. Remember what I’ve said in previous episodes: The best way to succeed is you already know what you don’t know about a particular subject, you know what your weaknesses are within a certain area or expertise, so competing with yourself is far more productive and better than to be looking at somebody else. The only way you look at somebody else is to learn from others. If you have the slightest feeling of envy or jealousy, you should be identifying what it is and how you can learn. Why even compare yourself to others, except to learn and understand how to do something?

Also, a jealous person emits negative emotions that makes them both undesirable and undesirable to be around. A person will rarely receive help and any support if they’re extremely jealous or they emit these feelings that other people don’t like. What we want talk about is how to convert jealousy.

First eliminate the idea of the lottery. If somebody goes and wins the lottery and you’re jealous of them, that’s kind of silly, because when you think about it, what’s the chances of winning the lottery anyway? Something like 1 in 200 million? So really you’re going to be jealous about something…? If you’re actually putting your money into the lottery, you’ve got to go back to episode one and start over on the whole series, because if you’re putting any money at all in the lottery, you really have to go back and get yourself together, because that’s the way to actually just waste money. If you put that same money aside, you would get someplace.

Holding onto jealousy does no good either. We know that, so we need to expel it quickly, get rid of it quickly. Not just get rid of it, but get rid of it quickly. This isn’t something that’s over weeks; this is something that’s over seconds. First, change the perception. Yes, if you end up being jealous of something that somebody else earned, you really should be admiring what they are doing, or what happened, or how they got there, and/or how you can learn from it. The person who had success: What skills did they have? What did they do? How did they do it? How did they learn to do it? Yes, there are some places where you could say: “Well, the person was just in the right place at the right time.