Stop Counting Other People's Money: It's Making You Poor
By Derek Neighbors on November 3, 2025
I caught myself mid-scroll at 2:47 AM, my chest tight, jaw clenched, refreshing someone’s LinkedIn profile for the third time that hour.
They’d just announced their Series B funding. $18 million. Three years after launch. I’d calculated it all: their runway, their team size, their burn rate. I knew their metrics better than my own.
Forty-five minutes I’d spent in that spiral. Forty-five minutes I could have spent writing code, refining my product, talking to customers. Instead, I was building a mental case file on someone else’s success while my own work sat untouched in another browser tab.
This wasn’t research. It was theft. I was stealing creative energy from myself and handing it to them for free.
You’re not building anything while you’re busy counting what others have built.
The Pattern That Drains You
Envy doesn’t just feel bad. It actively steals the fuel you need for your own work.
The Greeks had two words that matter here. Phthonos, destructive envy that diminishes both others and yourself. And zelos, productive emulation that studies excellence to cultivate your own.
Phthonos focuses on what they have that you lack. Zelos focuses on what they did that you can learn. One drains energy. One channels it.
The difference isn’t philosophical, it’s practical. One creates more work from you. The other creates more excuses.
Every minute you spend calculating their advantages is a minute you’re not creating your own. This isn’t emotional damage we’re talking about, though that’s real. This is the compound cost of days, weeks, months lost to scorekeeping instead of building.
That 2:47 AM spiral? It wasn’t the first time. It was the hundredth. I’d lost weeks to that pattern. Weeks I could have spent becoming the person whose success someone else envies.
The Ways We Avoid Building
The Competitive Accountant
You know their numbers better than your own. Their follower count, their funding rounds, their customer metrics, their speaking gigs. You’ve got a mental spreadsheet that tracks every win, every milestone, every public achievement.
The entrepreneur obsessing over their competitor’s funding while their own product stagnates. The creator who can recite another’s subscriber count but hasn’t published in weeks. The leader who knows exactly which peer got promoted but hasn’t improved their own team’s performance.
You tell yourself it’s competitive intelligence. The spreadsheet grows while your work stagnates.
Analyzing feels productive. Research feels like progress. Calculating their unfair advantages lets you avoid facing your unrealized potential. The truth-seeking is a cover for work avoidance.
Seneca understood this two millennia ago: comparing yourself to others is volunteering to be tortured by your own mind. You’re the torturer and the victim, and you chose this.
The Advantage Cataloger
You’ve built an airtight case for why they succeeded and why you can’t.
Their connections. Their resources. Their timing. Their luck. Their unfair advantages. You’ve documented every single edge they had that you lack. You’ve built a comprehensive presentation on the systematic ways the universe favored them over you.
The writer listing every advantage the bestselling author has instead of writing their next chapter. The leader cataloging every resource their peer has that they lack instead of optimizing what they do have.
Here’s what you’re actually doing: building evidence for your own powerlessness.
Every advantage you identify becomes another reason not to try. You’re not seeking truth about the market or understanding competitive dynamics. You’re constructing an alibi for why you haven’t built what you’re capable of building.
You’re using comparison to justify not competing.
The Success Validator
When you can’t dismiss their success, you diminish it.
They got lucky with timing. Their investors were well-connected. They compromised quality for growth. They’re good at marketing, not at the actual craft. You search for the angle that makes their achievement less legitimate.
The developer dismissing the successful founder’s achievement as “just marketing” instead of learning how marketing works. The leader attributing their peer’s promotion to politics instead of examining what political skill actually means.
The analysis serves ego protection, not truth-seeking.
Diminishing their achievement doesn’t elevate yours. Every calorie you burn finding flaws in their success is a calorie you didn’t invest in building your own. The flaw-finding isn’t truth-seeking, it’s defensive armor against the discomfort of watching someone do what you said you’d do.
Plutarch noted that envy is the only vice that brings no pleasure, only pain. You don’t even get the satisfaction of the high. Just the drain of the spiral.
The Parallel Universe Player
You live in the conditional tense.
If you’d had their connections, you’d have built something bigger. If you’d started when they did, you’d be further along. If you had their resources, you’d have already won. You’re rehearsing alternative histories where you have their advantages and they have your constraints.
The artist imagining gallery success with another’s connections instead of making their next piece. The leader fantasizing about what they’d accomplish with their peer’s budget instead of maximizing their own.
The brutal truth: rehearsing alternative histories replaces building actual reality.
Every “if only” is creative energy diverted from “what now.” You can’t create in the conditional. You can only create with what you actually have, right now, in the circumstances you’re actually in.
While you’re imagining what you’d do with their advantages, they’re building the next thing with the advantages you’re wishing for.
Why We Keep Doing What We Know Is Theft
The Greeks had a word for this: akrasia. Weakness of will. Knowing what’s right and doing the opposite anyway.
You know the comparison spiral is costing you. You can calculate the hours lost, the projects stalled, the gap between who you are and who you could be. The knowledge doesn’t stop the behavior.
This is what makes envy different from other forms of self-sabotage. It doesn’t promise pleasure. It doesn’t even offer temporary relief. Plutarch was right: envy is the only vice that brings no satisfaction, only suffering. You’re choosing pain you know is pain.
Why?
Because building your own thing requires you to face the possibility of failure that’s entirely yours. Their success is proof someone can win. Watching them is easier than risking becoming proof that you can’t. The comparison spiral protects you from the moment of truth where you put your work into the world and discover what you’re actually capable of.
You’re not seeking information about them. You’re avoiding information about yourself.
What Actually Works
The way out isn’t to stop noticing success. It’s to redirect the energy.
I caught myself in that 2:47 AM spiral because I’ve learned to recognize the physical sensation. Tight chest. Clenched jaw. Racing thoughts in a comparison loop. Time dilation, what feels like five minutes has been forty-five.
That night, I made a choice. I closed the tab. Not because I’m enlightened, but because I’ve done this enough times to know the cost. I opened my own work instead. I put one commit into the codebase. Just one. I redirected the energy from their metrics to my creation.
It didn’t feel noble. It felt difficult. The pull to go back to their profile was physical. But that one commit mattered more than any insight I was going to get from their announcement.
Two nights later, I failed. Caught myself an hour deep in someone else’s X thread, building the same mental case file. The awareness didn’t stop it immediately. I had to close the tab three times before I could keep it closed. The pattern doesn’t disappear after one win. You’re training against years of habit.
Here’s the method that works:
Notice the energy drain. Your body knows before your mind admits it. Tight chest, clenched jaw, racing thoughts stuck in comparison loops. Check the clock, how long have you been in this spiral? That’s the tax you’re paying.
Name what you’re avoiding. What work are you not doing while you watch them? What difficulty are you escaping by obsessing over their success? What fear drives this comparison? The pattern serves a purpose, it lets you feel busy while avoiding the actual work that scares you.
Redirect the energy to your own work. Close the comparison tab. Open your own project. Put one piece of work into the world. Not ten pieces. One. Channel the energy that was leaking out into one unit of creation. If you must study their success, ask: What can I learn that serves my craft? That’s zelos, productive emulation, not phthonos.
Track your creation, not their metrics. Daily question: What did I build today? Not what did they accomplish. Not where they rank. What did I create that didn’t exist yesterday? Progress is personal, not comparative.
The Greeks understood what we keep forgetting: arete, excellence, is about your highest potential, not your relative position. You’re not competing with them. You’re competing with your own unrealized capability. Greatness only competes with itself.
The only meaningful comparison is who you are today versus who you could become tomorrow.
Questions That Expose the Pattern
How much time did you spend this week tracking others’ success versus building your own?
What project would be further along if you’d invested your comparison energy into creation?
Can you name three things you’re avoiding by staying busy with comparison?
What would change if you redirected that energy to your own work for thirty days?
The Challenge
Seven days. No tracking others’ metrics, wins, or updates.
Every time you feel the pull to check their progress, create one piece of your own work instead. One commit. One paragraph. One conversation with a customer. One unit of forward motion.
At week’s end, compare your output to the previous week. The only metric that matters: Did you create more or less?
Final Thoughts
Envy is expensive. It costs you the exact energy you need for excellence.
You can count their money or build your own wealth. Not both. The hours don’t multiply. The energy doesn’t expand. Every moment watching them is a moment not becoming who you’re capable of being.
Marcus Aurelius understood the mathematics:
How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself.
Their success doesn’t subtract from your potential. Your envy does.
The person you’re studying isn’t thinking about you. They’re too busy building their next thing while you’re analyzing their last one. They’ve already moved on to the next challenge while you’re still cataloging their advantages.
Your excellence doesn’t need their failure. It needs your focus.
You don’t need another metric to track or another insight into someone else’s success. You need a mirror that shows you what you’re actually avoiding, a forge that forces you to build instead of analyze, and a crew that won’t let you hide in the comparison spiral. That’s what MasteryLab is for. Not another program. A place where the work of building your own excellence becomes harder to avoid than watching someone else’s.
