How to turn jealousy into a career superpower

I’ve been feeling grossly inadequate, career-wise. Some of this has been driven by my perception that the economy is failing and I’m going down with it, and my addiction to reading industry trends on LinkedIn.

Don’t get me wrong, I love LinkedIn. The anticipation of logging on and, fingers crossed, earning my long-awaited prize of a new client, job invite or contract is what drives me. But lately, I’ve been opening up to anxiety-inducing posts like, “Last night, an AI destroyed my career opportunities, but now I have a million-dollar business,” or “My startup sold for $20 million, and I’m an investor now,” and “I built an app that was so dumb, and then a community of millions downloaded it; here’s how I did it!” or “I just earned a massive sponsorship and partnership with [name your favorite celebrity],” and I just lost it.

The upside of envy

It seems like everyone but me is thriving in their new super-fab job, reaping the benefits of AI, or sharing highly informed commentary on a topic I know nothing about; then I see 15,000 engaging comments on their posts! Some people take selfies, use skin filters, and celeb-obsess on Instagram. But for me, I’m all about LinkedIn and it’s been killing my creator spirit. But the real truth is very painful and inconvenient: I am coldly and blisteringly envious.  

Warren Buffet quipped: “As an investor, you get something out of all the deadly sins—except for envy. Being envious of someone else is pretty stupid. Wishing them badly, or wishing you did as well as they did—all it does is ruin your day. Doesn’t hurt them at all, and there’s zero upside to it.”

But what if you could prevent this awful feeling, and turn it into a business opportunity? Even when you aren’t religious, this quote from the bible makes sense: “For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice,” James 3:16. Right now, jealousy seems to be at an all-time high in the United States. 

Some people are having such extreme career and financial success these days. If you are like me, you scratch your head daily and ask yourself, “How they are doing this amid layoffs and a souring political and economic environment?” And then, “What am I doing wrong that I can’t succeed too? Don’t I deserve success? I work so hard.” 

I imagine that many of you who are reading this are, like me, not feeling successful or satisfied. I know this to be true because after I read yet another “I’m winning” post, I go right to the comments. I’m not seeing the glass half full when comments I read are lined with the bitterness of regret and the sour taste of envy. You know those posts, the ones where the first comment makes a resentful or snarky complaint about the privileged, the well-connected, or the trust fund baby, or how they slept their way to the top. The morally upright you tries to dismiss such comments, but the envy in us feels some satisfaction knowing that we are not alone. 

Feeling envious or jealous is no way to work or grow a brand or a business. At some point, it will consume your entrepreneurial spirit, your happiness, and your time, just like it did mine. But I decided to repackage how to approach my feelings of envy, and it placed me on a path of professional and creative recovery. Give these five ideas a try to see if they help you like they are helping me.

1. Define success

Have we forgotten how to do this since we are so focused on other people? Do you define success as financial stability and comfort, or do you define it as having optimal health? Maybe you define success as finding hope, happiness, and abundance even in moments of despair? What does the outcome look like and what does it feel like for you? Defining your own version of success can arm you against self-pity, anger, and most certainly envy. Your version of success will be unique to you. 

After you define what success is for you, put the vision of success at the beginning of a journey map or flowchart and backtrack to get to where you are now. I find that seeing success first can prevent stagnation. As you build toward your vision of success, know that you will find “envy potholes” filled with people who  appear to have already reached the goals you’ve been trying to reach for yourself. You may feel that the grass is greener on the other side, and that might be true. But this part of the story is about you finding a place in your own heart first—where you can see your own success on paper and begin to act.

2. Embrace social comparison

Social media, with repeated use and exposure, makes us feel that we know successful people like they are friends, and that they see us. Social media is not real, and the people we see on it are not our friends. This actually reminds me of the woman on the plane who screamed “That MF is not real!” Remember her crash out the next time you see a person social posting their perfection. But scrolling with the intention to conduct research can help you learn, copy, admire, then repackage what you’ve learned to align with your own brand. Study competitive products, watch how your perceived competitor creates content, read their posts, add them to a social media monitoring platform and run analytics. Study, study, and study more. Become a student of your jealousy. Identifying insights instead of flaws is empowering—not spiritually depleting and extractive. Copy what you are jealous of and apply your own creativity to it. Replacing your competitiveness with curiosity will be a mental and career game changer.

Of course, you could put blinders on and never consume anyone else’s success content to keep your sanity. But if you are in business and are an entrepreneur like me, you’ll need to use all your social media tools for business outreach and to broadcast what problems you’re solving for others. 

3. Express gratitude

Speaking your gratitude out loud instantly changes your energy. Have you noticed that when you doomscroll you forget where you are and your surroundings go dark? I combat this when I do my morning runs. The first 10 minutes I express thanks for my health, my children, whatever is left over in my bank account, my current clients, current contracts—no matter how small, the sun, moon, air, trees, and light. I also use a mantra. One of my mantras is I will bring health and wealth to Birk Creative this quarter.

Gratitude and mantras pull me from barbed wire thoughts and back to the present moment, which is always the best place to be. Force yourself to speak positivity into existence. What also works for me is to put away my screens, take a deep breath, relax my shoulders, roll my neck, and stretch. This helps me to remember I am a human and connected to the earth. 

4. Beat the algorithm

Nope. There’s no way to beat the algorithm, but you can try to trick it. Force yourself to not look at, linger on, or tap at content that triggers your envy. Find and like content that is the opposite of what you typically consume. Click “like” on things that bring you joy, a smile, or a laugh. Just make sure something about it brings you to a place of learning that lines up with your vision of success. 

Focus on your body’s response to this feeling. Does your body relax or tense up? Do you keep scrolling or do you hang on and rewatch? Rewatching content to understand it is better for this exercise than empty scrolling to the next post. There’s no way to stop unwanted content on social media channels from showing up, but you can program new content. 

Delete an app and don’t visit it for a few days, maybe a week, and then reinstall it. Visit the profile of a person you are jealous of—make a screen shot and repost something of theirs you like or recreate it to add your own spin. Experiment with this strategy every day for at least a week. 

As another idea, look for business inspiration quotes and like them or repost them. Prompt an LLM to give you five quotes on positivity, then plug them into Canva to make your own positivity quotes. Write an essay based on the quotes; relate it to your experience and share it. What’s your favorite color? Prompt and create a beautiful image online that includes your favorite color and use that image to accompany the post. Here’s a prompt: A [fill in your color] flower floats above the ocean, under a [fill in your favorite color] sky with white fluffy clouds [water color painting style]. Use this image to accompany your essay; post it to your favorite social media channel.

Stumbling across someone else’s path of success can distract you with jealousy. Instead, try to find just one thing to authentically celebrate about the person or product you are jealous of. You know the saying: If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. Make a habit of finding something nice to say to combat your envy. 

5. Create or refine your own brand

If there was ever a time to get to know AI it would be right now. Even if you are tired of hearing about professional branding, creating your own is the one thing that will keep you from looking outward and being jealous and force you to look within and reinvent yourself. A professional and personal brand also helps to keep focused on creating your own platform for business growth and personal development. 

For those with a reservoir of content, go back to your saved articles, essays, YouTube videos, and social media posts, and repurpose them all using an AI tool like Whisper, Opus if it’s video, or Perplexity. Copy the words or YouTube link, paste it in the AI tool, and prompt it to create fresh buckets of bite-sized content that you can share. Or feed it to the AI and ask it to analyze your content and write your new professional brand statement. (To accompany this article, I created a playlist on YouTube called Songs to Help You Not Be Jealous.)

Use these tools to help you hone in on what you are good at by reviewing your content or by helping you write new content. Be honest, talk about your interests and your skills with these AI tools; use them to help you create a fresh personal brand even if you’ve never had one. The exercise here is to get you to navel gaze a little bit and focus on your own ideas in order to avoid becoming lost in greener pastures.

Transform your thoughts

The bottom line is there’s no real way to avoid business envy and jealousy. Unless you are the rare person able to feel altruistic joy for someone else’s success, it’s unrealistic to not wish that what somebody has could be yours. But each time you see something that you’re jealous of or envious of, transform your thoughts and actions, learn from them, express gratitude, and create away. Eventually, if you stay consistent with learning, your professional jealousy will turn into greater self-awareness, which most often leads to your vision of success.