Avoiding the Pitfalls of Success: How to Stay Grounded & Connected | Morgan Housel EP 621

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes, and welcome to The Daily Motivation Show.

0:11So once you started making an abundance more money than you had before, did you feel social debt? Did you feel people reaching out to you? Did you feel more nonprofits saying, hey, donate, friends, family? Did you feel this responsibility to give in certain ways? What happened to you? I feel like, by and large, the answer is no, because I don't think I have any close friends who I didn't know before. the books came out, which was really important. We live in the same house with the same neighbors, the vast majority of whom don't even know that I'm an author, which is great. I love that, that everyone just treats you normally.

0:46They've either known you for so long or they don't know what you do to treat you normally. There's this great quote from Matt Damon where he says, the day that you become famous, you retard socially and emotionally. Really? Because everyone treats you differently. Most social growth happens when you get treated poorly or you to use don't get what you want. Maybe it's in a breakup or, you know, you get humiliated somehow and then you grow socially. You have to develop yourself. But if you're surrounded by yes men and people who just want something out of you, it's different. I'll tell you one experience I had in this.

1:18At Collaborative Fund, where I work, years ago, I used to be active on the deal side, making venture capital investments. And I noticed that when a founder was talking to me and pitching to me, the way that they treated me, totally different. All of a sudden, every one of my jokes was funnier than it actually was. They were so polite. They were so, oh, that's so smart what you just said because they want your money. And then so you take that to whatever extreme when you have some net worth or some notoriety that people want something out of you, even if it's well-meaning and they're good people.

1:50And so I think to the extent that you can avoid that is really important. So you didn't feel this sense of social debt necessarily, but why do a lot of people feel this social debt concept? I do think if you gain some money and you use that as a lot lot of people do, and I don't blame them for doing this to buy a huge house and a nice car and a nice watch and nice clothes. You do that with this not bad idea of like, I overcame where I was before, and I want people to know it. I want people to see me in my nice car. And I think it's very hard to understand and hard to see the balance between you think that they are admiring you, but you're actually fostering envy.

2:27When you're driving around in your Porsche, you think they're like, ooh, look at him, he's successful. But actually they're like, man, I wish I had that car. Why does he get it and I don't? He's not smarter than me. That happens a lot. And I think that is a form of social debt in itself. Really? And what's hard about social debt is that you're by and large blind to it. You don't even know it's there. You're driving down the street and you think everyone's looking at you. And A, they're probably not. But when they are, they're probably like, it's envy. You want to do everything you can to avoid envy in life.

2:56There's a great Benjamin Franklin quote. He says he realized early on that he would be more successful if people were not jealous of him. And Ben Franklin was ridiculously successful in every endeavor he had. If there's anyone who could have flaunted how smart he was, it was him. And he went so far out of his way to say, no, no, no, no, that's not, that's who I am. And it was strategic. Like, people will help you more if they're not jealous of you. You know, the School of Greatest community has donated a lot of schools for charities over the last 13 years. And I kind of have this philosophy of, like, 50 % share and talk about it when you do it to inspire others to give.

3:31but don't always share what you're doing in it to brag that you're giving and you're like this good person. Yeah. It's like the dance of like, here are sales numbers. Look how great this book has done. If you haven't bought a copy, you should buy it. Yep. Versus I'm the greatest author in the world. Look at me. That's tough, right? And even if it's not that black and white, it's actually really hard to know where the boundaries are. It's tricky, man. You know, take an A-list celebrity. If Adam Sandler went on Twitter and he was like, my movies are selling, So you'd be like, Adam, we know. We know who you are.

4:03Like, we know you're successful. You don't need to rub it in my face. So I think once you reach some level, you should shut up. But it's hard to know where that level is. Why are people so focused on the greed of earning and making more versus investing more in the relationships they already have? I think money is such a tangible yardstick. You can measure it down to the penny. And you can compare it to others. Your net worth is$1 ,000. Mine's$1 ,001. Therefore, I'm better than you. It's so easy to measure. But how do you measure how much your kids love you? There's no metric to be like, oh, they love me as a 3.4.

4:40You can't measure it. So it's easy to ignore it. Even if you know it's so important in your life, how do you measure your relationship with your spouse, the quality of your marriage, in the same way that you can measure your annual paycheck? So I think just the quantification of money gives it this false importance. For most people, the most important decision they will ever make in life is whether, when, and whom to marry. They never teach that in school because you can't. And the reason you can is because you can't distill it down to a formula like you can in trigonometry. So things that can't easily be quantified tend to be ignored at the expense of less important things that can be quantified.

5:15If you could create a formula for whether, when, and who to marry, what would that formula be? I think it's different for everybody. I met my wife based off of total dumb blind luck. Not only do we meet by blind luck, but just another form of blind luck that we see eye to eye on finance, religion, kids, all like the very important things. We're like, oh yeah, that's exactly how I think too. Like, great, we're all set. Don't need to talk about this again. I think if there is some like common denominator of a great relationship, I have a friend named Brent Bishore who says, your relationship is great when both you and your spouse devote your life to serving the other person and expect nothing in return.

5:51So if I say like, I'm here to make your life better and I don't expect you to make my life better, But you both do that, then you're both pleasantly surprised. You're like, wow, you're helping me, and I didn't expect it. And your spouse is like, you're helping me too, and I didn't expect it. Nothing kills a relationship or a career like being needy. Because that's the opposite. It's like, I expect you to help me. Your job is to help me. Since relationships have evolved from what they were historically, which was basically a business partnership. I'm going to work, and you're going to make kids, and that's our business partnership.

6:21And now it has, thankfully, evolved into more of a bond of love. What that has done is I think it has created a lot of false expectations that your spouse is saying you expect them to solve your problems. I expect you to be my emotional support. I expect you to be my rock. I expect you to be my X, Y, and Z, which is too much of a burden to put on 99 % of people. So if you want to help them without expecting in return, I think that's a huge key to it. Wow.

6:55Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving The Daily Motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcast right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

7:44Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.