The Greatest Paradox of Becoming Wealthy

The following was taken from an answer I recently posted on Quora:

Becoming wealthy create conditions that make it very easy for you to become petty, or to become an asshole and stop treating everyone with the respect they deserve.

One of the best analogies for the human psyche that I have heard is that it operates like a thermostat. Our emotions are calibrated such that we have internal emotional cadences, where we will spend a certain amount of our time happy, a certain time stressed out, sad, etc. I believe our emotions evolved to focus our energies on solving the problems we needed to solve in order to survive - finding enough food and shelter, finding a mate, protecting young children against a harsh world, etc. When you are struggling for survival, this focuses your energies on solving the hard problems necessary to ensure you can put food on the table and provide shelter for your family. In the face of these challenges, we form highly collaborative relationships with those around us as we need their help in solving the problems of survival.

The early days of a start up, which is a modern version of the struggle for survival, create an environment for collaboration to thrive, and where strong relationships are forged in the trenches as you struggle mightily together.

We spent our first seven years in a scratching, clawing fight for survival. I think there were two months where we knew we had the utility bill paid for the entire month on the first. We had clear adversaries - The forces arranged against us that threatened our very survival. These adversaries took the form of simple every day challenges such as lack of sufficient revenue, challenges in acquiring customers, challenges in scaling our manufacturing… These adversaries were not individual people, but all of the factors you have to figure out or your organization will not survive.

I met my wife in the darkest of days, when I had emotionally thrown in the towel and was preparing to shut down the business. In retrospect, these were the greatest times of my life, and I think many of the other people would tell you the exact same thing. We were living a great story, the protagonists in an epic struggle. Our lives had all the excitement of a great movie, we were living the adrenaline rush that draws us all to the theater to see great stories told.

Then, we hit the turning point. Our third product launch was a major success. And within two years, we had gone from financial insolvency to an IPO and over the next four years we became the top performing publicly traded stock in the world. Many of us experienced life-changing amounts of wealth. I’m not gonna lie, it was epic. The rush of success after years of failure was fantastic.

After a few months, your brain adjusts to your new surroundings. The euphoria of success comes in the moment of change, as you transition from one state of struggle into one of great success. But after the state change has passed, you adjust to the new normal. I remember one day, I was driving down the street and I looked at the car next to me. They were gawking and pointing excitedly at my car. I sat back, and laughed at myself realizing I was driving in a Lamborghini, the same car I had fantasized about with posters on my wall as a child. But my brain had adjusted, it was now just my car. In that moment, I realized you have to make a conscious effort to sit back and take the time to appreciate all of the wonderful things around you when they are no longer new sensations.

Into this new environment, you bring your self. Your original self, including your primitive emotions and psyche. The same emotions that served you well in the struggle for survival now begin to struggle with nothing to struggle against. Your brain reaches out, seeking that against which you must struggle. There must be some conflict that threatens your existence, but where has it gone? Suddenly, you find yourself getting irritated or angry about small things that you would never have noticed back in your deep struggle for survival. But now, those small annoyances are the only challenges left. Many of these annoyances appear in the relationships with the people around you. So whereas external struggles forge great relationships, the lack of external adversarial forces leaves your brain searching for adversaries… and it will find them.

It has become cliché that rich people become petty, and their families political. Add on top of this that, once you achieve success, people start to treat you differently. People who used to ignore you, now approach you with compliments and accolades. If you don’t pay attention to your internal state and stay humble, it’s easy to start to believe these compliments and accolades and arrogance will start to emerge. You notice that you don’t have to be as nice to people as you used to, both in work and in your personal life, people become more deferential to you. The normal indicators that you are being an asshole go away. People will put up with rude, curt behaviors they would not have tolerated when you were just one of the crowd.

In this environment, it’s easy to devolve into the caricature of the rich prick we see in literature and film.

When you make the effort to frame your world through a lens of gratefulness, and you pause to appreciate the amazing things in your life, and to appreciate the very lack of survival stress that can free your mind to relax and enjoy life, having wealth can be as wonderful as you imagined it would be. But you have to first survive the post transition challenges where your mind is telling you life can’t be as good as it seems, and your subconscious starts nit picking the world and people around you to explain your internal emotional state.

As human beings, the source of happiness and fulfillment comes from the relationships with the people around us. We are truly social animals. The greatest risk of becoming wealthy, is that you no longer need those relationships the way you did when you were struggling for survival. If you devalue those relationships, and define happiness in terms of acquiring even greater wealth, that is a recipe for misery. There is always someone wealthier than you, and if you take the comparison mindset, you can always find ways to be unhappy with yourself and your position in life. And you will have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

I like to think that I have survived the transition. But the only way we could know for sure is to talk to the people around me, and see how they would answer that question when I’m not in the room.