People change when you succeed.

They’ll root for you, until you win.

Video version of this article if you prefer to watch vs read:

In 2017, I went to a music festival in San Bernardino with my friend group back home in the bay area.

One of my friend’s brothers that I started becoming close with that summer decided to come with us that year. I will call him “John” for this story.

It was one of the best weekends of my life. Everyone was having a great time.

John gave me a lot of great life advice because he was older than me, and we really connected on a deeper level. We basically hung out and chatted the entire time.

Then after the summer ended, I went back to San Diego state in the fall when school was back in session.

We still kept in touch for a little while, but eventually stopped talking because life gets busy, and it’s tough to maintain relationships 500 miles away.

Then in the summer of 2019, we all went back to the same music festival.

There was one major change that happened in my life between 2017 and 2019.

In 2018, I started my real estate career and closed my first few deals before this concert.

I posted about the deals on my instagram and linkedin to start building my personal brand online to generate more business.

John was a totally different person to me this time around.

I was excited to see him, and joyfully said hi to him, but I could tell from his facial expression and tone of voice that he wasn’t stoked to see me.

When we went to the concert, he never started conversations with me, he would only talk to our other friends, and he even made some nasty racial jokes about my nationality.

He made fun of me multiple times about my looks and my identity as an Asian American. I laughed it off, because everyone else laughed, but it was extremely hurtful.

I remember one of the girls, who was also half Asian, looking absolutely disgusted at what he was saying to me.

All of my guy friends and I had VIP passes, and the girls did not get VIP passes for the festival.

When all of the guys went to the VIP section, I felt bad for the women, so I paid a few hundred dollars to upgrade them to VIP.

On the car ride home with everyone, John made a joke about how I was a simp and a loser for paying for those ticket upgrades.

At the time, I was so confused…

Because it wasn’t just John. All of my friends acted more distant towards me. I felt alone that entire weekend, and wanted to go home as soon as I could.

Where was this hate coming from? It wasn’t until recently when I really reflected on what happened during therapy.

I didn’t do anything wrong. It was John’s fragile ego bursting out in flames because it felt threatened by a younger kid who was having more success than him.

In early adulthood, everything seems like a competition. It’s a big ego show off.

Competition about who’s making more money, who can drink the most alcohol without passing out or throwing up, who’s going on the most vacations, who has the hottest women, blah blah blah.

All surface level bull shit that no one should even think about.

Comparison is the thief of joy.

Everyone is on their own journey. I make a conscious effort to never judge people on a different path or get angry at people ahead of me.

Don’t get me wrong, I am human too, I have those lingering thoughts, but being conscious of them and redirecting them to productive action is a super power.

If status and competition with others is your primary motivation and driver, you will burn out before you even get to the starting line.

You’ll burn out the 2nd week of practice.

I’ll never forget one of my old coworkers at the commercial real estate company I started at.

When I first started, I thought this guy was the absolute man. I thought he was the guy to look up to and saw him as one of my role models.

Everyone said he was young and crushing it, and he became a senior broker very quickly.

He was a nice guy and I liked him a lot. I have nothing bad to say about him, but I could tell that his motivation for working was much different than mine.

He would shop for cars all the time at work, look at fancy watches, talk about his $1,000 dinners, and was a very materialistic person.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but it seemed like his work ethic had dwindled when he had all of the nice things.

I haven’t seen him do a lot of business in a long time.

Again, I am not judging, but this is one of multiple instances where I have seen someone work really hard for status and nice things, and the motivation eventually fades.

It’s really hard for a person to come into work every day and grind when that person’s only motivation to work is to get the new Porsche or the house that has 1 more bedroom a little bit higher up on the hill.

When I made my first stupid purchase in 2022, a brand new Mercedes coupe, I felt like the absolute man at first as well.

But after a week, it became just a car. The ego high faded and I felt like an idiot for wasting so much money on a car.

Not only that, but it put a target on my back. My old career was selling apartment complexes in rougher neighborhoods around town.

When people see you pull up in a nice car, they take another look at you.

Drawing attention in these areas is not fun, trust me.

Not only that, but I thought my clients would think more highly of me for driving a nice car.

Boy, was I wrong.

When I walked into my second appointment with the new car, my prospective client who was one of the wealthiest landlords in San Diego drove up in an old Jeep.

After the meeting, he saw me open my car door and he had a dirty look on his face.

I should have just gotten the Toyota Camry.

People will root for you if you are the young and hungry person that just took a risk to start your own business or go into a new career.

People want you to succeed, but not more than them.

This becomes an incredibly difficult concept to navigate when you become more successful than your best friend, and now he or she starts acting differently towards you.

My advice: He or she was never a real friend.

A true best friend will root for you no matter what the circumstances and be on your side.

My best friends that I still keep in touch with have always been there for me and we barely ever talk about work. We catch up about what’s happening in our personal lives.

Work is only 25% of our life. Family, friends, and faith are much more important than our work life, but it’s the only way we measure success in modern day society.

When I was hyper scaling my last company, you could say I was a success work wise, but I was a failure in all other aspects of my life.

I was a 75% failure, and a 25% success.

I do believe that work success is unhealthy when you sacrifice every other aspect of your life that brings you joy.

But, on the flip side, never settle and lower your goals and dreams because your mom or your best friend expressed their fears to you by saying you’re making a “big mistake” or taking a “huge risk.”

The biggest risk in life is settling and never becoming the best version of yourself that you knew you could become, instead you let others decide for you to stay average to maintain surface level relationships.

Thanks for reading. I’d love to know if you have ever experienced something similar in your life.

I always love reading and responding to your comments / thoughts. I hope you have an amazing week ahead.