The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

Envy Triggers
Although certain types are more prone to envy, you must also be aware
that there are circumstances that will tend to trigger envy in almost
anyone. You must be extra alert in such situations.
The most common trigger is a sudden change in your status, which
alters your relationship to friends and peers. This is particularly true
among people in your own profession. This has been known for a long
time. As Hesiod noted in the eighth century BC, “The potter envies the
potter, the craftsman the craftsman, the writer the writer.” If you
experience success, those in your field who have similar aspirations but
who are still struggling will naturally feel envious. You should be
reasonably tolerant of this because if the tables were reversed, you
would probably feel the same. Do not take so personally their faint
praise and veiled criticisms. But be aware that among some of these
peers envy can turn active and dangerous.
Renaissance artists who suddenly got commissions became targets
for envious rivals, who could turn quite vicious. Michelangelo clearly
envied the younger and talented Raphael and did what he could to
sully his reputation and block his commissions. Writers are
notoriously envious of other writers, particularly those with more
lucrative deals.
The best you can do in such situations is to have some self-
deprecating humor and to not rub people’s faces in your success,
which, after all, might contain some elements of luck. In fact, when
discussing your success with others who might envy you, always
emphasize or play up the element of luck. For those closest to you,
offer to help them in their struggles as best you can, without appearing
patronizing. In a similar vein, never make the mistake of praising a
writer in front of another writer, or an artist in front of an artist, unless
the person being praised is dead. If you detect signs of a more active
envy in peers, get as far away from them as possible.
Keep in mind that people who are getting older, with their careers
on the decline, have delicate egos and are quite prone to experiencing

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envy.
Sometimes it is people’s natural gifts and talents that will stir up the
most intense forms of envy. We can strive to become proficient in a
field, but we cannot reengineer our physiology. Some people are born
with better looks, more raw athletic skill, an unusually vivid
imagination, or an open and generous nature. If people with natural
gifts also possess a good work ethic and have some luck in life, envy
will follow them wherever they go. Often making it worse for such
types, they also tend to be quite naive. They themselves do not feel
envy toward others, so they cannot understand the emotion at all.
Unaware of the dangers, they naturally display their talents and attract
even more envy. Mary Shelley was all of this—gifted with a brilliant
imagination and superior intellectual capabilities, and also quite naive.
What is worse, envying types secretly loathe those who are immune to
feeling envy. It makes their envious nature doubly apparent to
themselves and stirs the desire to hurt and wound.
If you have any natural gifts that elevate you above others, you must
be aware of the dangers and avoid flaunting such talents. Instead you
want to strategically reveal some flaws to blunt people’s envy and mask
your natural superiority. If you are gifted in the sciences, make it clear
to others how you wish you had more social skills. Show your
intellectual clumsiness at subjects outside your expertise.
John F. Kennedy seemed almost too perfect to the American public.
So handsome, intelligent, and charismatic, and with such a beautiful
wife—it was hard to identify with or like him. As soon as he made his
big mistake in the failed invasion of Cuba (known as the Bay of Pigs)
early on in his administration, and took full responsibility for the
debacle, his poll numbers skyrocketed. The mistake had humanized
him. Although this was not done by design, you can have a similar
effect by discussing the mistakes you have made in the past and
showing some selective awkwardness in certain areas that do not
diminish your overall reputation.
Women who achieve success and fame are more prone to attracting
envy and hostility, although this will always be veiled as something else
—such women are said to be too cold, or ambitious, or unfeminine.
Oftentimes we choose to admire people who achieve great things,
admiration being the opposite of envy. We do not feel personally
challenged or insecure in the face of their excellence. We might also

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emulate them, use them as spurs toward trying to achieve more. But
unfortunately this is rarely the case with successful women. A high-
achieving woman inflicts greater feelings of inferiority in both other
women and men (“I’m inferior to a woman?”), which leads to envy and
hostility, not admiration.
Coco Chanel, the most successful businesswoman of her era,
especially considering her origins as an orphan (see chapter 5),
suffered from such envy her entire life. In 1931, at the height of her
power, she met Paul Iribe, an illustrator and designer whose career
was on the decline. Iribe was an expert seducer and they had much in
common. But several months into their relationship, he began to
criticize her for her extravagance and torment her about her other
flaws as he saw them. He wanted to control all aspects of her life.
Lonely and desperate for a relationship, she hung on, but she later
wrote of Iribe, “My growing celebrity eclipsed his declining glory. . . .
Iribe loved me with the secret hope of destroying me.” Love and envy
are not mutually exclusive.
Successful women will have to bear this burden until such
entrenched underlying values are changed. In the meantime, they will
have to be even more adept at deflecting envy and playing the humble
card.
Robert Rubin (b. 1938), two-term secretary of the treasury under
Bill Clinton, was a grand master when it came to masking his
excellence and defusing envy. He had begun his career at Goldman
Sachs in 1966, slowly rising through the ranks to become its cohead in
1990. He was one of the key figures who transformed Goldman Sachs
into the most powerful investment bank on Wall Street. He was a hard
worker and brilliant at finance, but as he became more powerful within
Goldman, he also became more deferential in all of his interactions. In
meetings in which he was clearly the most knowledgeable person, he
would make a point of asking for the opinions of the most junior
associate in attendance, and of listening to what he or she had to say
with rapt attention. When people who worked for him asked him what
should be done in relation to some crisis or problem, he would look at
them calmly and ask first, “What do you think?” He would take their
answer quite seriously.
As one colleague at Goldman later said of him, “There is no one
better at the humility shtick than Bob. The line, ‘just one’s man

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opinion’ was something he would utter a dozen times a day.” What is
remarkable is how Rubin earned the admiration of so many people and
how few had anything bad to say about him, considering the
competitive environment within the company. This reveals the power
you have to short-circuit envy by placing attention on other people
instead of yourself and engaging with them on a meaningful level.
If you find yourself under an envy attack, your best strategy is to
control your emotions. It is much easier to do this once you realize that
envy is the source. The envier feeds upon your overreaction as material
to criticize you, justify their actions, and entangle you in some further
drama. At all costs, maintain your composure. If possible, get some
physical distance as well—fire them, cut off contact, whatever is
possible. Do not imagine you can somehow repair the relationship.
Your generosity in trying this will only intensify their feelings of
inferiority. They will strike again. By all means defend yourself from
any public attacks or gossip that they spread, but do not harbor
revenge fantasies. The envier is miserable. The best strategy is let to
them stew in their “cold poison” from a distance, without any future
means of wounding you, as Mary did to Jane. Their chronic
unhappiness is punishment enough.
Finally, you might imagine that envy is a somewhat rare occurrence
in the modern world. After all, it is a primitive, childish emotion, and
we live in such sophisticated times. Furthermore, not many people
discuss or analyze envy as a major social factor. But the truth is that
envy is more prevalent now than ever before, largely because of social
media.
Through social media we have a continual window into the lives of
friends, pseudofriends, and celebrities. And what we see is not some
unvarnished peek into their world but a highly idealized image that
they present. We see only the most exciting images from their
vacations, the happy faces of their friends and children, accounts of
their continual self-improvement, the fascinating people they are
meeting, the great causes and projects they are involved in, the
examples of success in their endeavors. Are we having as much fun?
Are our lives as seemingly fulfilled as theirs? Are we perhaps missing
out on something? We generally believe, and for good reason, that we
are all entitled to share in the good life, but if our peers seem to have
more, someone or something must be to blame.

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What we experience in this case is a generalized feeling of
dissatisfaction. Low-grade envy sits inside us, waiting to be triggered
into the more acute variety if something we read or see intensifies our
insecurities. Such diffuse envy among large groups of people can even
become a political force, as demagogues can stir it against certain
individuals or groups of people who have or seem to have it easier than
others. People can be unified through their underlying envy, but as
with the personal variety, nobody will admit to this, nor will it ever be
seen as such. Public envy can be quickly turned against public figures,
especially in the form of schadenfreude when they experience some
misfortune. (Witness the piling on of hostility toward Martha Stewart
once she seemed to run afoul of the law.) Gossip about the powerful
becomes an industry.
What this means is simple: we will find more and more people
around us prone to feeling passive envy that can turn into the virulent
form if we are not careful. We must be prepared to feel its effects
coming from friends, colleagues, and the public if we are in the public
eye. In such an overheated social environment, learning to recognize
the signs and being able to identify envier types is an absolutely critical
skill to develop. And since we are now all more susceptible to feeling
envy ourselves, we must also learn how to manage this emotion within
ourselves, transforming it into something positive and productive.