On Greed and Jealousy

Greed is good. When met with a definiteness of purpose, bounded by integrity and self-confidence, greed is good. To put it in simpler words, knowing how much money you want is not important; knowing what you want to do with that money, for what purpose and how to get there are more important questions to answer. Money is simply the price tag of achieving that goal in mind and accumulating money is only a part of a 20 miles journey.

The purpose, no doubt, is guided by your wants; not just needs, but wants. Now, needs are basic comforts of life: food, clothes, shelter, leisure and mobility. And wants will dictate the level of luxury that you desire before setting out. These are your goals in life; the benchmark of your success. Now, the next step is, once you get to where you are and beyond, what would you do with the surpluses? Would you care to make a positive difference to someone else's life? Such as providing the less fortunate with the same creature comforts without any ulterior motives? In the end, all we want in life is to make ourselves happy while helping others to do so whenever we can. And after this journey is done; after we give ourselves a pat on our shoulders, we will want to move up. Therefore we start on a 50 miles journey on top of our previous one: start planning and accumulating funds for the next bigger project, keeping in mind that any surpluses beyond our new goal will again contribute to helping others kick start similar journeys of their own.

Greed, is key; moving up in life, wanting to do more is key. But moving up in the right direction is even more important. Throughout corporate history, I have seen too many times when greed, met with a definiteness of purpose and self-confidence but ill-guided by flawed values, led brilliant people to waste. Take Enron and Worldcom in the wake of the Dot.com bubble burst for example; take Countrywide Financial, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup at the start of the collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) saga for example. Unchecked greed was at work each and every time: smart people wanting to move up for their own good, paying no regards to what their actions might do to others. The latter incident was one that I knew all too well. How? Because I was there. I was on Wall Street last March interviewing with Merrill and Citigroup and I saw first hand what greed, unchecked by integrity, can do to people and companies:

Knowing that poor people do not have the cash to pay off debts, mortgage companies enticed them with cheap loans with no down payment requirements. Poor people, uneducated people, do not understand complex interest payment schedules so no money out of the pocket for a house that they always wanted was god-sent. But these financial companies knew that one day the business and real estate boom will come to an end. That one day, housing prices will fall and no one will be able to refinance their mortgages. That legions and legions of poor people will declare bankrupt and end up losing more than they'll ever gain from the loans they received. But did they care? No. They didn't care where the money to lend came from, who they are lending to or who the loans are then passed on to. As long as the imminent bad loan is not on their balance sheets, these financial companies are happy. So, they went about their rounds tricking poor people into putting their names on the line and bundled these loans into complex securities and sold them to unsuspecting buyers. Without a doubt, these buyers are arguably more sophisticated than the poor, but they are greedy and naive all the same. These investors wanted higher yields and larger fixed payments and they just could not care what will happen in the future. They were told by the mortgage, fixed income and credit rating industries that "Rome will last for a thousand years" and foolishly chose to believe them. In a nutshell, everyone was "cheated" by the greedy loan and fixed income companies without morals. And look at what is happening now? Jobs are gone, poor people are sleeping on the streets since their houses and cars are levied, and "blood" is all over Wall Street. I am thoroughly convinced that even though greed can be good, given the right conditions, unilaterally beneficial greed in the long run is inevitably destructive.

So, a definiteness of purpose and integrity are necessary conditions for mutually beneficial greed to work, but they are not sufficient. Self-confidence, the antithesis of jealousy and insecurity, forms the third leg of the stool. The trick here is to learn how to handle your inner judge. How do we get jealous in the first place? We form images of ourselves and others, especially our peers, all the time. And your inner judge will always be critical of how well you have performed as compared to others: how you are slowed down by your integrity, by others, by circumstances, and by your own shortfalls. You begin to blame everyone but yourself. You start to wonder if you would reach your goals faster if only you have relaxed your moral criteria; to doubt the realism of your goals and the plan you have laid out to accumulate the money you need. Concurrently, you compare your shortfalls with others who have arrived at your goals and start to feel relatively small, helpless and insecure. Your helplessness angers you and you curse your comparable peer for making you feel terrible.

And then comes the crucial question: what do you do next? If you give up on yourself, all your prior efforts will be in vain. You prophecies of being small and helpless will be fulfilled. You have lost. On the contrary, if you pause and start to think about how much your peers must have sacrificed and how hard they must have worked to get to where they are today, then maybe there are some tricks out there that you may not know. So, why not reach out to these successful people and learn some lessons on how to move along faster, get things done quicker and ease yourself back onto the journey towards your goals?

Life is not a race, you are not in it for a trophy that has only one winner. And that's the source of self-confidence: knowing that your inner judge will have nothing to judge you with when there are no one to compare against. You are unique; you live the life you want. And if you do not attain what you have set out to do with your initial effort, do not give up. Go back to the drawing board to dice and slice goals up into manageable pieces and try to work with many smaller goals the next time. Celebrate achieving each small goal with mini rewards to know that you've done something important, and it is important! A journey of a thousand miles is made up of small steps, and as long as you know the direction and the ultimate goal you are after, every small step and lesson along the way will get you that much closer to your destination.

Greed is good. When met with a definiteness of purpose, bounded by integrity and self-confidence, greed is good.