Why People Feel Guilty About Making Money
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Why do successful business owners feel guilty when they win?
One of the biggest mental hurdles some business owners have is to get through the guilt that comes with success. But guess what? There is a war on success out there. There's a group of people that have been taught by their communist college professor that success is evil. You didn't do anything wrong if you win. The only way to win in America's economy is to help a lot of people. And if you wanna win big, you gotta help a whole lot of people. A lot of people work their tails off to build something meaningful and then feel guilty when the hard work actually pays off. And instead of owning their success, they shrink themselves down to make other people more comfortable. You don't have to be flashy, but you don't have to carry that guilt around.
It can leak into everything, your confidence, your decisions, and even the growth of the company. So today, Entrez Leadership's head coach, John Falcons, is talking about where this guilt actually comes from and how to lead confidently without losing yourself in the process. Let's get to it.
After nearly 20 years of coaching business owners, many of whom were making millions of dollars, I realized something surprising. A lot of successful people feel guilty for winning. They feel guilty about the money or the cars and the businesses that they have built. They feel like they need to apologize for all of it. And maybe you feel that way too. But emotions like guilt don't just randomly appear. There's usually something underneath the surface, a trigger or a pain point that's causing you to feel that way. When somebody says, I feel guilty, or it shows up in how they lead, the first thing I ask is, Have you ever noticed a pattern of when this happens?
What are the three main sources of guilt leaders experience?
And most of the time, it comes from one of three places. The first is judgment from others. When you start doing well for yourself, your success becomes a mirror for other people. And the mirror makes people uncomfortable and frequently angry. They aren't really angry at you. They're angry at themselves and what your success reminds them of, their lack of success. Your discipline reminds them of their excuses. Your growth reminds them that they're stuck. Your courage reminds them of the risks they never took. And instead of dealing with that themselves, they judge, they gossip, they make comments like, you just got lucky. I remember being at a Chick-fil-A one day and overhearing a customer who said, well, must be nice to have one of these.
He had no idea the amount of work it took to own and successfully operate a Chick-fil-A location. He was thinking that the owner just woke up one day and inherited a packed restaurant, great employees and a profitable business. And that's how some people view other's success. They see the money rolling in, but what they don't see is the hard work. They don't see the years of worrying about payroll, the stress of making a bad decision or the kids' soccer games that the owner had to miss. People only see the fruit. They almost never see the labor that it took. The Aussies have a saying for this, tall poppy syndrome. If you've got a field full of poppies and one of them grows taller than the rest, people want to cut that poppy down, not because something was wrong with it, but because it stood out.
And the same happens in business. People who were perfectly fine with you when you were struggling suddenly become uncomfortable when you're succeeding. Suddenly, you're the tall poppy. And a lot of business owners respond by making themselves smaller and trying to stay relatable. They think if they become too successful, they'll lose connection with the people that they care about. So they downplay their wins. and they try to hide their successes. Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the Oculus VR is worth a fortune. And even though he can afford just about anything, he still wears Hawaiian shirts every day. He does that because as a kid, he got all the hand-me-downs in his family. He wore a lot of Hawaiian shirts.
And he does it now because it reminds him of who he was before he got successful.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
Why do successful business owners feel guilty when they win?
0:05–1:38
2
What are the three main sources of guilt leaders experience?
1:38–4:32
3
How does judgment from others create 'tall poppy syndrome' in business?
4:32–9:14
4
How do entitled people and hangers-on pressure owners into guilt-driven decisions?
9:14–11:27
5
What are the financial and operational risks of leading from guilt?
11:27–12:36