[sei]

[the genius filter]

How to Transform True Envy Into Fuel

This is a comprehensive guide to turning comparison into motivation.

Imagine someone in your life telling you their good news.

A coworker gets the promotion you wanted. Someone from your graduating class is buying a house in a neighborhood you can’t afford. Your cousin’s getting married; your sister’s having a baby. When you hear it, you feel a flutter in your chest. It’s not happiness for them, though you might perform that on the surface. It is something blurrier, something you would rather not name.

That feeling is envy, and we tend to treat it as a social faux pas that ought to be suppressed. We’re supposed to celebrate others' success, to be inspired rather than threatened, to rise above petty comparison. And so we push the feeling down and pretend it is not there. But it is there, and pretending otherwise does not make it disappear. It just makes it fester.

Social psychologist Niels van de Ven has spent over fifteen years studying this uncomfortable emotion at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. His conclusion was that envy comes in two distinct forms, and they lead to radically different outcomes. One form corrodes us from the inside out, while the other pushes us to be a better version of our true selves. That form we choose is the difference between envy as poison and comparison as fuel.

Understanding this distinction changes how you relate to the success of people around you. It also changes what you do with the sting.

[the spark]

The Two Faces of Comparison

Van de Ven noticed something in how people talked about envy that other researchers had overlooked. To him, the emotion didn’t seem like one thing. Sometimes people described a frustrated longing to have what someone else had. Other times they described a hostile desire to see the other person brought down. These felt different, and van de Ven suspected they led to different behaviors. He set out to test whether envy was actually two emotions wearing one name.

Across a series of experiments in the Netherlands, the United States, and Spain, he confirmed his intuition. Van de Ven found that benign envy is painful but focused upward. You want what the other person has, and the feeling motivates you to improve yourself to get it. The other person's success feels deserved, which makes your own success feel possible. Malicious envy is painful and focused outward. You want the other person to lose what they have. Their success feels undeserved, which makes resentment feel justified. The impulse is to level down rather than level up.

When van de Ven asked students to recall someone better than them at something important, the results were striking. The more benign envy participants reported, the more they planned to increase their study time. When he induced envy in a laboratory setting, participants primed to feel benign envy performed better on intelligence tasks than those primed to feel admiration or malicious envy. The effect was consistent across multiple studies: benign envy drove action, while simple admiration did not.

This is where van de Ven's work becomes counterintuitive. We are taught that admiration is the healthy response to others' success. But admiration, while pleasant, is passive. When you admire someone, you place them on a pedestal. You surrender to their superiority. Benign envy, by contrast, refuses to surrender. It asserts that what they have, you can also achieve. The discomfort becomes productive because it keeps you in the game.

Van de Ven found that what determines which type of envy you feel is whether you perceive the other person's success as deserved. When their achievement seems earned through effort and ability, you’re more likely to experience benign envy.. When it seems like luck or unfair advantage, malicious envy takes over. This means your interpretation of the situation shapes which emotional path you take.

You can't always control the initial sting of comparison. But you can influence which form it takes. Focusing on what the other person did to earn their success, rather than on the unfairness of the gap, shifts your emotional reaction from corrosive to constructive.

[the science]

Comparison can inspire, and it can threaten.

Van de Ven's research focused specifically on envy. But the broader question of when comparing ourselves to superior others helps us and when it hurts has been studied for decades.

Penelope Lockwood and Ziva Kunda at the University of Waterloo ran a series of studies exposing participants to information about high-achieving individuals in their field. They found that the effect of exposure depended critically on one factor: whether participants believed the superstar's success was attainable for them. When their peer’s success felt attainable, the comparison was inspiring. When attainability seemed low, the same comparison was deflating.

This maps directly onto van de Ven's framework. Lockwood and Kunda's research shows the same pattern painted with different terminology: whether upward comparison motivates or discourages depends on whether you believe you can close the gap.

Lockwood and Kunda also found that the comparison must be self-relevant to have motivational power. Comparing yourself to a superstar in your own domain activates the desire to improve. Comparing yourself to someone in an unrelated domain has no effect. This explains why we are most affected by the success of peers, classmates, and colleagues rather than distant celebrities.

So, to transform comparison into motivation, two conditions must be met: the domain must matter to you, and improvement must feel possible. If either condition is missing, comparison is more likely to demoralize than energize. The research suggests you can shape this by choosing your comparison targets wisely and focusing on the attainable aspects of their success rather than the size of the gap.

[the takeaways]

1) Name the Feeling Instead of Suppressing It​
​When you feel the sting of someone else's success, acknowledge the envy. Recognition is the first step toward directing its energy productively.

2) Ask Whether the Success Feels Deserved​
​Your interpretation shapes which type of envy you experience. When you see the other person's achievement as earned, you’re likely to feel inspired. Focusing on what they did, rather than what they got, shifts the emotion from resentment to aspiration.

3) Use the Discomfort as Fuel​
​Benign envy is painful because it highlights a gap between where you are and where you want to be. That pain is information. It tells you what you actually care about and where your ambition still has life. Follow it rather than fleeing from it.

4) Choose Comparison Targets Wisely​
​Comparing yourself to someone whose success seems impossible won’t inspire you. Find people one or two steps ahead, close enough that their path feels like a roadmap rather than a miracle.

5) Accept That Admiration Won't Move You​
​Admiration is pleasant but passive. If you only admire the people above you, you surrender to the gap rather than closing it. Benign envy keeps you in the game. The discomfort is the price of staying hungry.