Envy and jealousy tendency
It's not greed that drives the world, but envy.
Munger's much-quoted line. Envy is the desire to have what someone else has, often combined with the desire that they not have it. Jealousy is the fear of losing what you do have to someone else.
These are far more powerful drivers of human behaviour than most managers, advertisers, and investors recognise. Most consumer spending isn't driven by absolute needs; it's driven by what neighbours, peers, or influencers have. Most career switches are driven by what colleagues are doing. Most M&A is driven by what competitors are doing.
The discipline: notice when your motivation for something is downstream of someone else having it. If you wouldn't want it absent that comparison, you're acting on envy, and envy decisions are usually worse than rational ones.
Examples in the wild
Office salary leaks reliably make people unhappier than they were the day before. The salary didn't change. The comparison did. Envy is the active ingredient.
Crypto and meme-stock peaks were envy-driven. People who didn't even understand the asset bought it because their friends were getting rich. The losses afterward were the cost of acting on envy.
Social media is now an envy machine. Curated highlight reels of other people's lives produce constant background dissatisfaction. The fix is mostly to look less.
Envy and jealousy tendency is one of the mental models we apply through real cases inside the Pareto MBA — a part-time program for professionals who want to think clearly about business.