The Third Paradoxical Commandment

April 21, 2008

The Mentorship Approach With Teams & Groups

If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway.

© Copyright Kent M. Keith 1968, renewed 2001

I didn’t see this extreme response to success while I was a business co-owner. That might be because our level of financial success was a steady, comfortable income, but it didn’t bump us up a few tax brackets.

But the response came when, quite by accident, we looked like we were being elitist with our new address!

My wife and I lived in a starter home with less than 1,200 square feet for 13 years. Yes, we understand the idea of a starter home. But we had a longer-term vision than just buying a larger home every few years.

We wanted to live in a rural setting with some open land. Instead of moving into larger and more expensive homes, we found a plot of land with an old farmhouse and bought it. There were renters in the house, until it was too dilapidated to be livable, and their rent helped us make payments on the property. When we bought the property, the town was an old farming community with a few neighborhoods but mostly open land.

While we waited, and waited, and waited, we paid off our little house and started paying more on the property. After twelve years, we were finally at a point where we were ready to build our house. The renters had left a couple of years before and we had demolished the little house. We designed our home and had it built. By then, the little farm town had turned into an “exclusive, upscale” suburb. More and more open land was being bought up and turned into tract mansions. It was odd. People would say they loved the area because of the open land, but every addition seemed to have a large rock wall around it.

Our home, beautiful to us but modest and plain compared to the new homes being built, is still in a mostly rural part of town. But we are minutes away from elite shopping areas. This is how the Third Commandment reared its ugly head.

Before we moved, a woman we knew through soccer treated us warmly. She lived in another upscale suburb that also used to be farmland. But it was not as new and trendy as the neighborhoods being built in our suburb. When she found out where our new house was being built, she got very distant.

It got worse. When I told people where I lived it made an immediate impact. Some got a little sarcastic and expected I thought I was better than they were. Some acted like I had won a competition that I didn’t even know was going on. They were mostly people who lived in nice, but not as trendy, suburbs. Some lit up and said that we must be rich, that we must live in a huge house, and showed a lot of interest in where all the money came from. It was ridiculous!

I got to a point of not telling people the name of our town. I would say we lived near Grapevine, which is a very old city by Texas standards and has a mixture of communities and income levels. When I told them that, people treated me like just another person.

I think this comes from a strange tendency in the human race. In general, we want to be like other people, to fit in. More specifically, we usually want to be like and fit in with people in our own class. We want to be “just like everyone else” – only a little better. So there’s constant comparison.

Are you in my status level? Are you even with me? Boring!
Are you a little beneath me? Wonderful. I get to feel just a teeny bit superior!
Are you a little above me? Yuck! You arrogant pig!

We planned for a long time and paid down the loan on our land while we lived in a modest house. When we sold our little house we paid off the land and only owed the cost of building our new house. Over thirteen years we spent about half of what a lot of people are paying for homes around here by being patient. To me that’s success.

But to many people the fact that we live on the rural edge of an upscale neighborhood suggests huge financial success and a desire to flaunt our money. We don’t have expensive new cars and we don’t have an ornate home, but people assume we’re rolling in cash. And the way they treat us is based on their assumptions, good or bad, that we are financially successful in a huge way.

Some are friendly because we’re “good enough” or because they think we can add to their status. Others truly resent us. And their view of us is based on wrong assumptions about our success.

Succeed anyway. And do it on your own terms.

Posted in The Mentorship Approach With Teams & Groups, Zine 8: April 2008, Zines in 2008