Does this sound familiar?
You open Instagram for a five-minute scroll, and 10 minutes in, everyone else’s life looks better than yours.
Vacations on islands you’ve never heard of. A friend’s company exit. A guy from college who apparently figured out how to win at everything.
It’s a nice, tidy highlight reel – enough to make you feel like you’re far behind and you need to sprint just to not lose more ground.
And while many of us make efforts to tune out the noise from “the feed,” the same feeling of needing to keep up can hit you when a friend’s talking about the crazy returns from their last investment.
And if you’re not careful, you can find yourself sprinting with your capital to “catch up” – often with disastrous consequences.
You’re not comparing against the “real world”
The comparison set your brain works with is small, and it’s drawn almost entirely from whoever’s been talking about returns around you lately.
The friend at dinner who casually mentioned a 10-bagger on a single option play. The cousin who texted about timing a run on an obscure crypto. The buddy in the group chat who keeps reminding everyone he loaded up on NVDA at $40.
The comparison set is always biased toward what’s visible to you. And what’s visible to you is almost always just the wins.
The friend who 10x’d on options probably isn’t telling you about the many he bought that expired worthless and were a 100% loss. Anyone who tells you “I just doubled my money on X” is selected from a much larger group of people who tried Y and Z and never told anyone how those turned out.
So when you find yourself thinking “I should have done what they did,” you’re working from a survivorship-skewed picture of their whole investing history – not just the part that made it into conversation.
The chase costs you twice
The first cost is the one most easily seen. The next $100K that was going to a new base-hit, cash-flowing syndication ends up in whatever’s hot this week. You stop showing up for deal flow on your actual strategy.
And five years later, your portfolio reflects whatever was loud at each decision point, not what you decided when you sat down and matched your strategy to your goals.
The second cost is more insidious.
You don’t actually know your friend’s win rate – you only know about the win. The crypto trade, the option play, the leveraged thing they’re telling you about…those aren’t allocations that match the risk tolerance you set for yourself.
So when you chase, you don’t just miss the compounding on the strategy that was working. You take real losses on a strategy you probably don’t fully understand, and step into a risk profile well beyond what you’re comfortable with.
Capital that should have been growing inside your plan is gone (sometimes opportunity-cost gone, sometimes literally gone) because you chased a single visible outcome whose actual win rate you never bothered to check – and probably couldn’t have known if you tried.
Measure against your plan (not against everyone else’s wins)
Comparison is only a tool when it’s comparing the right things. Your portfolio’s return against a friend’s gambling-adjacent option play is apples and oranges.
The closest valid comparison is your portfolio against your own plan.
What did you decide you needed to achieve, over what time period, to hit your actual goals? Is your portfolio on track for that, or off it? Are you still allocating to that strategy, or have flashier distractions diverted capital?
What separates the investors who compound over decades isn’t that they don’t feel the pull…they’re human, of course they do. They’ve just learned to recognize it – and more importantly, to not let it sway them from their strategy.
The slow way good plans get abandoned
Most solid investing plans aren’t abandoned with some hard decision to change course – they’re lost in a slow drift, one comparison at a time, toward whatever was loudest at the moment.
You’re going to keep hearing about other people’s wins. It’s inevitable.
But next time someone tells you about their multi-bagger, stop and ask yourself whether that conversation is a real reason to redirect capital – or just a single visible outcome in the Instagram highlight reel.