How you can succeed better than Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk without being a billionaire

Winning the status race

Life is a status game. Everybody wants more. Nobody has enough. If you play it smart, you can beat anyone at it, even the wealthiest people in the world.

What is status

Status makes us buy fancy cars, follow fashion, fight for work titles, earn more money, compete in races, work out, fight in arguments, give to charity, go to clubs, do public speaking, gain mastery, and many, many other activities.

There are three types of status according to Will Storr in his brilliant book The Status Game: Dominance, Prestige and Virtue.

Dominance Status comes from power over others. It is the domain of physical violence but also verbal and emotional violence. Nowadays we call bullies those who seek dominance status.

The animal kingdom is full of dominance games. Baboons who feel stressed attack lower status baboons to feel better. Wolves, and many other predatory mammals, establish hierarchy based on dominance.

Among humans dominance games were more common in the past. Life was more violent. In the past hundred years we have reduced the amount of violence in the world and the pursuit of dominance games.