You have to make the distinction whether the decision you are making in your business, life, relationships and other things is based on short-term or long-term profitability. You have the choice to decide whether you want to do things in order to benefit yourself in the short term and suffer for the long-term or make the decisions to suffer for the short-term but live better for the long-term.
A key example of this, all of your friends have nice cars or watches and you feel left out and feel like you need to impress so you do the same thing and spend all of your money on that and continue doing that for a few months or maybe even years. At this point, you are broke, whereas the other person who did not spend all their money to impress their friends and other people now own a home.
Life is about balance and trade-offs if you are willing to be humiliated by your friends and other people and not allow your ego to get caught up or wrapped in that you will always do well as you will be making decisions for the long-term instead of the short-term. You can choose which one that you want to play, playing for the long-term is much more of a challenge to the average person as it can be difficult to strain away from these kinds of egotistical identities which your friends won't care about in a few years anyway.
