How To Escape the Comparison Trap | Creator of 'FOMO', Patrick McGinnis

Michael Gervais (0:00)

Well, we got the FOMO guy talking to the FOMO guy.

Patrick McGinnis (0:03)

Love the FOMO guy. Huge fan of the FOMO guy. What happens when we fill FOMO? We are losing agency in how we decide to live our lives. We are outsourcing our priorities to somebody else. Inside of our head, we are telling ourselves a story, and that story is what you're doing isn't good enough. That said, there are some upsides to FOMO, because as much as it can compel us to degrade ourselves, it is also an incredible motivator.

Michael Gervais (0:34)

Welcome back, or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training a high-performance psychologist.

We all know about FOMO, or the fear of missing out. We're scrolling through our social media feeds, and there it is, post after post after post of a friend who's somewhere exotic, having a great time, or at an exciting new job. And we're not, we're scrolling. And we can't help but to compare ourselves with the lives of people who seem to be doing so much more and living the good life. The result there can be an uptick in anxiousness and distress and thereby defaulting to grinding to keep up. And sometimes, sometimes FOMO can even stop us from taking action. That feeling of being overwhelmed can take over. FOMO, the acronym and the idea, really struck a nerve in the social media age. And not only is it now in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, but it's also spawned a whole new slew of related acronyms. FOBO, fear of better options, JOMO, joy of missing out. And it even inspired me to coin the term FOPO, the fear of people's opinions.

So today on the podcast is writer and entrepreneur, Patrick McGinnis, who invented the term FOMO back in the early 2000s. And he did it flippantly, but then the idea just took off and he's been owning it and he's studying it ever since. So Patrick has come up with a way of looking at our fear of missing out and how to train ourselves to work with it and even use it in positive ways to really go after the things that we want to elevate our lives. It's a cool story, a unique perspective on modern culture and a great way of using this negative idea and turning it into a tool for better living. So with that, let's dive right into this conversation with Patrick McGinnis.

Patrick, how are you?

Patrick McGinnis (2:41)

I'm really good. Thank you so much for having me.

Michael Gervais (2:44)

Awesome. Okay, so this is going to be fun.

There's lots of acronyms that we're going to share.

And, you know, we've got FOMO, FOBO, which might be a new one for some folks. Of course, you know, FOPO, the thing that I've been working on for a while. We've got JOMO, YOLO. Like, there's a lot of stuff here that I want to have some fun with you. But you coined the term FOMO, and it's a really important term. And so how did the concept of FOMO, fear of missing out, how did that originate?

Patrick McGinnis (3:17)

So it goes back a lot farther than people realize. It was the early 2000s. It was a time before social media.

And I was a student at Harvard Business School. Now, I had just moved up from New York City. And the way I like to think about my journey into coming out with FOMO is to go back to September 10, 2001

It was the day I took my GMAT, which is the entrance exam for business school.

I did much better than I had expected. And I thought, well, I'll apply to business school at Harvard. And I didn't expect to get in. I didn't really know anybody who had gone there. But I decided to do that on the 10th, woke up on the 11th, and it was 9-11. And I lived in lower Manhattan. And I remember going from real joy at having done well on this test to real uncertainty and stress and questioning of the world in which I was living and a real feeling that life was deeply precious and that I couldn't waste a moment and that I needed to make the most of every second.

I ended up getting into business school and moving up to Boston. And I took that ethos, that Carpe Diem ethos, with me. And I did everything. I took as many classes as I could. I went to every company presentation, even companies I didn't want to work at. I applied for all the jobs. I went on all the trips.