“Don’t compare yourself to others.”
It’s common advice. When you compare yourself to others, you are “comparing your insides to someone else’s outsides.” When you compare yourself to others, you’re more likely to become motivated by extrinsic, shallow reasons (fame/status/wealth) than intrinsic, sustainable reasons (meaning/purpose). When you compare yourself to others, you kill your joy.
Indeed, Leo Babuta says, “One of the biggest reasons we’re not content with ourselves and our lives is that we compare ourselves to other people.” He analogizes the issue to running in the park and seeing someone run past you. It’d be silly, Babuta says, to conclude, “Gosh, he’s a faster runner than me, and therefore better than me!” You have no idea how far he’s running, where he is in his particular run, what training plan he’s on, etc. Better to just focus on your own run. Learn about yourself as you run. Focus on your journey.
But it’s more complicated than this. You can benefit when you compare yourself to someone else. For example, what if the person who runs past you in the park sports a running technique that’s superior to your own and that you could adopt with success? What if the person running faster wears a certain kind of shoes that you could buy for yourself? What if his training plan offers valuable insight that you might incorporate into your own training plan?
When you compare yourself to others, you might be inspired to run faster in life. Better yet, you can get ideas for how to run faster. The best way to achieve expertise in anything is to study the masters, deconstruct their techniques (by comparing your techniques to their own), and consider adopting their best practices into your own routine.
I believe what people really mean when they say “Don’t compare yourself to others” is “Don’t let yourself get consumed by envy. Be the best version of yourself, not someone else.” It’s the second order effect of comparing yourself to someone else that’s the dangerous thing. Thus, the advice would be better stated: “Don’t let yourself get consumed by envy.”
Envy sucks. It really does cause unhappiness. It’s important to remember, though, that you don’t feel envy when Bill Gates has a big success. He’s so different from you and me. You also don’t feel envy as much when someone achieves great success in a wildly different life pursuit. So when do you feel envy? You feel envy when someone who is roughly the same age/location/life stage/life situation as you achieves something similar to your goal in your field of choice.
Hence, the dilemma: how do you learn from successful people without being consumed by envy for what they have?
Here’s a perhaps radical approach.
First, study the lessons from successful peers in adjacent fields. If you’re a development director at a non-profit, study the career of and compare yourself to a director of finance at a fast-growing startup. If you’re a young doctor, study the career of a peer at a biotech company.
Second, study the lessons of people in your direct line of work but who are way, way ahead of you. Compare yourself to him or her. If you’re a software entrepreneur, study Bill Gates’ life and career. Or anyone else who’s 10-15 years ahead of you. Learn, learn, learn by comparing, comparing, comparing to a party elder. Read biographies.
Third, if you find yourself nevertheless obsessing over your direct peers fighting in the ring next to you — and, because we’re wired to obsess with where we rank in our tribe, it’s a hard instinct to suppress — then create a tribe of one. Forge a life so idiosyncratic that it’d be silly to compare yourself head-on to someone else. Take the path less traveled. Adopt a unique life philosophy. Do something crazy.
If you do something common, you have lots of direct comparisons. If you go to law school and become a young attorney, there’ll be thousands of people right next to you, neck and neck in the race of life, and their success will almost certainly trigger biting jealousy. They are like you in every way…except they succeeded.
Do something uncommon, and it’s hard to make the case — in your own mind, anyways — that it’s an apples-to-apples comparison. When you compare yourself to someone who by strict demographics may be a peer — by age, race, location, etc. — you have a narrative in your head that’s envy-repellent: “I can’t compare myself to him. I spent two years in my 20’s surfing in Costa Rica while he climbed the corporate totem pole.” Or: “Unlike many, I’ve chosen a flexible work schedule so I can play with my kids and husband on the weekends. This comes with tradeoffs. No one else at my company has arranged their schedule in this way. ”
Bottom Line: Comparing yourself to others is a great way to learn. Just make sure you compare yourself to people who are sufficiently different or sufficiently ahead of you so that your drive to soar will come from genuine inspiration instead of envy. That takes imagination. Better yet, carve a life so unique that there won’t be reasonable direct comparison points. Then you can courageously stitch together whatever you learn from others into a life that’s all your own.
The fourth option is to develop the ability to feel comfortable with yourself, even when you come up short in your comparisons.
For most of my life, I practiced Technique #3–I can assure you, for example, that I was definitely the best Creative Writing/Product Design double-major at Stanford. But ultimately, being the best in a category of one still represents the fetishization of being the best.
As an investor, you should be able to learn from the wisdom of Warren Buffett without feeling bad about not equaling his achievements. Admittedly, it’s harder when it’s a peer or friend who achieves incredible success, but then I always fall back on the comforting notion that he or she might decide they want me to help them write a book someday!
Counterpoint:
* the more exactly like you someone is, the more likely their experience is to be directly relevant.
* there of course needs to be some difference, or else there no difference for comparison!
Why not take all the learning you can get but attack envy at what, in my experience, is the source: the belief that I’m entitled to something I don’t have.
My decisions and luck, both bad and good, have had consequences for me. As far as decisions go, some of these consequences I don’t like, but I can’t really say I didn’t deserve them! And most people in the world, no matter their situation, can look at their luck and see the bad and the good.
One more way to look at envy:
Nietzsche’s view of owning up to it. Instead of avoiding or repressing it we can use it. We can use it to boost our energy or enthusiasm and we can use it as a compass for where to direct our future. (I was reminded of this by a recent School of Life video: http://youtu.be/wHWbZmg2hzU?t=1m50s )
I’m not totally convinced but it seems like we make ourselves small if we are too cautious about where we allow ourselves to learn from.
If we are able to embody the Stoic “inner citadel” then we can learn from anywhere with a focus so complete that envy becomes a nonissue.
When I start falling into this line of thinking, I always try to remind myself that all we are seeing, in most cases, is the tip of the iceberg. The point that has broken through the surface. It looks glorious from afar, dangerous and unpredictable, standing on its own it’s magnificent. What we don’t see is the enormous base that is holding it up.
That is success. We often don’t get to see the blood, sweat, and tears of the hard work that put them there in the first place. An actor, who seemingly is an overnight success—no we don’t see the years of rejections beforehand. The point where they almost gave up, but something made them keep going. Keep rolling along.
If the preparation was from schooling or life experience, heart break and tragedy, we are never usually privy to that, only what can be shown in one photo, or book cover. One movie, or one marathon. Keep on keeping on I say. Great Article!
I’ve been giving this topic a lot of thought recently, as somebody who often finds myself envious of those around me, and this is what I’ve come up with.
For one, I think its unreasonable to pick and choose who you envy. I think if you could control that, then envy wouldn’t be a problem. But that’s ok because I think that envy is a trait that can be utilized to push yourself further than you would have otherwise.
To utilize envy though, I think you need to focus on the other person’s characteristics instead of their accomplishments.
If you envy your friend’s confidence to approach random people and start conversations, then spending a lot of time with that person will eventually allow that trait to rub off on you, especially if you pay close attention to how they act.
And if you envy another friend’s ability to find really cool opportunities for himself, just ask him/her as much as you can about what he does- and do it yourself.
Soon enough, you’ll come to embody the best traits of each person that you admire.
In other words, just keep in mind how other people’s feats (for lack of a better word) can be used to your advantage.
The danger then, is trying to avoid putting yourself down while putting the other person, up.
Just because something comes to one person naturally, that doesn’t mean that another person can’t learn to pick up that trait.
All comparisons are not correct, cherish what you have