How You Can Learn Positive Lessons by Comparing Yourself to Others
Comparison is the new enemy of personal well-being. Fueled by social media, your human drive to look at the neighbor’s grass and find it greener than yours may run almost unchecked. You’re constantly bombarded with aspirational images you’re supposed to look up to. You’re asked to reach for the unattainable, only to feel inferior when you unavoidably fail.
Obsessively comparing yourself to others can have nasty side-effects on your mental health. Through the lens of social media, where pain and struggle seem to have been eradicated to give way to happiness and beauty, you see only carefully curated lives consisting on one best moments’ reel after the next. There’s no way real life can compete with that.
The urge to compare your life to others’, however, wasn’t invented by social media. Humans have been engaging in comparison since the beginning of mankind. The question you need to ask yourself now is: what can you do about that impulse? Do you have to completely shut it down, or can you use it in positive ways to improve your life?
Giving comparison a positive outlook is a challenge that involves perspective, knowledge of self and the capacity to stick to the right questions. It’s definitely not something to be taken lightly, but it can bring you great results when done right. In the end, it’s less about blind comparison and more about measuring the difference and analyzing it.
Comparison for comparison’s sake is not the right way to go about it.
Choosing the right perspective requires that you first know yourself as best as you possibly can. You should understand your desires and dreams, your personality and limitations, your knowledge and curiosity — or lack thereof.
Knowing yourself protects you from merely coveting what others have that you don’t. It protects you from feeling ungrateful towards your blessings, and resentful over what you lack.
The right perspective for comparison is one that looks at your life as it is and at your dreams as they are, and reveals the gap between those realities. When you frame your observations through the lens of what you want to achieve, you find role models and mentors instead of people to envy and hate.
When you look at other people, look at those who you can honestly admire, not only for their material success, but for their work ethic and their morals.
Choose people who inspire you. Focus on those who have achieved what you would like to achieve, but also look at talented people from different fields.
Check out those who are at the top and take a look at their life story. Some came from nothing; some came from a lot, but somewhere along the way, they lost it all and had to start over from scratch. Notice their tenacity. Notice how they don’t stop in the face of adversity.
They might be famous and out-of-reach, but they don’t have to be. How about that old acquittance who works in your field and always seems to be doing better than you? How about that girl from high school you were never really close with, but now looks like has everything you’ve always wanted? Drop your envy aside and try to understand how they got there instead.
Social media might give you a glimpse of how the lives of your role models are like, but never forget how edited these glimpses are.
If they’re famous, search for articles, interviews, videos, biographies.
If they’re people from your social circle, try to get first-hand information: ask them out for a coffee — or better yet, drinks. In vino veritas, as they say.
Try a little experiment: instead of superficially comparing yourself to people you barely know only to end up envying them from afar, try including them in your inner circle. Reach out. Maybe let them know you admire their success and would like some help. Yes, it makes you vulnerable, but the worst thing they can say is no.
If a “no” from someone you barely know hurst you, then your skin is too thin indeed.
Besides, you never know when people might surprise you. People are more generous than we like to give them credit for, and most of them do love to help — or at least love an opportunity to talk about themselves.
When you have found your role models, the next step is asking the right questions. No, not to them, but to yourself.
What do they have that you want? A published book, or a contract with a sports team, or a successful business, or a family, or good standing with their community, or whatever.
What have they done to achieve it that you haven’t? They have made writing their priority, or practiced for 8 hours a day, or started a new business even after their 3 previous ones failed; or they have gone out and met new people, then gotten into a relationship and honored that commitment, or any number of things.
We fail the comparison game when we get attached to the circumstances. Every person’s circumstances will be unique, so what you should focus on when comparing is attitude.
And then make it your own.
Looking at people you admire as a source of inspiration should never lead you to doing the exact same things as they did — which is actually impossible. No one can live another person’s life. That’s not even the point.
But learning from someone else’s successes and failures is not a crime — it’s actually a very productive way to go about life.
Through the very human art of comparison (and with invaluable help from the internet — yes, including social media), you can take a look at what others are doing that you’re not, and the results they’re getting that you’re not.
Comparison is negative when you give in to envy and resentment, or when you use it to blindly copy people. Comparison becomes positive when it shines a light on what you could take initiative on, or what qualities successful people foster that you don’t.
Comparison can be powerful stuff, if you manage it well.
How You Can Learn Positive Lessons by Comparing Yourself to Others
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