You need to stop comparing yourself to others. The number one reason is that other people’s successes does not equal to your failures. What you need to do is to start comparing yourself to your past self. What matters is are you progressing in your own life, not whether others are progressing faster than you.
There’s a good chance that you are doing just fine in your life more than you know. All you have to do is be patient and continue to do the things that you are doing. By focusing on other people’s lives, you are actually taking the focus away from your own life.
That ruins the productive life that you’ve already created for yourself. Your progress is under attack, that’s no good! Jeff Bezos says that you need to obsesses over your customers wants and needs. Not what your competitors are doing. By focusing on what truly matters in your business, your customers, you can ignore the noise and stay the course.
All else equal, whose life really matters to you? Your own life or somebody else’s? If good things are happening to your friend, then you should celebrate his or her achievements! My friend recently got a promotion giving him a 27% raise. My salary used to be higher than his, but now it’s been blown out of the water.
Instead of being jealous, I was happy for him. I love it when my friends are successful, even if I am not being successful at the moment. It’s a learned skill, not an innate skill. You can do it, as well. With the right steps and mindset, you too can stop comparing yourself to others. It’s a waste of time, anyway.
Why You Compare Yourself to Others
1) Insecurity
This is the first and utmost reason. You are insecure that you are not doing as well as you think you are. You are looking for reasons that show why you are doing well against others and get disappointed when you find out you are not.
If it makes you happy that you are doing well against others instead of looking for ways to help them move up or at least feel neutral, it means you were unhappy before. You were unhappy and looking for outside reasons why you should be happy. You don’t have intrinsic happiness but dependent happiness.
People who know they are already good do not care whether others are doing well or not. It has no bearing on their own lives and doesn’t affect them in any way. We all know that the financial independence, retire early movement is all about gaining freedom.
One way you can be free is to stop comparing yourself to others. Once you are free from caring and taking note of what others are doing, you live a decluttered life. Your mind is too cluttered right now to focus on the more important things in your life.
While paying attention to other people’s lives, you are going to stop paying attention to your own life.
2) You see Friends as Competitors, not Friends
I was used to being the highest earner out of all my friends. However, two of my friends got promotions that blew me out of the water in terms of competition this year. I still see them as my friends and I don’t feel any sort of resentment, jealousy, or negative feelings towards them.
I was happy for them and we will be celebrating once the coronavirus pandemic is over! Your friends are people that you should be growing together with. There’s no need to one-up each other because there’s already enough good opportunities for every one of us.
Building wealth isn’t a zero sum game. When one of you wins, the other doesn’t lose. There’s plenty of opportunities for everyone to grow together. While a group of people may win more and faster than another group, there’s a way for everyone to win.
Just because Jeff Bezos goes out and becomes the richest person in the world doesn’t make you the poorest person in the world. One way that you can be a friend to this blog is to SMASH that social share button for the Google algorithm! What better way for you to stop comparing yourself to others than to share it with friends.
Why You Should Stop Comparing Yourself to Others
Stop comparing yourself to others, others may just be on a completely different path than you with completely different goals. Others may have focused their efforts, time, and attention into becoming the best athlete they could be. Maybe you were focused on building wealth, saving money, and investing it. As a result, you might have put working out to get ripped on the back burner.
You may only be working out 2x a week to stay fit and keep up with your health. Which is completely fine. The ripped athlete with a 10/10 body works out every day for hours on end. It’s literally their job to be in the best physical shape as possible.
Therefore, it would be foolish to look at them and think “why don’t I have that?” It wasn’t your core focus and wasn’t a part of your core goals. There’s more important things in your life that you want to focus on. That’s why you should stop comparing yourself to others. It just wasn’t a part of your focus.
Additionally, let’s not forget that the perfect picture that you see is an airbrushed snapshot of the best moment of their life. If you had a photographer following you around and take pictures of your best moments, others will be jealous as well.
Even if you don’t believe it, you have best moments throughout the day in your life. Moments that others would want to have for their own lives as well. Ever since the dawn of time, it was rooted in our DNA to compare ourselves to others.
Maybe our caves weren’t big enough or others were more desirable. These days, none of that stuff matters. Whether someone has a fancier car than you really doesn’t matter at the end of the day.
How You Can Stop Comparing Yourself to Others
One way to stop comparing yourself to others is by cutting off all contact with others. There’s no way you can compare yourself to others if there’s literally no one else to compare to!
While that is a way it is not a good way. You don’t need to cut off contact with all of your friends. That is too extreme. Below are six good ways for you to stop comparing yourself to others. Most importantly of all, they work.
1) Stop Social Media and Comparing Yourself to Your Friends
Social media is the biggest self belief killer you have ever imagined. It’s not hard to open up Instagram or Facebook and see that killer vacation your friends experienced. You can see it at the touch of a button now. Before technology, it was quite difficult to do so.
You had to get ready, schedule a time to catch up in person, and more. However, these days, it’s available when we wake up. It’s easy to see your friends wearing the trendiest outfit at the most expensive diner in town. Once you stop with the nasty habit of having social media, you can start to stop comparing yourself to others.
It’s been a great way to stay connected with others but there’s always a catch. It’s not entirely “free”. Your data and mental sanity suffers as a result. I haven’t used Facebook in years and I love it! My life is so much better and anxiety free.
2) Compare Yourself to Yourself
The best person to compare yourself to is yourself. Some metrics you can use to evaluate is net worth, happiness index (highly subjective), job title, relationship status, quality of relationship with parents, and more. If the difference between you today and you in the past is positive, then you are on the right path to success.
As long as the end of the year is better than the start of the year, it is a time to celebrate all the hard work you’ve put in.
That’s one of the biggest reasons why I use Personal Capital. I can easily see how far I’ve come in the past 5 or 10 years. I’ve been pleased so far at my net worth progress. However, as we’ve seen in the coronavirus pandemic, everything can change in a matter of weeks.
3) Focus on What You Have, Not What You Don’t Have
Instead of focusing on what you can work on, focus on what you’re doing well. I saw a LinkedIn post the other day saying that a father’s daughter came home with a test and got 27 out of 30 questions correct. The father asked “let’s focus on the 3 you got wrong”. The daughter replied “sure, but can we focus on the 27 questions I got right first?”
You will never be perfect at everything. As long as you are good the vast majority of the time, you are doing just fine. Stop focusing on what you could improve on and start focusing on what you are doing well.
Others may have fancier decorations and a fancier car, and that’s completely OK. The grass is not always greener on the other side. They may have had to take on debt to afford those things. Remember that if they are your peers, there’s little chance that they are that much far ahead of you in life.
There will ALWAYS be others doing better and climbed up the ranks faster than you. Therefore, comparing yourself is meaningless. Other people’s failures and successes literally doesn’t affect you in any way whatsoever. Stop comparing yourself to others.
4) Conscious Recognition
With everything so easily available with our phones, it’s difficult to recognize that we are actually comparing ourselves to others. It’ll be a new thing to implement, especially if you are used to comparing yourself to others. Therefore, it’s necessary to have conscious recognition throughout the day for when you do compare yourself to others.
It may be through social media or it may be through real life. Maybe you see a very attractive person walking by and think why you can’t look like that. The first step is recognition of your tendency to compare yourself to others. Without conscious recognition, it’s near impossible to change.
By the way, you are not alone. If you are feeling insecure about one thing, chances are that millions of others are feeling insecure about that as well. I used to have a lot of insecurities as well but no more will I compare myself to others.
5) Find Your “Enough”
A good way to stop comparing yourself to others is find out what your “enough” is. After you find out that number, then all of the noise in the world doesn’t matter. For example, my net worth target that I want to hit is $500,000. Once I achieve it, it will not matter to me whether my friends become millionaires.
I will be content with what I have because my assets are theoretically supposed to take care of my yearly expenses forever. Whether someone crosses the $10 million threshold has no bearing on my ability to enjoy life.
Therefore, it’s best practice to find out what your “enough” is. It could be related to net worth but it could also be related to how many trendy clothes you own, what vacations you’ve experienced, or how great your housing situation is. For me, I generally do not care what others think about my living situation.
What matters to me is am I happy with the current situation. The answer is a resounding yes.
6) Practice Self Belief
Self belief is when you truly believe you deserve all of the good things in your life. Once you start to actually believe that, then you can start to be happy and stop comparing yourself to others. Just as you deserved to win that promotion, others deserved to win theirs as well.
Once you become better at what you believe you are lacking, you start to have self belief because passion comes from mastery. Once you start to crush and conquer all of the things you want to achieve, you stop being jealous of others.
You start being generous to others. You have an excess of things you could ever possibly want in this world. Why not share the wealth and donate your time, energy, or money for others to benefit? When we all win, the world starts becoming a better place.
Stop Comparing Yourself to Others for a Better Life
It’s an endless treadmill to compare yourself to others. There’s an infinite number of areas that you can compare others to. Finances, love, friendships, relationships, and health are just the things that come to mind. The bad news is that it’s not just one person who differs from you in these aspects of life.
There’s eight billion people in the world who differs from you. The combination of the things you can compare to are actually infinite. Therefore, it’s in your best interest to stop comparing yourself to others. Otherwise, you will find yourself in the endless comparison treadmill and never get off.
Additionally, we are our own worst critics. People compare apples to oranges. We compare the worst of ourselves versus the best of others. Or better yet, we compare ourselves to the best of the best like Elon Musk. The difference is that Elon Musk had enough time to build everything he has already built.
It would be foolish to compare your 30’s or 20’s to a 49-year old guy. Time is the most valuable asset ever. The more time somebody has, the more opportunities they have to achieve their dreams and build something great.
The biggest reason you are comparing yourself to others is because you care about other people’s opinions. You care if you don’t have the latest and great model phone or car. Others are doing it, why can’t you have nice things too? The root of this line of thinking is because of pride and ego.
You want to win. That’s not right.
Once you recognize that pride, ego, and emotions are the enemy, you start to let go and stop comparing yourself to others.
Good Post. Compare yourself to yourself and no one else, love that mantra
Absolutely! It’s a fool’s game to compare oneself to others when that doesn’t really tell us anything. Everyone is on a different path with different sets of priorities.