THE LIFESTYLE ENTREPRENEUR

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The Comparison Conundrum

Comparison is the thief of joy.

Also,

Comparing myself to people I want to emulate has made me a formidable and successful man.

The benefits and pitfalls of comparison to others is a razor’s edge:

When navigating a new life journey - learning from the wins and losses of those before us is a literal cheat code in our process.

And on the other hand - constantly viewing someone’s state in life can amplify our failures and allow our negative self-talk to run rampant in our heads.

Today I want to simply lay out the primary benefit to comparison, along with the main logical fallacies we make when we allow negative comparisons, as a means to call out this tricky human condition.

Why comparison is great

Upward comparison is a process we’ve followed our entire lives to help shortcut the confusing process of navigating life.

In grade school adults came in and told us about their jobs. We said “I want to be a fireman when I grow up”. We’re constantly watching, listening, and following the paths of people ahead of us.

Upward comparison not only simplifies complex processes we’re trying to follow, it also adds feelings of comfort and security to the vastness of human opportunity.

We benefit from upward comparison in three main ways:

• Motivation - Seeing others’ successes can inspire and motivate us to pursue similar goals

• Learning and adaptation - Seeing how they navigate things allows us to learn from their process

• Benchmarking success - Seeing what success looks like gives us goals and benchmarks to shoot for

Why comparison gets a bad rap

Especially in the internet age, comparison gets a mostly negative role in our lives.

Every day we see the highlights of our global neighbors, we only see:

• Their wins

• Their vacations

• Their milestones

We rarely see the mundane moments of life that we all experience. We rarely see the losses. We rarely see the frustrations of life.

This consistent comparison makes us all feel like we’re inadequate, like we’re falling short of our potential, like we’re not enough.

Acknowledging this and making adjustments is important, also understanding the logical fallacies we engage in daily:

• Incompleteness - Ignoring the full context of someone’s success, like their timeline to completion, their surrounding circumstances, their available resources, will lead us to make incorrect assumptions about ourselves

• Perfection - Believing others are perfect creates an inaccurate and imbalanced view of others

• Overgeneralization - Using one aspect of someone’s life to judge our overall life

We all fall into these traps, they’re dangerous if left unchecked.

Tools to manage comparison

How do we leverage comparison to drive our personal growth, and manage it’s negative side to avoid the above traps?

Here’s a few tips:

1. Build your north star - Understanding the person you’re trying to become and your long-term plan, and putting it down on paper, brings it to life and gives you a compass to guide your efforts. This also allows you to measure progress against yourself and not others.

2. Take a single-factor approach when comparing to others - Emulating and learning from someone who’s done what you’re trying to do is extremely effective, but remind yourself you’re only following one aspect of their path and not the entire person.

3. Embrace your own uniqueness - Positive self-talk and reminders that we’re all unique is extremely important. There is only one of you, and you can only follow your own path in life.

4. Shape your media environment - The beauty of the internet age is that you can completely control what media you view. Follow inspiring, educating, and entertaining content and creators, unfollow anyone who instill negative feelings or feelings of inadequacy in you.

5. Shape your friend environment - Surround yourself with people who are living lives you aspire to, not lives you’re trying to leave behind. Being around the right people will shape your actions, mindset, and trajectory more than almost any other factor.

6. Seek out mentors - Getting to know people you aspire to be like will help you know the complete person, so you can narrow down on the actions you want to follow to find success.

Leveraging comparison for your own growth, and mitigating its downsides to protect your mindset, is worth the effort.

Used wisely you can accelerate your progress as a human. And that’s what we’re going for here.

Here’s a few quick and easy actions to take right now:

1. Audit your social media - unfollow anyone who gives you a negative feeling

2. Text or call someone you admire - tell them that, and if you’re due to meet up, schedule it

3. Review your long-term plan - If you haven’t made one, start with a simple one-sentence long-term statement

And remember - there are infinite people who have done things you want to emulate, but there’s nobody who you want to become. You are you for a reason, and that’s the greatest gift of all.

Talk to you next week,

Mike

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