When comparing yourself to others, you need to compare yourself to win. Too many people compare themselves to lose, or compare themselves to make others lose. Here is what I mean.
- Comparing yourself to lose: this is when you look at someone else and wish that you were them. You see how perfect their lives are, how much success they have, and you wish that you had that. This is comparing yourself to lose, because no matter how hard you try, you will never be that person.
- Comparing others to lose: this is when you take pleasure in someone else’s failure in order to make yourself feel better. Such behaviour is unhealthy. Your self-worth should come from yourself, not from someone else. If you enjoy watching your peers fail, you are building your confidence and your worth on something you can’t control: someone else’s success. You can only control your own success, so build your confidence on yourself.
- Comparing yourself to win: this is when you study other people and their successes (or failures) in order to make yourself better. When you see someone succeed where you have failed, evaluate their success and find out what they did that made them successful. If you succeed where someone else failed, find out what you did differently that made you successful and try to replicate that in the future. Learn from others’ mistakes (and your own), but don’t take joy in them.
Dynamic lessons
You often hear that you shouldn’t compare yourself to others, and that is completely true — most of the time. But you should also learn how to compare yourself with others to help yourself win. You can compare yourself to lose, you can compare others to lose, or you can compare yourself to win.
Who is someone successful that you admire? How can you compare yourself to that person and their accomplishments in such a way as to help you be a winner?
