How to Stop Comparing Yourself to Others (and How to Stay Focused on Your Goals)
“Our clear visions of inevitability are often only illusions…”
They are illusions that have been perpetuated for ages: everyone is where they are in life because of their choices. Everyone is in full control of their circumstances, and their place in life is indicative of their overall worth. People get what they deserve.
The problem with these myths? They completely discount the roles that randomness and chance play in life. Both play a much larger role than we realize.
More problems: believing these misconceptions can lead us to believe that people’s circumstances are predetermined and unalterable. We may start to get caught up in superficial comparisons and imagined hierarchies, constantly categorizing and labeling people.
When you feel yourself getting caught up in the illusions of social status and self-comparison, the following tips can help you stay focused on your own goals, your own self-improvement, and your own path to personal success (whatever that means for you).
Remember That Nothing is Permanent, and Perseverance is the Key to Progress
In his book The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, physicist Leonard Mlodinow describes a case study performed to find out if publishers recognize great writing.
The Sunday Times of London submitted manuscripts of the opening chapters of two novels to twenty major publishers and literary agents. Here’s the catch: both books had not only already been published, but each had also already won the prestigious Booker Prize for contemporary fiction (the prize is awarded every year to the best English-language novel published in the U.K.). The books were In a Free State by V.S. Naipaul and Holiday by Stanley Middleton.
One would expect that the publishers and agents would be astonished at the quality of the writing and would leap at the chance to accept each manuscript. But that’s not what happened.
Each publisher and agent rejected both manuscripts, save one who accepted Middleton’s novel. The same publisher wrote about Naipul’s novel, “We thought it was quite original. In the end though, I’m afraid we just weren’t quite enthusiastic enough to be able to offer to take things further.”
The lesson? Great work can easily go unnoticed. Rejections are not objective evaluations of a person or product’s worth. Rejections are often highly subjective.
Many of us have heard stories about now-famous authors being repeatedly rejected before they finally got published. Many successful artists, actors, singers, dancers, musicians, athletes, software engineers, physicists, and (enter any occupation here) faced rejection before they found someone who believed in them and gave them a shot.
Focusing more on our current effort rather than our current results can help us stay focused on our goals. Many people have failed at something for years, until they finally had a breakthrough. Imagine if they had given up because they believed their place in life was fixed or that rejections were an objective evaluation of their worth.
When people endure, it becomes a numbers game — the more attempts made, the better chance of success. There are many random factors in life that we can’t control. But we can control our effort.
About persevering, Mlodinow says:
What I’ve learned, above all, is to keep marching forward because the best news is that since chance does play a role, one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized.
We judge people and initiatives by their results, and we expect events to happen for good, understandable reasons. But our clear visions of inevitability are often only illusions.
Overcome The Natural Tendency to Label Ourselves and Others
Mlodinow describes two studies undertaken by social psychologist Melvin J. Lerner, who aimed to discover more about people’s intuitive judgments of others.
In one experiment, a group of subjects were brought into a lab to watch a woman attempt a learning task. During the task, the woman received (apparently) painful shocks each time she made a mistake (the shocks weren’t real — she was an actor). At first, those watching reported being upset by seeing the woman shocked. But as time went on, their sympathy dissipated, and some even began to denigrate the woman. The more she suffered, the lower their opinion of her became.
Later, the experiment was run again, but this time they told a different set of observers that the woman being shocked was also being paid a large amount of money for her trouble. In this experiment, the observers never formed a low opinion of the woman, and they felt less sorry for her.
In another experiment, groups of observers viewed two men completing a random mathematical task. They were told that one was paid while the other was a volunteer. The groups repeatedly judged the man who was paid as having completed the task more efficiently, even though the results were the same.
These studies suggest that we have a subconscious propensity to think highly of those we judge to be in fortunate circumstances and to think lower of those we see as less fortunate. This thought pattern leads us to form strong beliefs about people’s current situations.
The observants in the studies weren’t basing their assessments on tangible evidence. They judged a person as more efficient for the sole reason that he was being paid, and they judged another person as pathetic for the sole reason that she was seemingly failing. The people being paid or unpaid were chosen at random, yet the observants still formed strong opinions about them based on very little information.
Says Mlodinow,
We miss the effects of randomness in life because when we assess the world, we tend to see what we expect to see. We in effect define degree of talent by degree of success and then reinforce our feelings of causality by noting the correlation. That’s why although there is sometimes little difference in ability between a wildly successful person and one who is not as successful, there is usually a big difference in how they are viewed.
How can we be less biased in our views? Adopting a neutral tone towards where people are at in life can help. Life circumstances can change in an instant. It seems wiser to put more stock in people’s daily habits, character, and work ethic rather than their current circumstance.
Break The Habit of Constant Comparison
It can be argued that comparing one human being to another is a completely meaningless endeavor. No two people have identical DNA or perceive life in the same way (not even identical twins or close siblings). Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, everyone has unique frames of reference, and no two people have the exact same experiences or opportunities.
In Thoughts and Feelings, McKay, Davis and Fanning say the following about comparing ourselves to others:
The opportunities for comparison never end. And even when the comparison is favorable, the underlying assumption is that your worth is questionable. Consequently, you must continue to test your value, constantly measuring yourself against others. If you come up better, you have a moment’s relief. If you come up short, you feel diminished.
When you catch yourself comparing yourself to others, remind yourself that everyone has strong and weak points. By matching your weak points to the corresponding strong points of others, you’re just looking for ways to demoralize yourself.
The fact is, human beings are too complex for casual comparisons to have any meaning. It would take you months to catalog and compare all the thousands of traits and abilities of two people.
There’s just no way to measure two people against each other that takes every possible cause, effect, gene sequence, experience, opportunity, and random occurrence of their life into account to make a clear and objective statement about their accomplishments compared to someone else’s.
To make comparisons is to misunderstand the very fabric of human existence. We all fall into the comparison trap sometimes. But we are much better off focusing on what we can do to improve ourselves and our own situation.
Summary
The concepts of fixed statuses, total control of circumstances, and simple comparisons are illusions. They disregard the ever-changing landscapes of life, the effects of randomness, and the astronomically extensive variability of human traits and experience.
We can dissolve these illusions by becoming aware of our thought patterns. We can catch ourselves if we start to believe in inevitability, or that talent and skills alone determine outcomes. We can do our best to stop comparing ourselves to others.
Above all, we can choose to persevere through adversity. There are ways to handle rejection, setbacks and misfortune.
As Peter Doskoch points out in The Winning Edge, “studies show that grit and intelligence are completely independent traits.” It’s not always the most talented people that end up succeeding — it’s often the people that just don’t give up.
Our natural abilities will only carry us so far, but we can exercise passion, ambition, and self-discipline to meet our goals.
