Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash
Success is relative. We screw it up when we start comparing ourself to the everyone else and what success is to them.
Chris Eggleston
We all do it. We scroll through Facebook or Instagram and see the “wonderful lives” of our “friends”.
Then we start to get frustrated. Because we’re not the ones on vacation every other week, or the one with the perfect little life.
There is a funny commercial that depicts what I mean exactly…I posted it below…watch it!
Condoms! LOL
Alright, alright, let’s get back on track.
What I Realized
First, you’ve got to start the stories in the same place.
You can’t look at someone like ‘The Rock’ and say, “man I’ll never look as great as he does!”, when today was your first day in the gym.
You’ve got to go back to ‘The Rock’s’ first day in the gym, he didn’t just wake up looking that way! He’s got 20 plus years of hard work in the gym everyday!
Figure out what your heroes or those you look up to had to overcome to get where they are today. Learn what skills they had to develop, how much work they had to put in, and how many times they failed along the way.
If, for example, you learn ‘The Rock’ has only missed 1 day of gym time in 20 years, and you’ve already missed 5 this week, then you can be pissed at yourself.
Second, I don’t really want the same things as everyone else I have compared myself too.
Define what success means to you!!
I’ve got another example. I read a book about Larry H Miller a couple months ago, and while the guy was able to build a massive automotive empire and did some really cool things to keep the Jazz in Utah and learned how to leverage faith to accomplish some pretty impossible achievements, he died young, and sacrificed his family for wealth.
Don’t get me wrong, he did a lot of good with his money, but he didn’t have a relationship with his children until they were old enough to start working in the business, and as a result there were some adolescent issues.
I can’t do that! I could never sacrifice my wife and kids to achieve wealth.
For me the point of wealth is to have more time and freedom to do things with the people I love. Not drive a wedge between us.
Understanding what you want, and what you are and are not willing to do to accomplish those things is key to proper comparisons.
Tweet
You Should Be Your Only Competition
I may want to have ‘The Rock’s’ body, but I know, I am not (currently) disciplined enough to achieve that goal.
But that doesn’t mean I give up, it just means I need to adjust my goal to what I can accomplish right now.
Maybe that is being satisfied that I’m in the gym 1 or 2 times a week. Maybe it’s feeling good about losing 5 pounds of fat or gaining 2 pounds of muscle in the next 30 days.
You know what you’re capable of, and you know what your weaknesses are, so why not play to your strengths and use everybody elses journey as cheat codes to simply learn what is required for success in the things you want.
Final Words
There is always going to be somebody that has more than you, somebody that will make you want to achieve more.
Jeff Bezos of Amazon, might be the Richest man in the world, but he might wish he could have a meaningful marriage or more time with his kids.
What does success look like to you!?
That’s all that matters!
I agree and it doesn’t matter how old you get there is still that tendency to compare yourself to others and find yourself wanting. one of my favorite Bible scriptures is in James 1:4. “But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.” I know, we all freak out about that seemingly unattainable perfection and so did I until I learned that the more literal translation from the GReek word for perfection is, “complete, finished, or fully developed. Kind of like being ‘entire, wanting nothing.” God Bless.