Comparison is the Thief of Joy

How do you gauge your own success? For most of us, we do it by comparing ourselves to other people. I do that all the time - but there's a real problem with that.

If you compare yourself to other people and you happen to hang around with a whole bunch of people who have accomplished less than you, what happens is for a moment or two, you might feel successful because you're more successful than they are, but then you get comfortable. You stop aspiring to do more and you don't make progress to become the best version of yourself.

Now, if you're like me and you do the opposite - you try to hang around with people who you aspire to be, people who have accomplished the things that you're trying to accomplish because you know, you could learn from them - that's great, but the problem is if you compare yourself to those people, you feel like a total failure. You never feel successful. You never feel good enough because your business is not as big as theirs, you're not as profitable as they are, you haven't written as many books as they have, you don't have as many social media followers as they have, etc. If you're continuously raising the bar by hanging out with people who you aspire to be, which by the way is a wonderful thing to do, you never feel successful if success means you're comparing yourself to them.

Why is feeling successful important? If you never feel successful, at some point you get burnt out. You stop trying. So what's the solution to that? How do we hang out with a whole bunch of people we aspire to be, but not feel like a failure because we haven't done what they've done? Well, there's a great quote by Teddy Roosevelt that I love. He said, "comparison is the thief of joy." I love that and when he talks about comparison, he's talking about comparing yourself to other people. That's the thief of joy.

I'm going to ask you to do a different comparison. I want you to compare yourself now, to the person you once were. Are you moving towards becoming the best version of yourself, or away? Hang around with people who have done what you're trying to do, but do that for inspiration, do that for learning, do that for coaching. Don't do that for comparison.

So here's the action I want you to take. I want you to write this down. Who were you - as a person, as a leader, as a business owner, as a husband, as a wife, as a father, as a mother - who were you 12 months ago? Who are you now? Where have you moved forward? And where have you moved backwards? Use that as your gauge of success.