What is the most frustrating thing for you on your personal journey to success?
Is it seeing someone else who has achieved great things and wondering how they got there?
They make it look so easy — they have a grip on every step, every trick, every nuance of their business, their life, their health.
Every day we are inundated with success stories, tales of people who made it big.
Whether it’s growing a multi-billion-dollar company from scratch, earning a couple of PhDs, finding the perfect soulmate and having an incredible family… There are hundreds of things we look at daily that can make us feel inadequate by comparison.
They got lucky, we tell ourselves. They had it easier than I did.
We didn’t have all the benefits, the privileges, the education that they had, so how could we possibly be expected to achieve these same things?
The funny thing is, if you knew what was really going on behind the scenes of their lives, you wouldn’t want their life because it wouldn’t suit you.
In a world that prizes the 24-hour news cycle, the instant gratification of social media and the culture of “10 easy ways” to achieve a goal, we often fail to recognize our own achievements and successes.
It is so simple to look at the social media profile of a distant acquaintance, see the face they present to the world and believe their hype.
It is beyond simple to say, well, I’ll never achieve that.
You need to understand, deep down inside, what is presented as reality is rarely even close to the whole truth.
Not understanding this is what crushes so many people’s goals and ambitions. You need to stop falling for that con.
There is constant pressure from society to be a certain way.
For many, it feels like they don’t quite fit the box of this perceived success, which is why they haven’t achieved their goals.
Trying to fit into a box that isn’t built for you is going to crush your success.
Unless you start to see that box for what it is — something that isn’t designed to help you, but to hold you back from your potential.
Real failure is allowing someone else’s success to overshadow and diminish our own Click To Tweet
Where the real failure lies, however, is not in not being good enough.
It lies in allowing someone else’s success to overshadow and diminish our own.
We cannot become another person, no matter how hard we try.
Even if you try it’ll eventually fall completely apart because it’s all an act. You must be the person you were created to be.
While you will never become someone else, you can model after them.
Watch and practice their techniques, methods and success patterns.
In the end, you may even get further along than your original role model did!
Realize that just about everyone has someone who looks at them and imagines what it must be like to live such a successful life.
That includes you; someone out there wishes they could emulate your successes.
By continuing steadfastly down your own path, you have a much better chance of creating long-term success.
Remember, much of what we see is just the sparks of the firework.
Obsessively comparing ourselves to others can so often cause us to get stuck. To give up when things become difficult or when there are obstacles in our way.
I could never achieve those same things. I’m just not clever enough, lucky enough, or privileged enough. I don’t have the right connections.
But what if we could use our natural human tendency to compare ourselves to others to our own advantage?
What if we could be objective and draw inspiration from others’ success, instead of allowing that comparison to cripple us?
When many of us were growing up, we were surrounded by adults who were either ignorant of the vast levels of success available to us or had an unfortunate victim mentality.
Of course, parents and other people in our lives don’t realize they are imparting this ignorant way of thinking.
People like us don’t achieve mega-success. We simply don’t have what it takes, and that’s just the way life is. Want to try out for the track team, but can’t run fast enough? Well, then, better accept you aren’t fast enough and move on. Can’t play tennis? Well, then you can’t play. Just move on. Give up that dream. It’s not worth the heartache.
Especially in the days before ESPN and YouTube, there really wasn’t an example to see how good someone could actually become — or how to get that way.
When I was eight years old and kicking a ball around in the backyard, I just figured, hey, the other kids are better than me. That’s the way it will always be, so why bother.
That’s until I got big enough to join the gym and start playing basketball.
In a matter of months, I was getting good. Really good.
Sure, I was limited by my own speed and height, but I could shoot a basketball like nobody’s business — so I did.
My team played a high school that was eight times the size of ours, and we won.
I kept right on playing and getting better and better until one day it occurred to me that this is how it’s done.
Just because you start out being not quite as good as someone else, doesn’t mean you have to stay there.
You don’t have to accept that “that’s just the way it is”.
Just because you aren't good enough today doesn't mean you can't be good enough tomorrow. Click To TweetMy story is anything but unique.
There are many highly successful people who will tell you that they came to a similar conclusion: That there’s nothing wrong with comparing your own current level of achievement with someone else’s, but that you shouldn’t use it as an excuse to give up, or allow that comparison to take away your capacity for self-belief.
What happens all too often is that obsessively comparing our own achievements to others causes us to develop envy.
When we envy someone else’s achievements, it can prevent us from taking pleasure out of our own.
Which eventually leads to failure.
Constantly comparing ourselves to others can reduce our own capacity for compassion. It can eradicate our sense of trust and it can even lead to anxiety and depression.
So where do we find that middle ground?
How do we use the success of others to motivate ourselves and to teach ourselves to achieve success?
There is a fine line between inspiration and envy.
Inspiration is viewing someone else’s achievements, taking a page from their book and learning how to achieve your own success.
Envy is allowing their success to be the reason you give up. It is accepting that they will just always be better.
We all want personal, financial, career, family success. So we need to learn to focus on how to use that natural tendency to compare to our own best advantage.
Comparing and competing in a productive manner requires using those comparisons to measure your own progress.
For me, when someone does something big that grabs my attention, I see it as something that’s really possible to achieve.
Now, maybe you can’t be the greatest in the world, or maybe you can.
But knowing that someone has come close to it could pull you over that line.
Think about Roger Bannister.
It took seemingly forever before he famously broke the four-minute mile.
Once he had done it, more and more people started doing it because they realized it could be done. His success challenged them to run their best time ever.
The value of our goals can be established by comparing them to what has been achieved and imagining what more can be achieved.
This is where our natural human competitive spirit comes in.
If you are competing against the best, you can go beyond what others are doing once you realize that there’s always a greater possibility and more you could achieve.
Use your own natural tendency to compare to your own best advantage. Click To TweetWhat does that mean?
Only develop the talents you’re good at? Not exactly.
Of course, it pays to develop your natural talents, but it also means using your character strengths to help you achieve what you want.
Are you an especially positive person? Use that to drive yourself.
Are you an early riser or a night owl? Do the bulk of your work at a time of day when you are at your sharpest and most likely to push through.
Do you have the ability to sit and focus for several hours? Use that ability to get through all the work you need to do to get your degree.
Don’t worry if you’re not amazingly good at something right off the bat — that’s what hard work and practice is for—to get stronger and better.
When you are working towards your own definition of success, rather than someone else’s, you are more likely to stick to your plan.
Of course, you can be inspired by the way someone else does something, but by changing your perspective, you come up with a plan that works for you.
For example, it would be ridiculous, even harmful, to try and run 20 miles a day to get in shape, just because you heard that’s how an Olympic gold medalist does it.
It would be time-consuming, and it could break down your body.
And as for your goals, it could distract you from achieving the other things that are more important to you.
By all means, take inspiration where it appeals to you.
You can be inspired by the gold medalist’s routine, without allowing it to consume you.
Success isn’t a single destination, it is a series of milestones along the way.
If your goal is to write a best-selling novel, you don’t only have to celebrate once it reaches number one on the New York Times Best Sellers list. You can give yourself a pat on the back once you’ve successfully drafted the story outline.
Have a celebration once the first draft is complete, take pride when you finalize the editing and have a publication-ready story.
Enjoy your achievements along the way.
At every step, remind yourself that you have come a long way since the start.
When you celebrate your achievements your overall confidence starts to grow because you know you haven’t quit. Your dream is still alive and you are still moving towards it with every single step.
This tells you without a doubt that you are making progress towards something truly important to you.
Feeling good about yourself and the actions you’re taking prevents feeling constantly defeated.
Now you don’t have to rely on a fleeting, happy feeling to kick you into motivation mode.
Your motivation and confidence run so deep that anytime an obstacle threatens your progress, you’re able to bounce back.
You become more resilient. With so many great things happening, the setbacks are less daunting.
Here are a few practical steps to help make sure you are progressing in the right direction:
Comparing your own achievements to those of your friends, family, acquaintances or even heroes is normal and natural.
But when you turn that around and allow yourself to use those as inspiration, you will stop feeling the pressure to achieve according to someone else’s standards.
By setting your own goals and standards, you will enjoy your own achievements and success.
You will better understand your own dreams, your own goals and the process you need to follow to achieve them.
When you stop constantly comparing, you will learn to trust your own instincts, intuition and experience.
Follow your process one step at a time.
It’s perfectly ok to use the achievements of another as inspiration.
It helps to understand that constantly focusing on someone else’s achievements causes you to become side-tracked and pursue goals that aren’t meaningful or necessary to your own success.
Focus on what you can achieve and what you can do today that makes you more successful than yesterday.
Then, go achieve your goals for yourself.
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2 Comments
Great post. Lately I have been comparing my success to others. This is a timely post for me.
Mary,
This was also an appropriately timed post for me. It is so easy to see someone else’s accomplishments and immediately put ourselves down. I will remember to use their success as inspiration!
Thanks for reading the blog and commenting!
-Danielle
WOW Support