Why you should never compare yourself with others Comparing yourself with others is no doubt the most corrupting habit that you can adopt. It is however, easy to compare yourself with others to know where you stand, but comparing yourself with others and learning from others are two different ways to look at it. Comparing yourself with other people’s success and happiness will only make you jealous and nervous at times. Following are some very convincing reasons to stop comparing yourself with others:
1. If you are lacking, you are probably setting yourself up for failure If you continuously judge your achievements against other people, you are highly likely looking at people more successful than you are. Doing so will only lead to lower self-esteem and in every aspect, there is going to be at least someone performing better than you are. You can never be a perfectionist at everything. This can hence, lead to a downward graph because of giving up on your goals because you are not doing as good as the others.
2. You might be ignoring on areas of improvement If you are comparing yourself to lower-performing people, that is in no way going to help you either. While it may boost your self-esteem like anything, you might even become egotistical. It is something very commonly seen among videogame players. Once a person has a high score, the player might start to underestimate the opponents. In addition, these people stop taking any bad comments on their playing methods, and in order to improve, you do need to take critique. Hence, by comparing with these people, you might stop considering critique and therefore block your path to any improvement.
3. Comparisons only consider a single aspect Eventually, comparisons don’t consider the many differences that you have between yourself and the subject. Firstly, you see another person mostly for his/her success traits; this makes you overlook all the other aspects of his/her life. However, being good at one thing often makes you ignore the other aspects of life. Hence, if a person is really good at number crunching and finance, he/she might have a really bad love life. Hence, when you do compare yourself to another person, do look to see the opportunity costs that the subject is overlooking.
4. True measurement of success In the end, success is not about someone else’s life or their benchmarks. It is all about what you want to achieve. Hence, do look at how the others are performing, but in the end form your own benchmarks and checkpoints. Try to work hard on your level best and try to keep the opportunity costs that you can overlook conveniently.
Related Article: http://www.researchomatic.com/New-Research/Art-of-Comparison-142616.html