Is Comparison All Bad?
“Comparison is the thief of joy!”
People love this phrase. It's pithy and kind of old-timey sounding. You hear it from well-meaning folks when we compare our piddly achievements to those of people who are the same age or who graduated with us. (Did you know the Prime Minister of Canada is only four years older than me?)
Comparing the “progress” of two people is tricky because no two people are alike. We all have different hurdles to overcome and work with different assets, and we bloom in our own time. And for that matter, we all have different priorities. (To be honest, I wouldn't want to be Prime Minister.)
But I think that if you’re careful, comparison can be useful.
Comparison is Useful for Ideas
There's a coach in my neighbourhood who started coaching at around the same time as I did, and her career has taken off like a rocket. (Or that's how it seems, anyway.) I see her career and I despair: Why is she so successful and I'm flailing? What's wrong with me?!
Okay, we'll deal with all those feelings later. For now, let's talk about what I can gain from looking at this "rival" coach's path: I can figure out what she's doing and, just like in grade 5 art class, I can copy.
This coach has a crystal clear understanding of who her market is. She has strong branding and visuals. She has lots of great headshots. She posts consistently on social media, and she gets lots of coverage in regular media.
I can copy all of those tactics, if they seem right for me. Of course, I don't mean literally copy — I don't want to work in her niche, and I am not about to steal her branding or messaging. But I can follow her example in having those things, and in being persistent. Those things are good business practice, and that's why she's doing well.
Comparison is Useful for inspiration
Comparing yourself to someone else can be inspiring. If you're a competitive person, another person’s success can spur you to try harder and prove that you're just as good as they are.
For those of us who aren't competitive, someone else's success can inspire by showing what's possible. Role models inspire this way. “Someone like me has done a thing, which means that I could also, possibly, do the thing.”
Look for your own values
Have you ever felt a stab of envy when you learn about someone you know doing something that seems impressive?
Envy is a strong emotion, and emotions are information. That emotion has something to tell you about what's important to you, if you get curious and ask yourself what's going on.
Lately I've been feeling that stab when people talk about living abroad. Seems like everyone but me has spent a year or two in Amsterdam or Tokyo or London. For years it didn't bother me, but recently I've started to feel that ache of envy.
So I got curious. Why? What changed? I realized that under the envy is fear — fear that living abroad and having adventures is a young person's game and it's too late for me.
What changed is I turned 40, my mother died, my kids got older, I started to realized that the cool things I want to do in my life won't just happen “one day”. I need to prioritize my time and resources to make things happen. Classic midlife crisis stuff, basically.
Emotions give you useful information about your values, and the values in my situation are adventure and challenge: I like novelty and I like to do hard stuff. These are useful things to know.
So when does comparison steal joy?
I've talked about what comparison is good for, but that phrase is trotted out for a reason. Comparing yourself to someone else can be discouraging.
Those thoughts that I have about the other coach — Why is she doing so well and I'm flailing? What's wrong with me?! — are driven by fear, too. This time the fear is that my failure (compared to her) is because of something inherent to me, something wrong with me that I can never change.
There's an idea in psychology that how we explain things to ourselves can affect our outlook on life and our happiness. The idea is summed up with three Ps: Personal, Pervasive, and Permanent.
Personal means that we explain misfortune to ourselves as something inherent to the way we are. So you might think, “I broke my camera because I’m a clumsy person.”
Pervasive means we tell ourselves that it's something that will affect everything in our life. “I break everything.”
Permanent means we tell ourselves it will never change. “I can never own delicate things.”
For me, when I looked at that other coach and asked "What's wrong with me?" I was looking for a personal, permanent explanation.
Comparison steals joy when you let your train of thought lead you to a personal, permanent and pervasive dead end. But it's possible to derail the train of thought by noticing the language of the three Ps and the assumptions they’re leading to, and starting to gently question them.
“Do I really break everything? Am I always clumsy or was that just a single moment of inattention? Is there really no way for me to own delicate things, or can I set up systems and rituals that help me take care of things better?”
In my case, as I wrote above, I was able to examine the other coach's success and figure out what she's doing (not being) that I could also do. There's nothing personal, permanent, or pervasive about her that makes her successful — she's not a born super-coach — and by extension there's nothing about me that means I can't be successful too.
So who said it?
The first time I heard this quote it was credited to Theodore Roosevelt. Sounds right, yeah? He said that man in the arena stuff, this is kind of like that. But lately it has been showing up credited to Shakespeare? I couldn’t find a good answer, and it turns out according to Quote Investigator, it doesn't come from any of those sources. In fact, it doesn't seem to have come from anywhere in particular. It's just one of those useful little phrases that turns out to be not quite all it's cracked up to be.
So who said it?
The first time I heard this quote it was credited to Theodore Roosevelt. Sounds right, yeah? He said that man in the arena stuff, this is kind of like that. But lately it has been showing up credited to Shakespeare? I couldn’t find a good answer, and it turns out according to Quote Investigator, it doesn't come from any of those sources. In fact, it doesn't seem to have come from anywhere in particular. It's just one of those useful little phrases that turns out to be not quite all it's cracked up to be.
Credits
Thanks to my book club friends for help thinking through the value of business envy.
Photo by Anna Shvets.