Do you know the age-old advice of “ Don’t Compare Yourself to Others”? Well, I am here to fight that today.
I have never been a really competitive guy myself but when I do enter competitions, I normally find myself in 2nd place most of the time. It seems like don’t matter what I do or how hard I work, my destiny was to never reach 1st place.
I vividly remember always comparing myself with the person in 1st place and asking myself why I couldn’t be like him/her.
But comparing ourselves with someone “better ” is a sure-fire way to despair. It can make us feel hopeless and useless. That no matter how hard you struggle, someone is always better than you.
So there is some value in not comparing ourselves with others. But I have another question.
If we don’t compare, how would we know where we stand? How do we know what progress looks and feels like if we don’t have a reference? How would we know where to proceed from here?
It’s true that comparing ourselves with others leads to despair but when used in the right way, I think comparison can be the fuel and guidance you need for progress in life.
Sure, it still sucks knowing that no matter how hard you work, someone will beat you but I think the majority of the fulfillment lies in the progress that you made instead of your position.
Therefore, I argue that some comparison in our life is needed. But how do we go about doing that?
Fortunately, I have had a lot of experience in this because I won 2nd place a lot. Every competition I have never won gave me a chance to compare myself against others.
So, here are the two methods I use to compare myself to others to improve in life.
1. Answer the Already Solved Problems Of others in Your Own Way
I avoided this method for a long time because I feared feedback. I wasn’t happy being in 2nd place but I feared knowing why even more.
When you are working towards a goal every day, it is easy to get blind-sighted by the things you may not be doing. We often get attached to the solutions we already know and don’t work on our weak links.
Drilling on those weak links is then our fastest route to improvement. One effective way to do this is to create our own solutions to the problems that already exist.
You can then refer back to the solutions to those problems later for feedback. This is similar to solving textbook questions in high school and then later referring to the answers at the back of the book.
This can get quite complicated for more abstract things like writing or coding. Every story and software is different, so how do you go about comparing your work with the work of others?
The answer comes from Benjamin Franklin who I read about in Scott Young’s Ultralearning which takes the notion of only comparing pieces of your work and others.
When Benjamin wanted to improve his writing, he would deconstruct a story, writing bits of it in his own words, reconstruct it, and then compare it to the original story.
In other words, break a comparison object down into smaller tasks, work on each task, reassemble the comparison object, and then compare for feedback.
It’s simple but it still isn’t easy. But it can be done.
This has proven to be an extremely useful technique when it comes to exposure and problem-solving. Developing your own solution means you learn more and the difficulty you face will mean that whatever you learn sticks with you longer.
2. Copying the workflow of others.
Following a similar theme. I also find it extremely beneficial to peer into the minds of others and copy their style/workflow. Dues to the abstraction of some problems in life, it is hard to understand how some solutions perform better than others.
Like I mentioned before, it is hard to understand what makes a piece of writing so good. Copying and comparing that article would only allow you to improve on writing that article.
Therefore, it stands to reason to try and emulate the mindset of this person. Because I have found that sometimes the answers lie in the way the person thinks instead of the answer itself. The way you approach the answer matters too.
In other words, we have to build instinct. Instinct comes from experience and exposure, trying to adopt the mental model of others, grants you that exposure.
We sometimes can get too caught up in our heads that we try to force our solution onto the problem when it clearly does not fit. We get stuck in thinking that we have the best workflow but sometimes borrowing and comparing with those around us can give us a much-needed new perspective.
I found this extremely beneficial to improve my own problem-solving thinking. Pair programming with someone senior is something that I have found to drastically improve my programming ability. I was able to peer into the mind of others and see how they code and solve problems.
Final Thoughts
The two methods I mentioned aren’t in any way novel and most of us would have heard some variation of them. Comparison, when used all the time, can be detrimental to our mental health, it can make us feel defeated.
But like all things in life, when used moderately, can motivate and give us the needed guidance for progress.
I hope I have instilled some motivation to either compare yourself more or compare yourself less to help learn and progress more in life.
Hope that helps.
Thanks for reading.
