Measuring your success against someone else is zero-sum. Like tuning a radio to someone else’s signal and wondering why you can’t hear your own voice.
It’s amplifying static—what we do unconsciously. We follow their dreams, their timeline, their definitions, while our self drowns in the interference.
I’ve watched this happen in my life more than a few times: the familiar sting when your ear was pressed against the sound of your friends being more popular than you, so you try to match it but lose touch with yourself. Or when others announced they were buying houses or stepping through careers that looked effortless from the outside. You pledge that you’ll break your back to do the same but in an utterly unreasonable timeline.
So the mathematics of comparison falls on false premises and it feels pretty disquieting. When you measure your chapter three to someone else’s chapter fifteen, it’s clearly not comparing like with like. It’s your behind-the-scenes struggle versus their highlight reel, your rough draft versus their polished performance.
Comparison isn’t just theft, it’s self-erasure
Progress is archaeological work. But we automatically diminish our recent victories and to become an apologist for our progress by subscribing to borrowed metrics.
Every seemingly modest victory, such as a paid-off credit card or promotion from part-time to full-time, is another layer excavated from the sediment of where you began. These aren’t consolation prizes or waypoints towards “real success”. They’re proof of movement.
It says you can transmute the raw materials of circumstance into something distinctly yours. But those borrowed metrics made you apologetic about your own excavation site. Your modest apartment became something to explain away than something to celebrate. Your steady job that makes you laugh now feels insufficient against someone else’s entrepreneurial leap. Your carefully budgeted life turned too “constrained” beside another’s apparent abundance.
Every structure, no matter the size, is a foundation to be proud of. The work no one sees—or needs to. All architecture on rough stone and mortar can turn out beautiful, no matter the size. I admire every oak tree that came from the small acorn buried in the ground. Because its roots extend deep before anything reaches skyward. We don’t criticise the new for not immediately resembling the ancients, because we understand that different growth patterns serve different purposes, and some foundations need more time than others.
Your journey exists on a map only you can read accurately. The terrain of your starting point, the weather conditions you navigate, the resources available to you, the detours forced by circumstance—it shapes a topography that’s entirely yours. But when you use someone else’s compass, you end up in places that were never meant for you (something I would’ve told my younger self).
But the moment this became clear, I realised I was never stuck. Perhaps the most insidious aspect of comparative thinking is how it trains you to live perpetually in wating.
So refuse to ever apologise for the pace of your progress. Your timeline works on separate logic, with variables that onlookers were never meant to control or understand. Your small first apartment teaches you about space and gratitude. Your entry-level position builds skills to serve you for a future at C-level. Your careful budgeting is developing financial wisdom and a future of freedom that you once struggled to fathom.
But it’s a strange kind of violence to constantly defer your appreciation for what you’re building until it meets some external standard. Why would you tell yourself you can’t enjoy the warmth of a candle just because it’s not a bonfire? Why live only in the future tense, always waiting for permission to be proud, always apologising for not being further along?
Progress isn’t a performance for others to judge. It’s a private conversation between who you were and who you’re becoming. Forward steps represent enormous internal victories over inertia and fear.
Your current life shows no evidence of insufficiency. Only proof of agency. You chose this life rather than borrowing someone else’s. And you’ll look back at these moments as the rich ground upon which everything else was built. So never apologise for progress. Because it belongs to you and is measured by your own maps and timed by your own seasons.