Beyond “Don’t Compare Yourself To Others”
Published in
4 min readJun 12, 2020
Don’t think about eggs.
Don’t think about eggs.
Don’t think about eggs.
Don’t think about eggs.
Don’t think about eggs.
So. What are you thinking about?
I’m thinking about eggs.
The more you tell me to not think about something, the more I actually think about it. It’s like a big red button in my brain that says “don’t press”. My brain is definitely pressing that button.
Instead, this is what I needed before I actually stopped comparing myself to others:
- to know why I so naturally reverted to comparison
- to learn how to shift away from such an automatic thought process
Comparison as a metric
Mark Manson talks about how we can have different metrics for measuring some kind of underlying value.
What I realized was that my comparison to other students derived from using default, popular metrics that others were using to measure their own success or productivity:
