You can be happy, once you stop comparing yourself to others
Comparing ourselves to others is what we naturally do and many of us even like doing in our day to day life. In the 90s, this was brought to the top in Germany, with a famous advertisement of a bank. In the ad, a man in a bar shows three pictures to his friend stating “my house, my car, my boat”, then smiling, the friend does just the same, showing a much more luxurious house, car and boat to the other party. The ads shows a direct comparison of two men over materialistic things which they see as their ultimate achievements in life and the underlying assumption that by showing off to others they would achieve ultimate fulfilment and happiness. You can guess, that this is clearly not the case.
As humans, we are competitive beings. We like competitions and measuring our skills and capabilities against others. Already as kids in school, we are ranked with grades in comparison to other students in the class and this early pattern continues throughout our working life and careers later on. While a bot of healthy competitions is a great motivator for us and can lead to us being more efficient and reaching our goals, we have to be careful not to define our own success by constantly aspiring the achievements of others.
The skill here, is to find the right balance in being ambitious and using comparisons as strong motivators, but as the same time to not let our own competitiveness ruin our own happiness. If we constantly compare ourselves to what seem to be more successful people, it is highly likely that we sacrifice our own happiness and build up unnecessary pressure for ourselves to constantly perform and improve. Many people still believe that comparing themselves to other makes them feel better. However, by doing this we will sacrifice fulfilment and emotional well-being.
We automatically always compare ourselves to people who seem to have achieved more than us or why we see as better than us in many ways. This can be career related or family related and can be applied to many aspects of our lives that seem important to us.
In order to deal with this, we have to learn to differentiate. We have to look behind the surface and understand that no person that we compare ourselves with is perfect. It might be that the person seems to drive a bigger car than us or gets paid more in his or her job, but it might be that these people struggle somewhere else in their life by being divorced or suffering from a lack of self-confidence. An example somebody driving a very large and fancy car, very often experienced a lack of appreciation from others in his life and cries out for attention from others.
This gives us an idea, of how all of us have their own issues to deal with. To the outside everybody want to project their best image of themselves, which is why in comparison to us, people seem perfect and inspiring for us. However, remember, nobody is perfect.
We therefore have to find the right equilibrium between using comparisons to others as a motivator to achieve our own goals in life, but we should no use this to make ourselves feel inferior. Finding this balance will open the path to fulfilment and happiness. Everyone is unique, with unique strengths and skills, competitiveness and comparisons to others can help, but they can harm at the same time. Finding the right balance that works for us is the key to move forward and build inner self - confidence at the same time.
