MBA1904 How to Stop Comparing Yourself To Others

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Hey. Welcome to the 100 honest business advice delivered daily every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And in today's episode you will learn how to stop comparing yourself to others. A lot of entrepreneurs, new and seasoned veterans, will spend a lot of time and energy comparing themselves to to other entrepreneurs. They wonder why they haven't achieved what this other person has achieved. Their life seems so much better, it looks like it comes easy to them. What's going on with me? Why don't I have that? This can spin out of control and really lead to a lot of anguish, even depression. And I get it. For some of us this is really hard because business is a competitive sport. You can't help but look at what's going on with other businesses, with other entrepreneurs, with other people in your field of work. This is especially prevalent as you're scrolling through social media. The whole point of social media is to curate the best moments in everybody's life. So naturally you're gonna think your life stinks in comparison or in today's lesson, your business. So in today's lesson I'm gonna give you some really, really helpful tips when it comes to stopping yourself from comparing yourself to others. These really work. How do I know? Because I've tried them and they were my go to moves to attack this issue. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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I want to start with a quote from one of my favorite entrepreneurs and thought leaders, Naval. If you're unfamiliar with Naval, he's got a podcast where he shares some really good advice for entrepreneurs. It's really philosophical and quite deep, but trust me, it's worth a listen. So his quote goes like this. Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. Let that sink in for a moment. The feeling of desire, that constant desire. This is the feeling that we have when we compare ourselves to other. We look at somebody else and say, hey, I want that. I desire what they have. And it's quite self destructive because you kind of tell yourself, I'm not going to be happy until I get that thing. In fact, I'm really depressed right now and I'm feeling trapped. And I often repeat this quote to myself when I find myself comparing myself to somebody else. Happiness in my book is being content, really. It's being at peace with your life, with your situation. We all deserve that and we should try to work on achieving that. That's really the goal here is to just be at peace with yourself. This doesn't mean you don't work hard. This doesn't mean you don't have to go after it and hustle. That's part of the enjoyment. That's part of the thing that we love doing as entrepreneurs. Gonna be honest, it's the journey that really, really is exciting. Yes, the wins are great, but what happens when you reach a goal? You're kind of like, all right, what's next? You really love the actual process of achieving the goal. And the process is now. I really believe this. If you just focus on what you got and working with what you got, doing your best and focusing on the present, the future will take care of itself. The second thing that we all need to just admit and recognize and really let sink in our head as a fact is that social media is fake. Okay? This is not reality. It's not a real world. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, you name it. These are not real places on earth. Okay? Why? Because it doesn't show the full picture. It's like me showing you a beautiful sports car, but there's no engine under the hood. You can't tell there's no engine under the hood. All you see is this beautiful sports car and you're like, I want that car. Probably not because I can't use it. But you don't know that, okay? The problem with social media is that it's really all facade. It's all a bit of smoke and mirrors. Now, I say all, but of course, I mean most, right? Of course there are people that are sharing genuine stories, some challenges in their life, and that's great. But 95% of all content on social media doesn't show you the full picture of that person's life. So therefore, we can't let it influence us. This is why you got to heavily, heavily curate what you follow on social media, if you use social media at all. I like to stay off social media as much as possible because of this reason. I like to focus on my business, on my team, on my products. I want to do as best as I can and I want to be focused without being distracted by comparing myself to others and my competition. If you follow somebody that is constantly flaunting what they have and quoting it as inspiration, I highly recommend you stop following this person because it's doing more damage than good. Here's the thing about entrepreneurs. We don't really need inspiration. We know our why, we know what we're doing, we know why we're doing this. We have internal drive. Most of us. If we need a push, we need some motivation. It's here or there. Go to YouTube for that. Just search something and go and watch it and feel good about yourself and get pumped and go ahead. But you don't need it as your regular news cycle. The other thing I noticed about seven or eight years ago is when you focus on your peers, other people in your industry, other entrepreneurs, when you start looking at their profiles and their life and their website and their ads and all that kind of stuff, you follow that and you just consume that day in and day out, it influences you. You become a me too product, a me too business. Their branding, their business, their practices start to become yours. And that really kills your uniqueness. Some of the businesses and brands are unique because they don't look at their competition. In fact, they purposely don't want to know what their competition is doing because they know it will influence their decisions on making their own products or own marketing, their own sales techniques, their own design on their website. You want to stay clean and fresh, okay? It's better for you to know your actual avatar your know your ideal customer and understand them more than your competition. Cause that's really who you're serving, not your competitors. The next point I'm gonna make here is a little bit of a heavy one. But, you know, I've been an entrepreneur for almost two decades. I've met a lot of people in business, a lot of successful people. And I'm here to tell you that most people I've met that are highly successful people that you might be envious of, people that we both probably know, they're not the happiest people, okay? They have other problems in their life that they don't talk about that are not on social media, that are not in their marketing or ads. And in a lot of ways, you do not want their life. They have things they're dealing with that you're not aware of. I kind of see life as a package. There's different elements in that package. You might be in the beginning stages of your business, and you're struggling a little bit with getting some traction and getting bigger and scaling. But you're in fantastic health. You have all your faculties. You have a loving family. You have supportive friends. You might have had a education that's helping you. You might have had some experiences in the past that's helped. You don't think everybody's got it better than you. You probably have it better than a lot of people than you think in different areas of your life. So the key to this is, again, gratitude. This is why I like to start every morning writing down three things I'm grateful for. I really try to think, what are some things I am so grateful for? It could be something so simple, like the ability to step outside and breathe fresh air. There's a lot of people that live in parts of the world where there's so much pollution that is not possible. Or the mere fact that I'm able to have a level of safety in my life and security. There are millions upon millions of people around the world that don't live in a safe neighborhood, that don't live in a safe country. There are bombs flying and dropping from the sky. Literally. I mean, all of us can kind of look around our surroundings and our settings and be like you know, I have no excuse. I really have everything I need to be happy, to be successful. And if I have some challenges in my life, I can overcome them. Most of us have that ability. So starting my day with gratitude really helps reframe things. And what I like to say is try to live in your feelings a little bit, sit in those feelings. So when you're feeling grateful, be self conscious of how does this make you feel? How do you feel right now? What does this feeling feel like? Right. Why? Because you want to be in that state as much as you can in your day and it's going to be kind of a trigger when you don't feel that way. And that's usually when you're looking at something else and comparing yourself to somebody else or something else and you realize, oh, wow, I'm not grateful anymore. I'm starting to fall down that slope. I should recenter and stop doing what I was doing that's causing me to do that.

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To wrap up today's lesson, comparing yourself to others can really damage your ability to really be in a good state of mind to produce great work. I really believe being conscious of your state as much as possible, so you're at least in the know of. Is this a negative state or positive state? Why? Because your state of mind, the way you feel, is going to change how you think and what you do and what you produce. Sometimes I get tired, I get burnt out and I feel like, oh, I don't really feel like doing what I'm supposed to do today. As soon as I start feeling that feeling that I'm not happy with, this is like a signal, a trigger for me to be like, wait, stop. Let's think about what you're grateful for. This is not that bad. You actually have a lot of things going for you and what you have to do today is really a privilege. You get to do these things. This energizes me to get up and be like, you know what, let's tackle this. And it changes my state. That self awareness really helps. And I gotta say, I didn't develop this overnight. It took me a long time to be mindful of this. I'm still working on this. I'm really trying hard because hey, life is a journey and I'm trying to improve every day. But I'm just sharing with you what has worked for me over the years and I really encourage you to implement some of these strategies I shared with you to really stop comparing yourself to others. It's just not healthy. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe so you don't miss another episode. You also get access to over 1900 business lessons in our archives by hitting subscribe. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. This is going to sound a little bit strange or maybe a little bit too forward, but one of the things I realized is life is too short. You can't waste time comparing yourself to others. These other people, they don't think about you. Probably not. Point is, is that you, you can't allow these other people to live rent free in your head as you're comparing yourself to them. You got to get on with life. Enjoy it, tackle it, take on those challenges, improve your business, improve your life. Enjoy the process. Live in the moment as much as you can. The present is what you got. Don't waste another second of your life of going down that path of comparing yourself to others. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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Fortunately, by switching to Geico, you could save about 900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico.