The other day, I got an email that really bummed me out.
Just recently, I was part of an affiliate promotion. I did pretty well with it. It was a really cool program and I was proud to spread the word, and I was pleasantly surprised that a fair number of my people agreed that it was cool and signed up, despite it being very different from anything I’d been a part of before. It was nice. I’d again used that win/win/win principle I talk about so often, and everyone was benefitting, and I’d made some nice coin without a ton of effort, and all was well with the world.
Except that I wasn’t good enough. I was good, but not good enough. This email proved it.
The email I’m talking about ranked the top affiliates for the promotion, and I came in seventh overall. The first place person referred almost four times as many as I did. I stopped thinking about win/win/win and pleasant surprise and started thinking about seventh place. Suddenly, I didn’t feel all that successful.
Right now, nobody is feeling sorry for me. In fact, probably some of you or most of you are all angry at me, thinking, “Boo fucking hoo — Johnny only made X amount of money and not four times X, whereas I’m still struggling to make my first hundred online. I feel so BAD for him.”
But the fact that I was bummed out about something like this is exactly my point. It’s like complaining about having too many supermodels after you. Or not having enough time to be able to drink all of your fine wine. Should that email have bugged me? Of course not. And that’s exactly why I decided to write this post.
Why did it bother me? Because it told me that someone was better than I was. Six people, actually… and in the universe of this one event, they were a LOT better than I was.
So: Are YOU feeling beaten up? Are you feeling inferior?
Well, join the club.
You’ll never be good enough
The pain in the ass about life is that at least as far as I’ve experienced — and as far as I’ve seen in everyone I’ve known — you’ll never really outrun your insecurities.
If you become rich, there will always be someone richer than you are, and you’ll envy them. And if you used to be poor, it’ll take a lot of self work for you to ever not feel destitute, even while rubbing yourself with thousand dollar bills.
If you used to be a scrawny kid who got bullied all the time and you bulk up, you’ll still feel intimidated when you go back to high school reunions, and you’ll always notice when someone is stronger than you are, no matter how irrelevant the context.
Personally, I can’t talk to an attorney or lawyer without thinking that these people must wonder why they should take this young kid seriously. And I’m 34.
I wasn’t on the football team in high school and I never got invited to the cool kids’ parties. (In fact, the reason I almost never drink is thanks to negative associations I have to those cool parties.) I defined myself by academic success. I was always the smartest kid, and if I thought someone was challenging my position at the top of the nerd pack, I’d work as hard as it took to beat them. The grades and accolades didn’t matter. What mattered was finishing first, because that’s who I’d decided I was.
The good thing about the world is that it’s big enough that someone will always give you something to strive toward, to force you to stretch and be better. And the shitty thing about the world is that if you always do that — if you always define success by comparing yourself to others instead of comparing yourself to where you used to be and where you’d like to be — there’s always a ton reasons to feel like a big, fat loser. Like, all the time.
I’m doing pretty well, right? Built a business from scratch in well under a year, got up to six figures, built a great base of readers and customers, closing in on my own rock star life and have like a quarter million mentions on the web according to Google.
Yeah, but six people were better than me recently.
And also, I listened to Brian Clark’s interview with Glen Allsopp and realized that what I’ve done, Glen did before age 21.
Oh, and I haven’t caught up with my mentors. Never mind that it’s only been a bit over a year… they remain better than me.
I look at other popular blogs, and unless they’re lying, they all have many times the number of RSS subscribers as I have. And person X just accomplished this. And person Y just started this new thing, and it’s making Z dollars, and everyone loves it.
You can’t win this way. If success in anything (or everything) is defined as something you’re always striving for, then that means you’ll never actually have it.
If you’re feeling beat up, more success won’t make that feeling go away.
There will always be someone better than you, whether you’re at the bottom of the barrel or the top of the heap. It’s like that episode of The Simpsons where Homer is trying and failing to compete with the invention record of Thomas Edison, and he realizes at the end that Edison was just trying and failing to keep up with Leonardo DaVinci. If we insist on living in someone else’s shadow, there are plenty of tall folks out there to feel small next to.
I listen to a ton of personal development material. (I go way back. Remember those giant folding plastic things filled with Tony Robbins cassettes that snapped closed like a big flat Tupperware container?) One from way back that I still listen to on my iPod is Deepak Chopra’s The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, and in it, he talks about the concepts of “self referral” and “object referral.”
In object referral, the point of reference is in the external world, and worth and accomplishment are defined by looking at other people and outside circumstances. This is the reference point of the ego.
In self referral, the reference point is yourself. You don’t look outside to see how you’re doing. Instead, you look within.
I still struggle with this because we’re trained to look to others, to keep up with the Joneses. Hell, that rock star life post that people seemed to like so much? It’s all this same stuff. If you’re doing what you think you’re supposed to do and wanting what you think you’re supposed to want, you won’t see that if you look inside, you may already be doing what you want to do and achieving what really matters.
If you’re feeling inferior, like you could never do what Naomi Dunford has done, I get it. A year ago, what she’d done intimidated the hell out of me despite the fact that a few years before, she was a wage slave like the rest of the world, and that a few years before that, she was living in a homeless shelter. Despite the fact that she has plenty of her own well-publicized neuroses. Despite the fact that she and I both now feel inferior to any number of people who are more successful, better liked, more stable, or whatever than we are.
You don’t need to become more successful in objective terms. You need to train yourself to watch only your internal compass to see where you’re going relative to where you want to be. If you do that, you can improve and actually feel the improvement instead of remaining just as far away from newer, bigger objects of envy.
Deep down, I’m still the twelve-year-old kid who wasn’t good at sports and who had to score well on objective tests if he was to establish his worth. I try to not be that kid, and to instead be who I am today. I usually succeed, but not always.
Who are you? Are you your past, or do you allow yourself, in every self-referring moment, to be your present?
That “live in the moment” thing? Yeah, I think there might be something to it.
Maybe we are all just who we are supposed to be. Wow, is that a scary thought, or what?
Geez, and imagine what the guy who came in 10th felt like.
You’re one of the 7 guys above me too!
Ah crap…that sound pervy too. Oh well, great post, Johnny!
Appreciate the honesty. I struggle with comparing myself to others who I see as being where I want to be. When I do, I get frustrated and start making foolish decisions that try to rush the process rather than play my game.
It’s like golf. Sure you’re on the course with hundreds of other players. But how they play doesn’t (or shouldn’t) affect how you play. You need to go out, play your game, and beat the course. Those golfers who do are the best in the world. Those who play against the other golfers are the guys further down the ladder looking up at the “6 guys above them.”
I feel inferior to you because you gleaned wise insights from an episode of The Simpsons. You are the online Aristotle.
Dave
Hey look! You’re finally promoting the Jam Sessions – about time
I don’t know a single person who doesn’t compare themselves to others successes. I think the important part is to have a clear(ish) vision of what you’re trying to achieve. When I started to get specific about what I’m working for I started to realize that many of their successes didn’t really make sense for me.
Of course there’s a lot that do and I still find myself comparing and feeling inferior to them. It’s good fuel for the “how’d they do that and how can I do it so it works best for me” fire though.
MM. Yes. I’m writing a lot about this lately. Moving (generally) from an outside-in life to an inside- out one. But DAILY I stumble. Hourly? Hell. Messy human insecurity. But the broad strokes? Yeah- we are making headway. Thanks for this.
Great post and you are just absolutely right. Why do we constantly compare ourselves to others? As if it is a relative comparison. We are told not to do it by everyone and their brother but still we compare and contrast. Just a part of the world of dichotomy? Human struggles?
Even if you are the president of anything including a country, there are a ton of people you can compare yourself to and come out less than number one. Is it just the plight of the over achiever?
Glad someone finally said it, Johnny! We’re always too busy keeping our eyes on what everyone else is doing and achieving, and not enough time looking at how far we’ve come ourselves. It’s why we see so much of the “me too” mentality going on out there in the world, online and offline.
We see those who make millions of dollars, have the lifestyle, land a tv spot, whatever it is…and many think that’s what they should be doing too. But first we need to look inside ourselves and figure out what’s being true to ourselves, our values, and how we define success personally. That’s our reality…not what the world tells us we should do or want.
Easier said than done sometimes, yes? We’re all just human after all.
Brilliantly written and while feeling sorry for you was not at all the point, the story certainly drew me in and I read this entire long post (and now am sufficiently behind in everything else but I digress!!) Thank you for coming in 7th so that you could feel really bad and then share with us by putting it all in perspective. I have played the rat race and the compare myself to this and that person and it is exhausting. I love being me lately – being utterly and completely me – and doing what I like to do and I do have some of those questions that make some of my friends (if they knew) look at me strange – like what European locale shall I run off to with the hubby on business class for Thanksgiving this year (seriously, Germany, France or the city of Madrid?) but I have made it from nothing and I am proud of my sweet problems. There are millions better off than me and tens and tens of millions worse off. In the end, the race is with ourselves and the sooner we quit the sooner we can start living. THANK YOU, Johnny, you are #1 to me!
The drive you talk about, working as hard as you can to be number one, that’s a great quality. I work hard to find that drive as I am not naturally competitive, unless I’m playing Monopoly, in which case, I will destroy you no matter what it takes. In the business world, I know it’s important to constantly be striving for the next sale, the next rung up, etc. Thanks for a great post.
I’m all about living in the moment and not comparing myself to others. Trouble is, the next moment I’m all about living in the past, futurizing, and telling myself I suck compared to certain talented others. Lucky for me that all this falling down and getting back up provides the foundation for most of my writing. If I ever get it all together and keep it that way, my writing career will be doomed.
There is no #$% juice in the comparison game and I loved that you wrote this post and outed yourself. That YOU “7 guys above me” is willing to say this is so, so great and a relief to my damn lizard brain that keeps whining over and over again that “I’ll never be good enough.”
You are who I look to when I want to remember how I want to write. Funny, straight up, sarcastic – and you always make a difference.
Take that #7!
Mark McCormack talks about this very thing in “What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School”.
In the very last chapter, he recounts a conversation he had with a famous golfer. I want to say it was Nicklaus. Nicklaus was playing off against some other famous golfer, and said “Man, I wish I could hit as good as that guy!”
McCormack then basically heard the same exact thing from the other guy about Nicklaus!
The Champion mindset, according to McCormack, is never being content with your own standing, and always striving for self-improvement.
Hmm…I never considered the measure of my progress against where I used to be…that makes a lot of sense.
It’s so hard to live in the moment and resist regretting the past and worrying about the future. I struggle with mindfulness everyday, and I’m pretty certain I’ve written a post extolling the virtues, but, um…I’m sure it wasn’t good enough, and I can’t remember b/c I’m too concerned with next week’s….oops!
I think you could give Naomi a run for her money…I’m going to check out your guest link now. I’ll be mindfully present for some more straight up tips.
Thanks!
Wish I knew what to say to cheer you up bro, but life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you gonna get (Forest Gump) the internet runs somewhat in that same course.
You can only put in the work and see where it goes from there..an hopefully one day you pass your mentors.
“TrafficColeman “Signing Off”
Yep – fight my mediocrity everyday.
Some days I win and live internally.
Some days I lose and compare myself to everyone else – including you.
Most days I just try to focus on the growth achieved since I started this online game.
Excellent stuff Johnny
Great post!
Everyone, especially guys, have a friend that completely lives in the moment. You know the guy, living in a basement suite, excited about getting something new for his car or mini-bikes. Working a job that pays the bills for said mini-bikes. The best part of his life are the times he manages to actually score with the waitress he met at the late-night drive thru. Not the brightest guy, but happy, and completely oblivious to ‘the future’ of life’s scorecard.
I always try to remind myself, that although I’m way too in my head to be that guy, he does have something to teach us. There is only Now, and celebrating the Now in time and place is something we can always do a little more.
Thanks for the reminder.
Being human is what makes you and your posts so appealing. We all know that.
Comparing ourselves to others is just what we do. Chalk it up to ego’s dance with the lizard brain. As long as we can maintain awareness of how this works against us, NOT for us, we can all go back to being uniquely who we are. Do what we do. Rejoice in our victories, measured on OUR scale. What you’ve done and what you do is phenomenal. What I do and what I’ve done is extraordinary. Stay with that, ride it and you’ll be # 1 every time.
And THIS is why I’m obsessed with you. First of all, we’ve all totally been there. Doesn’t matter how “successful” you are (or even just appear to be), seeing others do better always sucks.
The best thing I’ve learned is to just stop comparing myself. Yeah, yeah, totally easier said than done, but also crazy freeing once you remember that you are SO awesome and talented and SMART. That person that got the #1 spot? No idea who they are but as the saying goes, “Angeline Jolie shits too.”
In all sincerity though, thanks for posting this and for simply being awesome. I have no idea how to word this without sounding horribly pervy, but to me (and all of your readers) you are the 7 guys above me. See what I mean? I swear, I TOTALLY didn’t mean it that way.
I needed this post. Really bad!
You’re right in that we will always lack in areas of our life if we constantly compare to others. I know that and believe it. But I just can’t help it sometimes. When you’re busting your ass 5 to 8 hours a night in addition to your corporate job, when you’re living on 4 hours of sleep a night, when you’re struggling to just barely get ahead…then yes, it drives you absolutely insane when you (mis)perceive others who look like they’re getting handed success on a golden platter.
It does help a huge amount though when the people we view as heroes (like you, Naomi, and a host of others) are willing to show just how human you are too. It gives those of us farther back on this journey hope that we can one day be in a place where our humility can help others. But most importantly, it gives me confidence that the hope that one day I can leave the wage slave life behind…isn’t a wasted hope.
Thank you!
Hey, Johnny!
While a lot of people talk about comparing themselves (whether inwardly or outwardly), all the talk’s about outward stuff — money, position, titles, location they live, vacations they can afford…
It’s the inner stuff that matters. I used to feel like the lowest piece of sh*t EVER, that was… The reason? I was told (verbally and in other ways) during several years when I was young enough to believe it.
Now that I know Who I Really Am (not what anyone else told/tells me), I’m so mellow despite my outer circumstances I don’t care if there are 7 or 70 people who sell more than I. They can’t say they’re better at being me than I am. Still motivated to express that outwardly, but not by comparing.
You’re gettin’ there, kid.
Annie
Great post! I’m so relieved to see your blog back…that was scary!
Anyhow, this post was just what the doctor ordered. I’ve been dealing with thinking everyone else is better than me, and that I’m not good enough to be able to do the things I want to do. It sucks to always be second-guessing yourself, and it sucks even harder when you realize that it’s all in your head.
Thanks for sharing…you’re a model of transparency!
Jerry
Hey all,
Thanks for all the comments, and glad to see that this was something that’s relatable. I haven’t been able to watch the comments very closely because I’ve been dealing with a site crash (saw this and a bunch of ancient posts on your RSS again? Um, that was the most benign of the things that happened).
But look how much we care! The comments on this post got nuked when we restored the database (big thanks to @Norcross for that), so I asked my assistant Amy to painstakingly add them back in one by one from the comment notification emails I’d gotten. EAT THAT, CUSTOMER SERVICE GURUS!
Growing up, my mom had a decoupaged wooden plague of Desiderata hanging in the kitchen. It came to life in my mind as I read your post. The whole comparison thing is right there – in the middle of all sorts of other wise and wonderful stuff I forget all the time. The plaque hangs on my wall now. Your post sent me down the hall to read it. Again. Thanks!
Thanks for this Johnny.
I have been experiencing this a lot recently. I see what you and others I follow online have built and I see what a few people I know personally are build or have found and I see me. A guy who wakes up goes to a coffee shop and tried to figure out how to do something to buy food next month.
There is a fine line between being challenged and inspired by others and feeling inferior and I tend to the latter.
The things I forget are:
- People come to me for help on a few things
- I have NO debt (well I took my girlfriend out to dinner the other night but that will be paid by the next bill)
- I have a place to sleep for the next few months
- Oh and I just had a frozen mocha cause I could
Challenges that remind of us the blessings we have or obstacles that ignite our fears and insecurities… that is our choice.
Thanks again Johnny, keep it real.
Hey, Johnny, fabulous post.
I think it’s pretty tough if you hang out online, and in fact run your business online, not to compare yourself to other people. There’s some awesomeness out there for sure, and a lot of it self-promotes phenomenally well, hence exacerbating the whole thing.
But if we keep comparing ourselves to Naomi, or Brian, or, not disrespect, but you’re up there for me too, we’ll never achieve on our own terms. We can’t be these others, but we can be ourselves. Our “top” might not be the absolute “top”, but as long as it’s our best, it’s a great result.
Oh Johnny, Johnny, Johhny –
You are just about the most refreshing fucking thing (I can say that F-word, cause it’s your blog afterall) on the Internet. Thank you. Whenever I need a boost – there you are. And…when I grow up, I wanna be like you. Ooops…is that ‘object referral’? Well, I mean it in the very best, most empowering way.
Cheers. @itsleisa
So cool how you can be cool talking about how you sometimes don’t feel cool. If a coup de grace is a blow that kills mercifully, then you have delivered what i shall coin as a blog de grace. Good work, sir [insert very respective golf claps]
Love the way you said this! In fact, this is the main reason I started my new business – because so many of the success stories out there apply to service and informational product businesses, that it can be easy for someone in the slower startup curve of a product business to feel they are doing well. Your post is exactly the kind of thinking that we all need to remember – just keep on keepin’ on and appreciate how far we’ve come!
Writing like this is why you’re one of my heroes. I struggle with this daily. Thanks for expressing it so well.
Johnny,
Another good one.
In my case, a combination of object referral and an unhealthy preoccupation with what my well-meaning family thinks of my choices, and I find myself in a messy kettle of self-doubt soup.
It’s good for me to unplug once in awhile – both from the net and family – and remind myself that I’m still heading in the direction of being the best version of me, based on MY standards.
I hope I can teach my kids the same thing.