Have you ever been perfectly content with your life until you stumbled on someone else’s achievement? Perhaps someone got married, bought a house, secured a new job, started a business, travelled abroad, or announced some exciting milestone.
Suddenly, you start questioning your own progress. You begin to wonder whether you’re doing enough, whether you’ve made the right decisions, and whether you’re somehow falling behind.
The funny thing is that nothing about your life changed between the moment before you saw their achievement and the moment after. But somehow, your perception of your life has changed.
Why?
I think one of the reasons you compare yourself with others is that you sometimes use other people’s lives as a measuring stick for yours. And this happens more often when you haven’t clearly defined what you want your life to look like, what you’re working towards, and what progress should mean to you.
Let me share three things I think you should consider as likely reasons you compare yourself with others:
1. You don’t know your season.
This one is perhaps the most profound.
When you compare yourself with others, what you’re most likely comparing is their outcome with your current reality. I promise you, you will hardly ever compare yourself with people’s process.
So, that cute couple you’re comparing your marriage to? They probably went through hundreds of difficult conversations, conflict resolution sessions, sacrifices, and prayers to attain the unity they enjoy today.
That business owner whose success makes you question your career? You may be looking at the business they have today without considering the years they spent learning, making mistakes, building relationships, and even questioning their sanity.
And that person who seems to have everything going for them? You don’t know what they had to prioritize, postpone, sacrifice, or work through to get there.
So, when you compare yourself with other people, you may be comparing two people who are in completely different seasons of life.
One person may be in a season of building, another in a season of harvesting. One may be discovering their identity, while another has spent years developing theirs. One may be laying foundations that nobody can see, while another is enjoying the results of foundations already laid.
And because you haven’t clearly identified your own season, you might mistake the activities of someone else’s season for what you should be doing in yours.
This is why you need to understand your own journey.
What are you building? What are you learning? What needs your attention right now? What responsibilities has this season placed before you?
You see, when you have clarity about these things, someone else’s progress doesn’t automatically become evidence of your failure.
You can celebrate their harvest without despising your planting season.
2. You compare yourself with others because are not grooming your gift.
I have a rather interesting belief. I believe it is possible for all of us to shine. And no, I don’t necessarily mean we all become celebrities, public figures, or people whose faces appear everywhere.
I mean we all have the potential to discover what makes us unique, develop and become so good at it that we become so valuable to the people around us.
Why do I believe this?
Because there is nobody God made empty, since there is no emptiness in Him.
We all have something to offer. We have different abilities, interests, perspectives, experiences, and capacities. But the problem is that many people spend so much time admiring what others have that they neglect what has been deposited in them.
Think about it. How much time do you spend wishing you could do what someone else does compared to the time you spend developing what you can already do?
You admire someone’s communication skills, but have you invested in improving yours?
You envy someone’s business success, but are you developing the problem-solving abilities, discipline, and business acumen that could help you build something of your own?
You admire someone’s creativity, but are you giving yourself room to explore, practice, make mistakes, and improve?
Sometimes, comparison is a symptom of misplaced attention. You’re so occupied with what is happening in someone else’s life that you have very little time and energy left to cultivate your own potential.
And here’s the thing: you cannot develop what you consistently neglect.
Your uniqueness doesn’t automatically translate into excellence. You have to groom it. You have to learn, practice, improve, and give yourself opportunities to use it.
So, rather than spending all your time wishing you had someone else’s gift, perhaps it’s time to pay attention to yours.
You might be surprised by what becomes possible when you finally start developing it.
3. You don’t know how to utilize the gift of people.
Now, this might sound a little strange, but hear me out.
What if, instead of seeing someone’s achievement as a reason to feel inadequate, you learned to see it as an opportunity to learn?
Yes, even if you never get to do exactly what they do, or become exceptional in that particular area, there is still something you can learn from what you admire about them.
Someone has built a beautiful marriage? You can learn about communication, intentionality, commitment, and conflict resolution from them.
Someone is doing exceptionally well in business? You can glean from their approach to identifying opportunities, managing resources, building relationships, and solving problems.
Someone is disciplined and consistent? You can observe their systems, routines, and the decisions that help them stay committed.
Do you see what I’m getting at?
Other people’s gifts, achievements, and experiences can become resources for your own growth if you learn to approach them correctly.
I think one of the things we sometimes forget is that we were not designed to figure everything out independently. God places people, with their different abilities and experiences, in our lives for different reasons. Some people can teach us things we would otherwise spend years trying to figure out.
But when you approach every impressive thing you see with envy, resentment, or a sense of inadequacy, you miss the opportunity to learn from it.
You see someone doing something remarkable and immediately conclude that you’re not doing enough.
Meanwhile, you could have asked how they developed that skill, what you could learn from their experience, or how their knowledge could help you improve in your own area of responsibility.
The next time you admire something about someone, don’t stop at admiring it. Look for the lesson in it.
You don’t have to become them to benefit from what they know.
So, what should you do the next time you try to compare yourself with others?
I don’t think the answer is simply to tell yourself to stop comparing. I think you need to redirect the attention you’re giving to other people’s lives towards something more productive.
The next time you find yourself comparing yourself with someone, pause and ask yourself these three questions:
1. What season of life am I in?
What am I currently building, learning, working on, or preparing for? Am I judging my progress using a timeline that doesn’t reflect my actual responsibilities and priorities?
2. Is there a gift in me I can hone better?
What abilities, interests, and strengths have I been neglecting? What can I start learning, practicing, or improving instead of wishing I had someone else’s abilities?
3. What can I learn from what I admire in them?
Is there a skill, habit, principle, or lesson behind what I’m admiring that I can apply to my own life?
And that’s it!
You don’t have to spend your life competing with people whose journeys you barely understand.
Learn to recognize your season, take responsibility for developing what God has deposited in you, and allow the people around you to become sources of wisdom rather than standards against which you measure your worth.
There is room to admire what God is doing in someone else’s life without becoming dissatisfied with what He is doing in yours.
And perhaps that’s where we should start.
