When I was a senior manager, my director pulled me aside one day. She had seen something in me — ambition, restlessness, the particular kind of frustration that comes from watching people around you advance and not fully understanding why. She gave me a piece of advice I have thought about many times since.
"Never compare yourself to anyone," she said. "You do not know if they have a powerful father. You do not know what connections got them into the room. You do not know what luck arrived at the right moment. And you do not know what they did — or did not do — to get there. If you compare yourself to anyone in this life, you will be upset forever."
She was right. I understood it immediately. And I have kept it with me ever since.
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The comparison instinct is not a character flaw. It is ancient and it made sense once.
The psychologist Leon Festinger described it in 1954 — social comparison theory: humans have a fundamental drive to evaluate themselves by measuring against others. In a small tribe of thirty or fifty people, this was a useful navigation system. You could see the full reality of other people's lives. You knew who hunted well and who struggled. The comparison was grounded in actual observable information about real people you lived alongside every day.
Now we have LinkedIn for careers, Instagram for travel and fashion, Twitter for opinions, and YouTube for success stories. The tribe is not thirty people anymore. It is millions. And every single one of them is showing you only the version of their life they chose to publish. The comparison instinct that evolved for a world of complete information is now running on a feed of almost entirely curated highlights. The system was not built for this.
The result is a specific modern misery: measuring your full interior reality — your doubts, your setbacks, your quiet Tuesday afternoons — against other people's best moments, most flattering photographs, and most impressive announcements. That comparison cannot be won. Not because you are falling short. Because you are measuring two different things and calling them the same.
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There is also a cultural layer that makes this worse depending on where you were raised.
In Turkish culture — where I grew up — success is highly visible and heavily social. What you have achieved, what position you hold, what your children study, what neighbourhood you live in: these are not private matters. They are communal measures of standing, discussed openly at family gatherings, among neighbours, between old friends. The pressure is not subtle. It arrives at dinner tables and in WhatsApp groups and in questions that are asked with warmth but land with weight.
In American corporate culture — where I worked for years — success is also visible but differently performed. The LinkedIn announcement, the Forbes feature, the conference keynote. Equally relentless, just more individualised. In European professional culture it is more understated — performed through taste and access rather than direct declaration — but the comparison is still there, just quieter.
What all of these cultures share is a definition of success that is almost entirely materialistic and positional. Title. Income. Visible accumulation. The problem my director identified — you do not know how they got there — applies everywhere. But the deeper problem is that we have agreed to define success as something external and measurable, without asking whether the person who has it actually feels it.
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This is where Andre Agassi becomes useful.
I should say — I liked Agassi as a kid for reasons that had nothing to do with philosophy. He was shorter than Sampras. I was also shorter than most people I wanted to beat. He was losing his hair. I was also losing my hair. There was solidarity in that. I tried to play like him — the baseline aggression, the returning everything, the refusal to accept that the point was over. He never accepted losing as a final answer, and neither did I. I liked him before I understood what he actually had to teach.
Agassi reached number one in the world in tennis. He won Wimbledon, the US Open, the Australian Open, the French Open. By every external, measurable, culturally recognised definition — Turkish, American, European, any — he succeeded. And here is what he said about it:
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"Got to number one in the world and I had never been so disconnected as I was at that point in my life." — Andre Agassi |
He spiralled. Fell to 140th in the world. Everyone was shocked. He was not. Then he made a different decision — not to chase number one again, but to focus entirely on one thing:
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"I don't know if I'll ever be back to number one. But I know one thing — I can be better than I am today. I can control what is in my control: my work ethic, my discipline, my focus, my relentless spirit of trying to make myself that one day better." — Andre Agassi |
No past. No future. Just today, and whether he was better than yesterday.
He eventually returned to number one. And here is the part nobody talks about: he was no more engaged at the top the second time than he had been at 140. The ranking changed. The internal experience did not. He was the same person at 140 as at number one — more connected to himself at 140, because the process had become the point rather than the destination.
Success and failure are both illusions. The only thing that is real is the quality of your engagement with today.
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I grew up in a competitive environment — a high school and university where the best students pushed each other hard. Some of my closest friendships were formed inside that competition. We grew up together, measured ourselves against each other, and genuinely cared about one another. That part was real.
But I have watched many of those same people carry the habit into their forties and fifties. The benchmark never stopped. Where are you living. What is your title. How much are you making. Are your children successful. The measuring continued long after the school gates closed, dressed in adult clothes but running on the same adolescent software.
These are intelligent people — some more intelligent than me, I know this honestly. They like me as a friend. But the habit is in the words, in the questions, in the way certain conversations turn. It is not malicious. It is just what happens when the comparison instinct never gets examined — it keeps running, quietly benchmarking everyone in its path, long after anyone asked it to.
I am not saying do not compare. You will compare. The instinct is too old and too wired to simply stop. What you can do is become aware of it in the moment — notice when the loop has started, recognise it for what it is, and choose not to follow it all the way down into the blame, the jealousy, the quiet bitterness that makes everything worse.
Mindfulness, in its most practical form, is simply this: you notice the thought instead of becoming it. The comparison arrives. You see it. You do not follow it. You return to what is actually in front of you.
And on the practical side — curate ruthlessly. If someone's feed consistently makes you feel worse about your own life, remove it. Not out of anger. Just as a maintenance decision. Block the people who share only polished success stories. Unfollow the accounts that sell a version of life you do not actually want but find yourself wanting anyway.
Agassi had a front windscreen bigger than his rear-view mirror. So do you. The road ahead is bigger than what is behind. But you have to stop looking at other people's cars to see it.
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This week's insight You are comparing your inside to their outside. Your real anxiety against their LinkedIn announcement of a promotion they are already doubting. Your quiet Tuesday against their Instagram photo from a holiday that cost more than they should have spent. That comparison cannot be won — not because you are falling short, but because you are measuring two completely different things. |
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