Tuesday, September 27, 2011

The despair of compare

If there is one word of wisdom I can offer you today it’s this: stop comparing yourself to those around you.

The days of keeping up with the Jones or the Smiths are dead and gone. Stop looking at the other guys car, because if you knew the truth of it all, you’d probably be glad to know that you don’t have to pay his monthly lease bill. I have seen it time and time again – especially in tough economic times – the shedding of top end vehicles and full furnished bungalows because the vehicles and properties were never owned by the occupants in the first place. They were owned by the bank.  So stop comparing yourself with others and their stuff.

The only person you should be comparing yourself with is you and your last week, month or year’s performance.

Here are some questions to prime your personal comparison pump -

How far have you come?
What skills have you added to your resource in that time frame?
How much more money have you saved?
How much bad debt have you reduced?
How many credit cards have you cut up?
What have you produced in the past twelve months?
What new mentors have you added to your circle of influence?
What new friends have you added to your circle of peers?
How many people have you positively influenced?
How much money have you given to charity?
How much time or effort have you volunteered for no charge?
Have you grown as a person?
Are you more in love with your spouse and your children than last year?
But don’t’ spend one minute on a comparison analysis with someone else. It’s a total waste of time.

And as someone once told me, ‘If we all put our problems into a hat and then picked out of it someone else’s problems, we’d all ask for our own back.’

Learn to live in a state of dissatisfied satisfaction. Enjoy today, but continue to dream and hope for a better tomorrow. But whatever you do, don’t waste today worrying about what you could have done yesterday. Learn from yesterday, but don’t stay there. Do better today than you did then, and you will be assured of a better tomorrow.

Make it your focus to only compare your today’s efforts with yesterdays – with a constant mission to improve. This will set you up for some hugely successful tomorrows.

And remember this, that to compare yourself with others will only create one thing – despair. Don’t go there!

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