Theodore Roosevelt is often credited with saying, “Comparison is the thief of joy”. I’ve never entirely agreed with that.
I believe comparison can be useful. We learn by observing people who are better at something than we are. We look at what others have achieved, understand what’s possible, and sometimes find the motivation to do better ourselves.
That said, I also know the reality of the world we live in where everyone is constantly being bombarded by reels and stories and posts about achievements and hacks to get ahead.
We used to compare ourselves with people we wanted to become. Now we compare ourselves with moments we can’t possibly sustain.
The difference in perspective is critical. Are we comparing ourselves with someone’s lifetime of effort, or just a highlight?
The startup comparison
When I started building Skwill, my first technology product company, I found myself in unfamiliar territory. I’d spent close to three decades building and running technology businesses. But starting a company from scratch was a different experience altogether.
There was product development, finding customers, raising capital, managing cash flow, and making decisions with limited resources and incomplete information.
And then there were the funding announcements.
Someone had raised $2 million. Another startup had raised $15 million. Someone else had just closed a $100 million round. These announcements were everywhere. And when you’re trying to build a company yourself, it’s difficult not to compare.
Over time as Skwill started to grow, it hit me that my perspective on news coming of out of the startup world was fundamentally flawed. The announcements told me how much money a company had raised. They rarely told me how long it had taken to get there.
Was the company two years old? Five? Fifteen?
How many times had the founders changed direction? How many customers had rejected them? How much of their own money had they invested? How many years had they spent working without knowing whether the business would survive?
We knew the outcome. Very little about the journey. And without that information, what exactly were we comparing?
A founder who raises $20 million after ten years of building a business is in a very different position from someone who’s been trying to raise their first $500,000 for eighteen months.
Yet it’s easy to look at the two outcomes and conclude that one person is succeeding while the other is falling behind.
There’s another question we rarely ask ourselves.
If someone took fifteen years to achieve something we admire, are we prepared to commit fifteen years of our own lives to achieving something similar?
We all want the outcome, but are we willing to go through the process. Food for thought.
The process becomes almost invisible
Imagine watching a ten-second Instagram reel. Someone has transformed their body over nine months. You see the before and after. The transformation is remarkable.
For a second, let me put another image in your mind, instead of ten seconds, the video showed the entire nine months. Every workout. Every missed session. Every meal. The days when nothing seemed to change. The frustration, the boredom, the setbacks.
Would you watch it? I have a feeling you won’t. That is interesting, isn’t it? If we wanted to achieve something similar, that’s precisely the part we should be interested in. The process.
Yet we’ve become far more interested in the outcome than in what it takes to get there. Social media is particularly good at exploiting this.
A ten-second transformation gets our attention. Nine months of ordinary, repetitive effort probably wouldn’t. These platforms compete for our attention, and extraordinary outcomes are much easier to package and consume than the messy reality behind them.
The outcome becomes highly visible. The process becomes almost invisible.
Herein lies the problem. We admire achievements without fully appreciating what they require. We see what’s possible, but not necessarily what it takes. Over time, we start expecting results much faster than is reasonable.
So when our own progress is slow, repetitive or messy, we begin to wonder whether we’re doing something wrong. The reality is that we might be experiencing exactly what progress looks like.
Why comparison can make us feel inadequate
There’s some interesting psychology behind this. In 1954, psychologist Leon Festinger proposed something called social comparison theory.
The idea is fairly straightforward. We evaluate our abilities and opinions partly by comparing ourselves with other people, particularly when we don’t have an objective measure. If I’m learning to box, I might observe someone who’s been boxing for ten years to understand what good technique looks like.
If I’m building a startup, I might look at another founder who’s successfully built a business. The comparison gives me a reference point, and that’s incredibly useful.
But what happens when I’m comparing myself with the outcome, without understanding the time and effort behind it? I might look at that successful founder and start wondering why I haven’t achieved the same thing.
The comparison is no longer just about their achievement. It starts becoming a judgment of my own progress.
Psychologist E. Tory Higgins explored something related through self-discrepancy theory. In a nutshell, there’s a difference between who we believe we are today and who we’d ideally like to become.
That gap isn’t necessarily a problem. It can motivate us to improve. But repeatedly comparing ourselves with people whose achievements seem far beyond our own can make that distance feel enormous.
And that can contribute to feelings of disappointment and dissatisfaction. Think about that for a moment.
Nothing about our actual circumstances has changed. We haven’t become less capable. We haven’t lost the progress we’ve made.
When we changed our reference point, our perception of our own progress changed. Someone else’s success has made our own achievements feel smaller. I found that quite revealing.
How we feel about our progress isn’t always determined by what we’ve actually achieved. Sometimes, it’s determined by what we’ve chosen to compare it against.
When comparison stops us from acting
There’s another psychological concept that makes this particularly interesting. Albert Bandura called it self-efficacy. It’s our belief in our ability to perform the actions needed to achieve something.
This is important because it influences the challenges we take on, how much effort we invest, and whether we persist when things become difficult.
These three ideas might together. We see someone achieve something remarkable. We compare ourselves with them.
Because we don’t understand their journey, the distance between their achievement and our own progress feels much larger than it might actually be. That distance can make us question our capabilities.
And if we begin to believe that the gap is impossible to close, we may become less willing to try. There’s an irony here.
Something that could have helped us improve can end up becoming a reason not to try.
Of course, this isn’t inevitable.
Seeing someone else succeed can also strengthen our belief in what’s possible, especially when we understand how they achieved it. If I watch an experienced boxer demonstrate a technique, I might recognise something I can practise.
But if I simply watch that boxer perform at an extraordinary level, without understanding the years of training behind it, I might conclude that I’ll never be that good.
Same person. Same achievement. A very different response. The difference is what I take away from the comparison.
And perhaps that’s where we need to become more deliberate.
One thing worth trying
I don’t think we need to stop comparing ourselves with other people. I’m not sure that’s realistic, and I don’t think it would necessarily be helpful. But we can be more thoughtful about how we compare.
Here’s something worth trying this week.
The next time you find yourself comparing your progress with someone else’s achievement, ask yourself three questions.
What am I actually comparing?
Am I comparing my everyday reality with someone’s best moment? Do I understand their circumstances, or am I drawing conclusions from a singl achievement? Are we even at comparable stages of our journeys?
What was their time horizon?
How long did it take them to get there? What did they have to learn? What challenges did they face? What resources or advantages did they have? And if I don’t know the answers, perhaps I don’t have enough information to make a meaningful comparison.
What can I learn and apply?
This is the question I find most useful. Instead of wondering why I haven’t achieved what someone else has, I can start looking for something worth learning. Perhaps it’s their consistency, a skill they’ve developed, or how they handled setbacks, or simply their willingness to stay committed for years.
The idea isn’t to copy someone else’s life. It’s to find something useful that I can apply to my own. Something I can act on today.
A highlight or a lifetime?
Building a startup taught me many things. One was how little a single announcement tells us about the work behind it. And I’ve come to think the same is true of most things we admire.
A successful career. A healthy body. A thriving business. A skill someone has spent years mastering.
We tend to notice the results because they’re visible. But most of the work that produces those results happens when nobody is watching.
The ordinary days. The repetition. The mistakes. The periods when progress is difficult to see.
And that’s what we need to pay more attention to. Understanding the process gives us something we can actually work with.
Comparison can teach us a great deal, only if we’re comparing things that make sense and if we use what we learn to make progress rather than measure our own worth.
The next time you see someone achieve something you admire, ask yourself whether you’re looking at a highlight or a lifetime.
There’s a lot more to someone’s success than the moment we happen to see, and a lot more to your own progress than you’re giving yourself credit for.
I’m Anoop George, host of Built, Not Born, a weekly podcast exploring the everyday challenges that affect how we think, feel and behave. One problem, what science tells us, and one thing worth trying.
🎧 Listen to Episode 3: Am I Falling Behind?
The science behind this article
Leon Festinger (1954)
A Theory of Social Comparison Processes.
Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140.
Read the research
E. Tory Higgins (1987)
Self-Discrepancy: A Theory Relating Self and Affect.
Psychological Review, 94(3), 319–340.
Read the research
Albert Bandura (1977)
Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change.
Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215.
Read the research