Ask HN: How do I stop comparing myself to others?

The race is long and it is only with yourself.

Realistically, what is the percentage of people in the whole world that can do what you can do? Here is the answer: Under 25-million or you can do what you do better than 0.0000000025% of the planet.

https://www.quora.com/Approximately-how-many-programmers-are...

I bet that didn't help but look at it this may, you may or may not become a "New York Times, number-one, best selling author" or a "Diva at an Italian opera house" but you can master your craft and use it to better people's lives or even your own life for that matter. Perhaps that should be the goal and revel in those accomplishments?

Well, you should start by stopping reading Hacker News, because it's clearly not good for you in your current mental state. I promise, you won't miss anything important.

Next, take some of your time and go volunteer somewhere - go tutor a child or teach someone to read or feed the homeless or whatever else you like, just go help someone out. You're now accomplishing something way more important than interning with some 'top company' somewhere. Congratulations, your existence is now justified.

Finally, now that you're doing something worthwhile for humanity and you're not tormenting yourself by wallowing in everyone's self-promotional bloviating, you can happily focus on learning new things, gradually improving your own skills, and figuring out how to make a big dent in the universe on your own personal schedule, which is different from everybody else's.

Hey, I spent my entire twenties fucking up left and right - whatever you end up doing, I guarantee you're way ahead of me.

    news.ycombinator.com##td.subtext

I don't think you can stop comparing yourself to others, and you shouldn't try to. It's a good thing to do.

What you should try to do is realize you are you, and you have the opportunity every second to be creative and additive rather than competitive or detrimental to the world. That is amazingly valuable :)

A study shows people of age 18-25 are the most stressed out, as it a period of "entering adulthood". This is the time you have to make many important decisions in life and it is absolutely normal to get confused and remember you are not alone in facing such a situation . Millions of people of the age 18-25 face the same problem. But what you must do is, sit and think what you really want in life and listen to your inner voice. Always remember no two fingers are the same, so never compare yourself with anybody else. Each one is made for a purpose. Identify yours and work towards it.You may not realize your own strength untill you set a goal and work towards it. So all the best my dear friend. Be cheerful. You are not alone!

Realize that what you can achieve in your life depends on the DNA you started with, the life circumstances that got you to where you are today, your world view, perspective and perception, and a healthy dose of luck.

Then realize that there are zero other people in the world who have that same set of attributes. Therefore, no matter who you interact with, see on YouTube, or read about, the difference between the two of you is not going to be explained by something you can control.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/communication-success/2...

I'm going to offer up what might be a bit different advice. Comparing yourself to others isn't necessarily a bad thing. Doing this can tell you who can help you improve, or maybe you identify role models, appreciate a good mentor, etc... Or it can show you who you might be able to help. Sometimes we all need some help.

The real battle is in how you define your sense of worth. Take smarts, for example. In your life, you are going to encounter people smarter than you are, as well as not as smart, or maybe you can't really tell. What does that really mean?

Think about being smart enough. One artifact of that thought could be what you accomplish boils down to how willing you are to do the work to actually accomplish it. Being willing is very high value! Suddenly, how smart you are isn't a defining attribute. Your intent and resolve are.

Another artifact of that might be the realization that smart people "rub off" If you want to improve, being around people better than you is an excellent way to do that, and feeling inadequate gets in the way of all that too. Think back on that intent and resolve and maybe you realize everyone who wants to do stuff with their life has those things and is sharing them with others who appreciate it. Going further, many people respond favorably to someone they see doing the work to get after those big things, whatever they are. And there should be no shame in any of that at all.

Extend that a bit more, and suddenly those comparisons have value! Hard working people rub off. Social people rub off. Etc...

What you need to do is absorb unabashedly. As you encounter others who are compelling in some way, watch and learn! Make a few friends. Those people know it's OK to be who they are, as should you. Those people are doing the work, making the friends, showing good intent. As should you.

Do the work and trust in yourself. Get help when you need it. Give help when others need it. Treat yourself with the same respect you would others you admire or believe you can learn from.

In fact, cultivate a sense of respect. Mutual respect. When you demonstrate this, people most often return it. And if it's your intent to do that, work hard, get something you believe in done, people will most often return that too, and in that process you become one of those people you are comparing yourself to.

Give with honest, good intent, and 'ye shall receive.

You aren't stuck behind anybody. You are where you are, and it's up to you to move forward and do what you want with your life. What you are doing here is looking at younger peers who made different choices and you are wishing you had made those same choices. Or you are buying the bullshit they are selling.

A great many people never, ever really figure out what they want to do with their life. Often, they are too busy living it, having fun, building, doing, playing to think about it. Others are driven, focused, intent.

So you've arrived at some life goal! Good for you. Now quit your regrets and start getting after it, whatever it is. There will always be others who seem better positioned, or whatever. It's not about any of that. There are people who are worse off, or more poorly positioned too.

Do you want to be here? Do you care about other people, the world, and the things you find in it? Great! That's all anyone requires as justification to be here. No joke. Be sure and share that often. People like other people who care. People value others who care too.

Share that thing you want to do with others, and ask them what it is they are wanting to do as well. Maybe you can help, or maybe it's good to just listen and appreciate they are doing something they care about. Maybe you have a common goal.

Maybe you can realize that's all any of us are doing, you included.

Like I said, give and 'ye shall receive.

One great way to feel better about yourself is to help others, and the doing of that does wonders for yo...

So, you're basically normal. Comparing yourself is typical, especially in your early 20's.

Impatience is a great quality, you just need to combine it with Not Giving A Fuck. Comparing yourself slows you down if you go beyond "I should know that too!"

Someone else will always be better than you; embrace it. If you're the smartest person in the room, find a new room. You'll learn more there.

(Not that your friends are "better than you." They fall in a different category called "great family support.")

How can you possibly be impatient to achieve big things when you don't understand what you want to do and what HN posts are about?

You need to understand that you won't achieve big things. You're not Zuckerberg and you're not Steve Jobs. You're not going to be a billionaire, or even a millionaire. It's pretty evident from the things that you wrote above.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, you can accomplish great things once you gained the maturity to realize that you need to work hard and study hard and learn. Figure out what you enjoy, and work hard at it. You might not be the next Steve Jobs (no one is), but you can make a very good living in tech if you work hard and keep learning throughout your career.

Comparing yourself to your peers is the key for personal growth. It's often not easy, in particular in days of Facebook and other social networks but here why I think it's crucial for us:

At the end of the day we are imitating our peers--everyday. When we start as babies we imitate our mother, our siblings and everybody we see. Later in school and university we see what friends and other peers do. Sometimes we think good idea I might try it.

And sometimes we are surprised that in our eyes to us inferior peers try and accomplish stuff which is more challenging, advanced and just more exciting than our life. THIS is the key for personal growth: this feeling that somebody who was inferior all the past overtook us, frustrates us and will lead us into bigger journeys. Especially men who tend to be more competitive cannot stand this feeling and gear up.

I started to raise money because of some 10 year younger guys I met who raised 500k seed with ease. And I found those guys are inferior to me, so I was forced to get on par.

But when I was an office drone deep in corporations I imitated my peers there: worked as little as possible but still climbing the career ladder via office politics, complaining all day how bad the company is, worked just for the weekends (full of partying and girls) and the only goal was planning the next vacation. This was a hollow life where I lacked strong peers and I was slowly degenerating like them for years. I lost time.

This is the good thing about Facebook. Because we have 1,000 of FB friends the probability that we see everyday some big achievement of someone is quite high (and so frustrating) and leads to a very restrictive posting behavior on our side because it tells us: only post if you achieved something special and this initially negative energy might be good: it pushes into new and more challenging activities.

I know not everybody will like my answer but again peers who push us out of our comfort zone help our personal development. So we should see it as something positive.

Compare yourself with your own self, but several years younger. Have you achieved something notable? Did you just now noticed that you did something wrong before? Then you're all right - you're growing.

I am not being cynical, but I wouldn't recommend using HN to replace a therapist.

Listen to these for starters: http://www.bornhappy.co/michaelneill/ and http://www.bornhappy.co/love/, possibly this TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr6VawX2nr4

Why would you want to compare yourself to those bunch of losers?

I started learning programming at 27, I'm 30 now, have a full time job and never been happier, so you are definitely not late.

The turning point for me was when I read this article: http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-yo...

It basically says you have to make things and you won't feel yourself worthless.

Start learning and doing hard, that's all!

Welcome to life.

Don't worry though. Everything will be OK.

(The things I'm about to say is/are true for me. So is most of what everyone else here is saying. While it's good that you are asking your peers for help, the answers you will get won't make "sense" until you discover them for yourself. (Like the A-HA moment when you finally grok a mathematics proof or a famous algorithm). This will require effort from you.)

The facts of the matter are simply this:

- Your life is unique the same way that everyone else's is. - Your journey is not the same as anybody else's. - You are a whole person. - You have all the tools you need. - :)

The answers you seek are of a spiritual nature and you need some kind of spiritual process to discover them. I can recommend Buddhism, Toaism or even the Yogic disciplines/technologies. What they all have in common is an insistence that one needs to meditate, daily...

(Meditation, loosely, is learning how to accept and acknowledge thoughts that are uncomfortable.)

Good luck!

Here is the simple idea that I always use - "Don't take life too seriously - we are not special". When we start to take our life too seriously we start to think about some sort of objective or some kind of success we want to get to. We start comparing ourselves to others to figure out the so called objective and then we find that we are far behind from everyone else.

Now the way I avoid being too serious about life is by thinking about the Universe and how amazing and large it is. At the scale of the Universe we simply don't matter.

The short answer is to let go.

It can take years of training and searching to let go, the best guide I have found is this book : http://zenhabits.net/lg/

I strongly recommend that you read some Epicurus, Epictetus and Seneca ;) Start with Senecas "On the Happy Life"

Meditate and tell yourself that you're pretty okay.

> I didn't figure out what I wanted to do with my life until recently

Great, just do whatever that is. You're not behind, 22 is basically 0 years old in your career. Just start doing the thing you want to do until you become really good at it.

There are many good answers in this Quora thread: https://www.quora.com/How-can-you-overcome-your-envy-of-peop...

As many comments on this page suggest, try to stop worrying about what's outside of your control. You can't control if someone else is a better programmer or started coding at a younger age. But you can control what you study, how hard you study, how hard you practice outside of school, etc. If you work hard, 5 years from now there will be a bunch of 27-year-olds that you work with who feel inadequate working next to you.

If something's outside of your control, you _literally_ can't do anything about it. So why make life harder for yourself by worrying? That's like worrying about an asteroid hitting Earth -- you'll upset yourself, but it won't do you any good.

The multiplicity of casual friendships online has led to an interesting new phenomenon: Because people preferentially broadcast their successes, we tend to get the feeling that everybody else is more successful than ourselves. I don't think you can avoid comparing yourself to others; what you can do is try to keep in mind that life is a mix of good and bad, and even if all you manage to do is avoid the worst of the bad, you're doing pretty well.

Take me for example. I started university when I was 13, won the Putnam competition when I was 18, went on to a doctorate in computing from Oxford University, and single-handedly bootstrapped a successful startup. I think most people here could tell you that much about me; but I doubt many could tell you that I'm 34, that I'm socially awkward and stutter when I'm nervous, that I'm diabetic and wrestle with this life-threatening condition every day, that I'm 20 lbs overweight and due to my sedentary lifestyle have the cardiopulmonary fitness of a typical 50 year old, or that I've been dumped by every woman I've ever dated.

When you inevitably compare yourself to others, remember that there's probably a lot you're not hearing about them.

My life began at 40, amusingly.

6 billion people in the world.