These are my thoughts about Rule 15 from Jordan B. Peterson’s “40 Rules”. You can read them all here. In the case of the rules that made it into his “12 Rules for Life” book, I’m not going to repeat any of his explanations here. These are my own thoughts about each rule from my own life and experience.
15. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
Like most of Peterson’s maxims, this one is deeper than it first appears.
Even if we’re willing to immediately accept the second half and not compare ourselves to others (a difficult thing to just “do”), we still have some work to do on the first half.
In order to compare myself today to who I was yesterday, I must first define what I want to do in life, who I want to be, where I want to go. I can’t judge my success in self-improvement unless I have a goal to which I am getting closer.
Once I have the goal in mind, I must then be able to state, honestly and without sweeping anything under the rug, what my current situation is. How close am I, today, to that goal? This is not easy to do and it may take some painful self-awareness to accomplish.
Finally, I must be able to look at who I was yesterday (and the day before that and the day before that) and be as brutally honest as I was in the previous step, to decide if I have improved between then and now.
This is a lot more work than that half a sentence initially suggests.
And then there’s the second half of the sentence.
While working on deciding what my goals should be, analyzing my current status in relation to those goals, and comparing myself to who I was yesterday, I also have to NOT compare myself to anyone else!
That’s probably worth its own blog post but I will say that comparing oneself to others is natural and human and sometimes useful.
However, when you’ve got a goal in mind and you’ve decided to use your own level of improvement as your only barometer, then “head down, blinders on, don’t look at the rest of the world, do the work” is probably your best choice.