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Weighing In

There is a famous quote often attributed to Teddy Roosevelt: "Comparison is the thief of joy."

In the age of Instagram and "Transformation Tuesdays," this thief is working overtime. It is easy to scroll through your feed, see someone who dropped 10 pounds in a week while you have been stalled for a month, and feel a sudden crash in your own morale.


But for #MindsetMonday, I want to go deeper than a bumper sticker. I want to look at a line from my favorite piece of prose, Desiderata by Max Ehrmann (1927).

"If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself."

This is not just poetry; it is a logic gate. It describes two distinct system failures:

  1. Vain: You compare yourself to someone "lesser" (someone struggling more than you) to inflate your ego. This is false confidence.

  2. Bitter: You compare yourself to someone "greater" (someone losing weight faster) to validate your insecurity. This is false failure.

The Benchmarking Error

In my Objects in Mirror Are Lighter Than They Appear post, I discussed the internal glitch of Body Dysmorphia - how our brains struggle to see our own progress. Comparison, on the other hand, is the External Glitch.

As a Manager, I would never compare the performance metrics of a brand-new laptop against a 10-year-old server. They have different hardware, different operating systems, and different histories. Yet, we do this to our bodies daily. You might be comparing your results to someone who is twenty years younger, male vs. female, or someone who hasn't spent decades metabolically damaging their system with sugar. That is not a benchmark; that is bad data.

Run Your Own Race

When you are driving, if you spend all your time looking at the car in the next lane to see if they are going faster than you, you eventually drift out of your lane and crash. This is the "Lane Departure Warning."

Your journey is N=1 (a sample size of one). The only metric that matters is: Are you better than you were yesterday? If the answer is yes, the system is working.

The Takeaway

Delete the mental leaderboard. If you find yourself becoming "Vain or Bitter," close the app. Go back to the Desiderata. Remind yourself that you are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars (and the gym bros). You have a right to be here. Focus on your own paper. The test is hard enough without trying to cheat off your neighbor.

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Location: Halifax Regional Municipality, NS, Canada

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