Be Yourself: We Should Not Compare Ourselves with Others

Be Yourself:

We Should Not Compare Ourselves With Others

In our culture a lot of times people advise us to compare ourselves with others. "You should be like your father," "You must be the best of your class," etc., and this is not always the best way of thinking. There are many reasons to change this way of thinking and begin to compare us only with ourselves. This is the way it should be, and in this paper I will discuss about some of the most important reasons of this.

The first main reason to avoid comparing yourself with others is that there will be always someone better than you. It doesn't matter in which aspect, but it is true. So, you could feel inferior to others and maybe without a real reason. For example, you can be an incredible student and the best in your class, and this can make you feel incredibly good, but if someday someone become better than you , you will feel sad although you are still the same incredible student that you were before.

The second reason to avoid this kind of comparison is that you will always find someone worse than you, but as opposed to the first reason, this can make you feel better than the others, and this feeling can turn into a horrible pride. For example, if you are the second best student of your class, and one day the very best student leaves the school, you will then be the best one even tough you are still only as good as you were before.

These two first reasons lead us to a third one: If you want to be better than the others, you don't need to improve yourself; you only have to make the others look bad. If I want to be the leader of the group, but you are the leader now, what I need to do is to make you look like a collaborator or stupid and then I can take your place. Then I will be better than you.

A fourth reason to stop comparing ourselves is that the one who compares him/herself with another is judging, and this doesn't help us develop as human beings. Nobody knows the interior reality of the other; nobody knows his/her story and his/her most deep intentions, and when we judge it is hard to accept the others.

The last but most important reason to avoid comparing ourselves with others is that when we do, we can be attracted to copy them, to do the same things, and to act and think like them. The problem with this is that if we copy someone, we will never know who we really are and what we really want, and then we will never grow spiritually.

For all these reasons and because we are unique, we should not compare ourselves with others, only with ourselves. The only comparison pattern that we really have is our perception. So, if we use this arrangement we will not feel less or more than others; we will not try to make others look bad; we will not be judge so much; and we will accept ourselves as we really are. In other words, we will