Mert Emin Kalender

You And Successful Others

22 October 2012

It is quite often that I find myself inadequate about various areas or topics or any piece of work you can think of. This happens when I see someone else who had achieved great things in their life and compare them with myself.

If you have a profession related with computer science, it is easy to find hundreds of people have done something nice. The example must not be a billionaire like Mark Zuckerberg, but an entrepreneur with an idea solving a problem, a developer created a cool application, a grad student written a good paper or even an high school kid sharing his open source code on github are all simple, but significant examples. And I realized that the more chance the person is someone similar to you (e.g. web developer, student), the more you are being hard on yourself. In addition, you can easily find these examples on the Internet by just visiting github, twitter etc. or keeping up with recent tech news or checking your friends’ shared posts.

While this behavior really annoys me, I really couldn’t come up with a good reason to explain it. However, yesterday I read an influential blog post by Matt Cheuvront and learnt that the behavior of comparing myself with other good people is usual. What Matt says is

We constantly compare our beginning to someone else’s middle. Our middle to someone else’s end. And when you do that – you’ll find that you’re never, ever satisfied. You’ll never, ever be good enough. You’ll always struggle to celebrate your accomplishments.

Wherever you are in life with whatever you’re doing – you’re going to be ahead of some and behind others. That’s okay. Own where you are. Take time to embrace and celebrate that. Continue moving forward. And never compare your beginning to someone else’s middle.

So I have decided on some rules that might be useful to cope with this situation. The rules are simple, but I think iterating over and over again would contribute to your self confidence and hopefully lead you to accomplish something satisfactory.

By the way, I saw the link of blog post on Joel Gascoigne’s twitter feed. I suggest you to follow him. He writes and shares cool stuff.