We’ve all gotten caught up in the comparison game. I’m guilty of it. You’re guilty of it. Your best friend, your boyfriend, your teacher, your classmate, your teammate, your boss – all of them are guilty of it too. With the growing popularity of social media, it’s so easy for us to look at the lives of other people and think that their lives are better, they’re more successful or they’re happier than we are. We look at people who are younger than us and found success more quickly. Friends who graduated with us who have gone on to be big whigs at prestigious companies. People who have traveled to all of the places we’ve had a desire to go. People who have found love. All the while, you’re sitting in bed, scrolling through your feed, wishing that you could get hired at your dream job or take a backpacking trip or find someone to fall in love with.
Stop it.
I have a love/hate relationship with social media. Because I’ve moved around a lot throughout my life, social media is something I’m so grateful for because it allows me to keep in contact with people I met when I was younger. It’s so easy to lose or break your phone and lose all of your contacts, but as long as sites like Facebook exist, you can easily keep up with everyone in your life who has a social media page.
On the other side of that, social media can be so dang toxic. I’m guilty of looking at my friends’ pages and wishing that I had picked a better second ship so I could be visiting some amazing countries or envying the happiness of my blog friends who have found success as content creators. It’s so easy to get caught up in the comparison game and wish for parts of your life to be different.
But here’s a reality check for all of us >>>
Your life isn’t supposed to look like the lives of everyone else.
You’ll find success in your own time.
You’ll travel to exotic places in your own time.
You’ll fall in love in your own time.
If we were all supposed to have the same successes and live the same lives, our world would look a lot like the gray world in The Giver, and we all saw how that turned out.
Stop trying to live everyone else’s life. Stop trying to keep up with everyone else. Where you are in life is where you’re supposed to be, and if you keep creating goals and clear ways to achieve them, you’re going to find success, you’re going to fill up your passport and you’re going to fall in love. Stop playing the comparison game. The only person you should be comparing yourself to is the person you were yesterday. Once you stop focusing on what everyone else is doing, you’ll learn to find happiness within yourself, and that’s where true success begins, no matter what your goals are.
Remember that your path is okay, and it’s the one you’re supposed to be on. Never let anyone, including your inner voice, tell you any differently.
What are some of your biggest (and scariest) goals?
Today I’m collaborating with Alexandria from Chapter Fifteen, and she’s sharing her own experience with forging her own path. You can read her post here.
Alexandria Taylor, who usually just goes by Alex, is a twenty-something in Pittsburgh, currently aspiring to be a New York Times bestselling author. She blogs about travel, life, and style at Chapter Fifteen. When she’s not writing blog post or writing novels, she’s watching HGTV, baking something sweet, and wasting too much time on the internet. You can keep up with Alex on her blog and her Instagram, both titled Chapter Fifteen.
