Stop Comparing And Start Living

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You can feel great about your life and still get discouraged by one scroll. One minute you're focused, the next you're measuring your body, money, career, or relationships against someone else’s highlight reel and wondering why you are “behind.” This spiral is real. This spiral is common. And unfortunately, it kills joy, and quietly drains the fire you need to keep going. 

I break down the mindset shift that keeps me grounded: you cannot compare your chapter one to someone else’s chapter twenty. We talk through real examples from a fitness journey and from building a business and creative career, including what you do not see when someone looks “successful” online. Different timelines, different teams, different circumstances, different lessons. When you forget that, comparison turns into envy and demotivation fast.

We also dig into the deeper layer: strengths and weaknesses come as a package deal. Discipline and resilience can drive you forward, but they can also create the feeling that you have not done enough, even when you have made real progress. The goal is awareness without shame, tracking your own growth, and trusting the process long enough for results to mature. I close with a reminder to expect the comparison game to show up, then dust yourself off and keep taking action, plus an unreleased track to ride out.

If this message hits, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who has been stuck in the comparison trap.

Transcript

Opening Song About Chasing Goals

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Losing myself and finding my strength came to the conclusion and I want it all. Feeling that pressure of tryna do better. I wanna reach heights, but too scared to fall. Too scared of failure. Way more scared of feeling regret. I'm not even trying, that's terrifying. I understand that chasing my goals, I bury my clocks because it takes time. I gotta go. I already know if I wanna grow, you reap what you sow. That be the case. Planting my seeds or water my base. Yeah, I made mistakes. Yeah, I know you grow in your garden, but watch for the snakes. The people that act like you're crazy, but trying this, they far away. They don't think it's possible, I think it's possible. That is hate. If they hate themselves, cause they on the shelf. While you create a life that you love. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A life that you love. Loving the fact you improving yourself. Decided that you would not settle. Decided that you got the drive to do it. The road got bumping your foot on the pedal. You go up a level, you turn up whenever it's time for you to go put in that work. I know my worth, huh? I know it ain't gonna be easy, yeah. I know it hurt, but thing is for sure. Until it put me in this earth. Before I ride in that hearse, I'm chasing my goals. I'm chasing my goals. Loving the fact to improving yourself. Decided that you were not better. Decided that you got the drive to do it to go. Got bumped, you're putting on the cutter. I'm chasing my goals. Alright, and welcome back to another episode. Thank y'all so much for being here. Like I always say, if you are on YouTube, go ahead and like and subscribe to my channel. Like right now, go ahead and take you one second. If you are on a podcast platform, please leave me a review. Uh also uh I made a new way for you to be able to support me. Um, you can just buy me a cup of coffee, which again, I love coffee. Uh, I drink it every day. So go ahead. Uh I left a link in the description for you to just click on it, and you can just buy me a cup of coffee, and it helps me out to keep this thing going for all y'all. Let's go ahead and get it started though. Today we're going to be talking about why comparing yourself is killing your joy. And I've talked about this episode a few times on here, probably all the time, but I wanted to do a full episode on this topic because we live in a world where we can see everything somebody is doing, right? Or what we perceive to be everything somebody is doing. We can see where they are, what they're wearing, what they eat, who they with, pretty much everything. We can see their car, their house. If they decide to show it to us, we will see it all. And if you spend enough time on social media, it's a pretty good chance you compare yourself sometimes. It's damn near impossible. Even if you don't spend a lot of time on social media, I bet you have moments of comparison. Whether that's with your friends at dinner or at a gym or you compare yourself, you compare your body to other people's bodies at the gym, countless opportunities to compare yourself. And today we're going to talk about why comparison, if you're using it the wrong way, is killing your joy. So, short answer, you absolutely should not be comparing yourself to other people. But if you use it right, comparison can be a good thing. The problem is, more often than not, we do it wrong. Most of the time we compare things about our lives, our bodies, our finances, our families, our careers, and we compare it to other people's lives, and that's when comparison gets bad. And like the phrase says, comparison is the thief of joy. If you want to kill your joy, just start comparing yourself with people. And the thing we need to think about is everybody is on their own path. They have their own circumstances, their own memories of their lives and traumas that are different from our own. And you don't have the same life circumstances as them. So comparing yourself to somebody else, if we really strip it down to the ultimate truth of it all, is kind of ridiculous. And I want you to think about this phrase and think about this often, as much as you can when you find yourself comparing yourself. Because look, I'm not gonna sit up here and tell you that after this episode, you won't ever compare yourself to people again. That's just not realistic. We're human, it's gonna happen. Even when we know we shouldn't be doing it. And the phrase is you can't compare your chapter one to somebody else's chapter 20. You can't compare your chapter one to somebody else's chapter 20. Let me give you an example. Let's say you're overweight and you want to change your body, so you go to the gym and you already know where I'm going with this one, but you can't compare your body to anybody else's body. You can't compare it. Let's say you look on Instagram or Facebook and you see somebody who is real fit and you say, Man, I I look at them and they look so good. They've been killing it at the gym. And what you're not thinking about is that person probably been going to the gym for five years, ten years to get that body. Maybe you only been going for a month and you just started your journey, your health journey. Hell, maybe you haven't even started working out, and you still compare yourself and say, Damn, I don't look like them. And that's not a motivating feeling, right? Judging yourself on where you are compared to where somebody else is, that's demotivating. Again, you can't compare your chapter one to somebody else's chapter 20. If you just starting on your fitness journey, because that's what it is, it's a journey. If you just starting to eat right and work out and drinking only water, and it's only been a few weeks or months, you can't compare to their chapter 20. That person you see at the gym on Instagram or at work, they might have been working out for five, seven, ten years, probably even more. But you know who you can compare yourself to? You can compare your body to what it was last month to now. You can compare how much you worked out, even though it might not be as much as you want it to be, to who to how you wasn't even working out at all last month. How you have been putting in work, how you have been getting better, you have made some progress. See that progress, see it and use it. Understand that you can see more progress. And if you don't quit now, or if you quit now, you will lose it all. Don't compare your chapter one workout progress to somebody else's chapter 20. You also can't compare your business after one year to somebody who's been running their business for 10 years. And I've been caught up in this way too many times, my damn self, and I'm not immune to this. I see a lot of folks uh who are personal trainers and people who run podcasts online, and since I do it, my Instagram feed is full of all kinds of examples of other people's businesses and social media accounts who do the same thing. And there are countless amounts of people out there whose business is just doing way better than mine. And from time to time I get that feeling of, well shit, they're doing way better than me. I ain't nowhere close to that level. But then I have to remind myself that my path is different. I've only been doing this for a few years, and I have a whole acting career that limits me, right? It limits the amount of time I can put into this. You can tell that those folks, they've been training and have a social media presence for way longer than I have, a way bigger social media team. Right? They have whole teams and they hire people to do most of their legwork for them. They are literally a large business, and I just ain't that. And that's okay. But what I can compare myself to is where I was two, three, four years ago. I wasn't doing any of this. No fitness coaching, damn sure no podcasts, I wasn't doing anything with my music. I can look back and see the progress I made. And that's one of the things that gets me excited to keep going. And who's to say that if I keep going and learning that I won't be exactly where those other folks are? But mine will just be different. My path ain't their path. But how do I know that I can't get there? Right? We look at other people and we only see their strengths and we compare our behind-the-scenes life to their carefully curated content that you see online and only those strengths that they put out to the world because they are not talking about their weaknesses. And we get real frustrated with ourselves and we over-catastrophize, we over-catastrophize our weaknesses, and we beat ourselves up for having weaknesses. And obviously, we shouldn't be doing this, right? This isn't a healthy thing to do. Instead, what we should be doing is saying, Okay, I don't like this weakness that I have, but this weakness isn't what defines me. I have strengths that are incredible, and I love myself as a whole package, and who I am as a person isn't only tied to this weakness I have. And unfortunately, weaknesses are important. They are weaknesses matter because we have we have to have the weaknesses that come with the strengths. It's a package deal. Nobody only has strengths. Nobody only has strengths. We have to have the weaknesses. And I use myself for example. So one of my strengths is strengths is that I'm disciplined. I have a lot of resilience when it comes to not giving up on something. I set my mind on something and I'm gonna figure it out, and I will make it work eventually. I have the mentality to just keep going, to put in work and make it happen, even on days I don't feel like doing it. And of course, I have some days that I don't do it because we all have those days, right? Some days I'm just burnt out. But for the most part, more often than not, I can fight through those thoughts in my brain that tell me that things are too hard, right? And because of that, I will eventually see success in the things I'm working towards. My strength is that I have the discipline to work hard at something, even when I feel, even when I don't feel like working at it, right? On the flip side of that, one of my weaknesses is that I always feel like I haven't done enough. I haven't accomplished enough. I have a hard time seeing my success. A lot of times when I talk about what I'm doing, I talk as if I'm still trying to get there. And I got some great friends and people in my circle and people that actually call me out on it. Like, bruh, what? Yes, you are. Or Dodge, you do. Right? You have all these people supporting your music, right? A lot of folks wish they had what you have. And I got a homegirl who always tells me that I'm a superstar. And um I was at the podcast studio chopping it up with my boy Bobby, and I was talking about my career and how I feel like I'm close to quote unquote making it. And he was like, But you did make it. And the whole time I'm talking as if I'm trying to get there. Because in my head, I didn't. I haven't made it. And I get caught up in not noticing where I am, the progress I've made, right? That's my weakness. The success comes and I don't always enjoy it because I don't always see it. The strength and the weaknesses. And in society, we want to avoid weaknesses, right? We try our best to avoid it. We see weakness as this horrible thing. When in reality, we all have them. And in reality, if you look at your strengths, nine times out of ten, you can correlate a weakness that's tied to that strength. So what we should be framing in our minds, in our heads, is that I can't have one without the other. I love my strengths, but I also have to accept the fact that they do come with weaknesses. We have to come to terms with the fact that there will be some parts of us that just ain't desirable. But you don't have to beat yourself up over your weaknesses. Your weaknesses don't have to be a bad thing if you are consciously aware of that, of what they are, and you accept them and then work to support yourself in a way to make them less of a weakness for you in the long run, right? Make sure you are aware of those weaknesses, aware, but not ashamed. It's not realistic to try and go through life and only have strengths. That's just not real. Be aware of your weaknesses so you can support yourself to make them as less of a weakness as you can, and give yourself the kind of environment in your head that'll be conducive to you getting to where you want to go in the way that you want to get there. So back to comparisons, to the comparison weakness. You can't compare your new business to somebody's highly successful thing. And that goes for your fitness progress, your career progress, your financial situation, your school goals, your family goals, your marital status. Everything has its own pro its own process, a certain amount of time that's required that will be different for everybody. Let that process mature. These things take time. You haven't learned the same lessons, had the same experiences, been in the same circumstances as the other person who was in there chapter 20. So you can't compare what you have to them, but you can and should compare what you have now to what it was two months ago. A year ago. Look at how long you've been working towards that thing. Look at the progress you made, that project you're working on that you feel like you're not as far as you want to be. How far were you when you first started? Look at how much distance you've traveled in that time. You have made some progress. Get excited, get excited about the fact that you still can achieve it. You still can finish it. You already made the progress. Is it as fast as you want it to be? No. But realistically, more often than not, it never is. Right? And truly never is. We underestimate how long goals take time. Goals almost always take us longer than we think they will. And comparing yourself to other people will not make you feel good. It will demotivate you. Comparison causes that feeling of lack and jealousy or envy, right? These things are never positive. And when it demotivates you and then pushes you even further away from what you're going after, because that's what it does, and now you don't have the fire inside you to actually work at it. You keep pushing it further and further away. So remember, and believe in yourself, believe in your future. That is your future is specifically made for you. You are in your own lane, you are your own competition. Follow the lane the universe carved out for you. You and your own race. Follow what it is you feel like you should be doing. Most of the time, the key factor to us being successful or accomplishing that thing we want to accomplish is just time. We need to allow time to take its course, right? One, for the things we're working on to mature and grow. And two, for us not to stop taking action. I can't say it enough. Don't give up. You gotta keep taking action. And you also gotta start if you haven't started yet. You have to start. And once you start, keep taking that action. Yeah, you're gonna stumble along the way, you're gonna mess up and compare yourself to other folks. It's gonna suck. It's gonna make you feel like you ain't doing enough or doing it right, or maybe you feel like you're on the wrong path. But remember, you are on the right path. It's your path. If you take that action and keep working towards it and truly making a conscious effort to accept the fact that this is a process, this is the process, the process of you becoming that person, you experiencing those setbacks, those negative feelings, those small wins, the small steps, the big steps, the backward steps, the ups, the downs, the moments when you feel like you ain't making no progress at all. If you accept the fact that this is the process and you don't give up, and you keep taking actions, when you get to those moments when you start comparing yourself to other put other people, you can have this in the front of your brain, and now you can expect all these things to come. Expect the comparison game to creep into your mind, expect that it's gonna bring all those negative feelings, and it's gonna make you want to stop, make you want to give up, make you feel like you ain't doing it right. And if you expect it to come, knowing that you are on your own journey and that this is part of the process, it will help you keep going. It'll make that comparison thing affect you a little less than it normally would, and you'll be able to just dust yourself off and get back to it. So that's what I got for you today. Man, thank y'all for being here. Like I always say, please share this on your social media or with a friend or family member who you think would uh appreciate hearing this message. Like I said, I do have a new way to support me. You can buy me a coffee, just click on the link in the description, and you can support me in that way. Much appreciated. Let's go ahead and get to this music. It's another unreleased song. This one is called On God. Let's ride out.

unknown 16:57

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 17:04

I ain't even gonna waste time and take time putting a watch on, cause everything I do is timeless. I make images when I write, got a smart pen like a stylist. The only thing that can stop me now is copper time the other riders. Don't refer to me, I'm a bias. Refer to me as your highness. That's a vibration, yeah. Gotta have patience, yeah. Uh-huh. I'm Daniel with the lions. I'm David with the liars. Ain't okay, man in the Bible. My evolution be goddessing. No, I'm not a guy, but I'm an idol. A lot of y'all been committing sins just for a chance to go for out. Readin' my new scriptures, read it for my crucifixion. Like that y'all thought you was a Christian. Yeah, I'm waiting for one of y'all to catch the first time. Um God, that charge me up, they feel like it's a burst on. Then I put the budget for speak up like a turf on. But you gotta send the email cause my cell phone and my work. I'm gonna follow the deep man, like walk on the plank or know what's hard. For anybody that's putting my heart. Watch for the circuit on the yoga. Listen to the clock, they whisperin' I'm acting like they owned you. They walk on the water. Give a sacrifice for you, please win it, fill it with it. Yeah, the heavenless mother, please forgive me. I have to see questions. I don't comprehend. I do good people, got the habit so bad if they go with the walk with me. I never know. This pick me one time when heaven the second I pray. I never know. Pick my bug up, I bitch my life, take my bummer like general colour. Another question, I never know. Like I can't do it, I'm gonna be fine. That you be thinking you got on your mind. You can't do mineracles all of the time. Yeah, on God, Joe Harpay. I'll make not be actually right. Gotta make sure you was taking it right. If you I didn't act like advice, I'm doing me, that's on God. I'm doing this with the passion of Christ. I play they don't cross me, Law. Please keep them off my back with a knife. Yeah, I don't wanna be God, but I've been actin' like Christ. Cause he was a carpenter, I'm gonna build, I'm doing that for my life, uh, yeah. And I don't do no trends, I don't be rapping for likes, uh. Not my energy, I'm too old school. Yeah, I got old testament tennis, yeah. My brothers will never be my enemies, yeah. We will never be canin' neighbor, they'll never be my nemesis, yeah. We go too far back since day one like Genesis, yeah. Clear vision like contacts, catch a contact when these eyes I'm reaching. You don't need no carfax to see my driving mint condition. I flip the channel like Comcast, they listen to me like a podcast. I've been ready to crash out like Flight 11 on the tarmac. I feel like Juve. If I ain't a hot boy, then what do you call that? Yeah, on God, I wish he never left us here. Oh God, I wanna be close to God. I need protection here. Feel like he about to make a return every election, yeah. Murder ain't corruption and destructive misconceptions. Yeah, it ain't gotta be trusting. I don't trust you, learn my lesson, yeah. Only trust in my instincts and my eyesight and my vision clear. Vigilizing my demons, tryna take me exercisms, yeah. I run it to him head, I'm on like a collision, that's on God. Yeah, and I don't care if this won't hurt your feelings, that's on God. I don't care if you ain't tryna listen, that's on God. Little pathloat. I've been improving their nutrition, that's all we got.