Ask HN: How do I stop comparing myself to others?

[mwhuang2]

I always have this problem of feeling inadequate. I'm a junior CS student at a decent but not great school. Some of my friends go to Stanford or UT Austin and have already interned with multiple top companies, while I haven't accomplished anything of significance. I also read this site daily and I can't even comprehend most of the posts. I didn't figure out what I wanted to do with my life until recently, so now I'm 22 and stuck behind my younger peers.

I'm really impatient to achieve big things. It's like I need to in order to justify my existence. How do I transition to a healthier state of mind and stop feeling worthless?

[cperciva]

The multiplicity of casual friendships online has led to an interesting new phenomenon: Because people preferentially broadcast their successes, we tend to get the feeling that everybody else is more successful than ourselves. I don't think you can avoid comparing yourself to others; what you can do is try to keep in mind that life is a mix of good and bad, and even if all you manage to do is avoid the worst of the bad, you're doing pretty well.

Take me for example. I started university when I was 13, won the Putnam competition when I was 18, went on to a doctorate in computing from Oxford University, and single-handedly bootstrapped a successful startup. I think most people here could tell you that much about me; but I doubt many could tell you that I'm 34, that I'm socially awkward and stutter when I'm nervous, that I'm diabetic and wrestle with this life-threatening condition every day, that I'm 20 lbs overweight and due to my sedentary lifestyle have the cardiopulmonary fitness of a typical 50 year old, or that I've been dumped by every woman I've ever dated.

When you inevitably compare yourself to others, remember that there's probably a lot you're not hearing about them.

[nvivo]

Amazing post, thanks for the openness.

As I get older (I'm still 33), I realize more and more that almost nobody got their stuff together. Most people even in their 40 or 50 are still trying to figure out what to do with their lifes. They change careers, move to a different state, start writing books, start some business different from what they have done their entire life.

When I was young, I always heard that 'life is hard'. I live in a third world country, grew from a poor family and never had much money. But it wasn't until I was married working in a good company that I realized what that means.

I realized that life being hard is not about not having money or a family... these are struggles we all have. Life being hard is all about these choices you have to keep making that are not confortable at all, you can never rest, life is always changing your plans. Even when you think you have it all figured out, this will last only a few years and you will have to start again.

It's all part of life. We all have struggles and the sooner we realize that it's all about the journey and not about the ends, the easier it gets to go on.

[louisswiss]

> When you inevitably compare yourself to others, remember that there's probably a lot you're not hearing about them.

This is exactly why it's useless to compare yourself to others --> incomplete data (or even worse, pre-selected data).

There have been a lot of posts which seem to advise against comparisons.

I'd argue that a comparison isn't bad for you per se, it's the data you are comparing your life/achievements to that can lead to problems because of a lack of transparency.

Why not keep comparing, but compare your current self to yourself at timepoint t-1, t-2...

Also, try to set schedules for when you compare and which facets of your life you are comparing (eg. health, education, 'job success' etc on a bimonthly basis).

Last word of warning --> most people tend to make comparisons when they are feeling 'down'. Don't let this kind of expectation bias screw with you - try to leave comparisons until you are in a moderate or positive mood.

[akshatpradhan]

Wow and you're that guy that won the Putnam

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

[michaelmcmillan]

I appreciate your openness Colin, thanks.

[refrigerator]

> When you inevitably compare yourself to others, remember that there's probably a lot you're not hearing about them.

That's definitely true but I find little consolation in it because for me it's not only about being really successful. It's also about being perceived as really successful by other people, so it's not just about "winning" the "competition" of who has the "best" life, it's about winning the competition of who other people think has the best life, which is a competition in which it doesn't matter whether there's a lot that you're not hearing about the winners, because the majority of people (the judges) will only take the stuff you do hear into account.

I hope that makes sense, couldn't really think of a good way to phrase it.

[vaughngh]

I've become accustomed to online anonymity, it's pleasant to hear some vulnerability for once. Thanks for sharing.

[askafriend]

I really appreciate you opening up like that. The world is a more beautiful place when people do.

[wishiknew]

This man has been on Facebook and has seen right through it.

[earlyresort]

Well, you should start by stopping reading Hacker News, because it's clearly not good for you in your current mental state. I promise, you won't miss anything important.

Next, take some of your time and go volunteer somewhere - go tutor a child or teach someone to read or feed the homeless or whatever else you like, just go help someone out. You're now accomplishing something way more important than interning with some 'top company' somewhere. Congratulations, your existence is now justified.

Finally, now that you're doing something worthwhile for humanity and you're not tormenting yourself by wallowing in everyone's self-promotional bloviating, you can happily focus on learning new things, gradually improving your own skills, and figuring out how to make a big dent in the universe on your own personal schedule, which is different from everybody else's.

Hey, I spent my entire twenties fucking up left and right - whatever you end up doing, I guarantee you're way ahead of me.

[kaolinite]

Consider using this Adblock/uBlock filter:

    news.ycombinator.com##td.subtext

I've been using it for a week or two now. It blocks links to all comments (besides Ask HN, Show HN, etc - which is why I'm here). I've drastically cut down my HN time but still keep up to date on tech news. I also read the articles in full a lot more than I used to.

(It also tidies up the homepage and makes it look a lot cleaner, IMO: http://i.imgur.com/RzHKD2d.png)

[peterjmag]

+100. And an extra +1 for teaching me a new word (bloviate). =)

I wrote a bit more in response in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10523788

[pndpo]

Going through a similar struggle as OP and this really helped me out. Thanks.

[pieterbreed]

Welcome to life.

Don't worry though. Everything will be OK.

(The things I'm about to say is/are true for me. So is most of what everyone else here is saying. While it's good that you are asking your peers for help, the answers you will get won't make "sense" until you discover them for yourself. (Like the A-HA moment when you finally grok a mathematics proof or a famous algorithm). This will require effort from you.)

The facts of the matter are simply this:

- Your life is unique the same way that everyone else's is. - Your journey is not the same as anybody else's. - You are a whole person. - You have all the tools you need. - :)

The answers you seek are of a spiritual nature and you need some kind of spiritual process to discover them. I can recommend Buddhism, Toaism or even the Yogic disciplines/technologies. What they all have in common is an insistence that one needs to meditate, daily...

(Meditation, loosely, is learning how to accept and acknowledge thoughts that are uncomfortable.)

Good luck!

[epalmer]

I agree that there is a spiritual growth component here. As another response said, go find someplace to volunteer and help others. Do this doing something you love, even if you think you are not that good at it. For example help code.org, black girls code, FIRST robotics etc.

In terms of HN and how smart people are here: Remember there are a lot of people that participate in HN and the experts and sometimes so called experts come out and respond to the posts in their knowledge domain. So some of these people do know a lot more about a topic than most of us.

I read HN almost daily and don't understand most of the topics and responses. It doesn't bother me at all. If it bothers you you might want to stop for awhile.

I'm 62 and was miserable working at a bank/financial institution. I quit and started working at a university (web services) and volunteering in STEM education of K12 students 9 years ago today. I felt stupid at the bank until I left and realized the people that were above me were clueless. Clueless people promote clueless people. So my biggest advance in my journey started when I was 53 years old.

Now I'm in a much better place. Take care of yourself. Exercise, moderate your vices (if you have them) and give back. Be grateful for what you have and journal that every day until you think in terms of gratitude as your new mental model. And yes meditate and give prayers of thanks for what you have.

You have taken a big step asking for help.

[gonyea]

So, you're basically normal. Comparing yourself is typical, especially in your early 20's.

Impatience is a great quality, you just need to combine it with Not Giving A Fuck. Comparing yourself slows you down if you go beyond "I should know that too!"

Someone else will always be better than you; embrace it. If you're the smartest person in the room, find a new room. You'll learn more there.

(Not that your friends are "better than you." They fall in a different category called "great family support.")

[aji]

I like this! "If you're the best jazz player in the band, find a new band"

[lpolovets]

There are many good answers in this Quora thread: https://www.quora.com/How-can-you-overcome-your-envy-of-peop...

As many comments on this page suggest, try to stop worrying about what's outside of your control. You can't control if someone else is a better programmer or started coding at a younger age. But you can control what you study, how hard you study, how hard you practice outside of school, etc. If you work hard, 5 years from now there will be a bunch of 27-year-olds that you work with who feel inadequate working next to you.

If something's outside of your control, you _literally_ can't do anything about it. So why make life harder for yourself by worrying? That's like worrying about an asteroid hitting Earth -- you'll upset yourself, but it won't do you any good.

[fapjacks]

Yes, this echoes something Worf once said, "Thinking about what you can't control only wastes energy and creates its own enemy."

[SCAQTony]

The race is long and it is only with yourself.

Realistically, what is the percentage of people in the whole world that can do what you can do? Here is the answer: Under 25-million or you can do what you do better than 0.0000000025% of the planet.

https://www.quora.com/Approximately-how-many-programmers-are...

I bet that didn't help but look at it this may, you may or may not become a "New York Times, number-one, best selling author" or a "Diva at an Italian opera house" but you can master your craft and use it to better people's lives or even your own life for that matter. Perhaps that should be the goal and revel in those accomplishments?

[khnd]

something something suncreen

[troydavis]

Find a goal or even a yardstick that's more meaningful to you than to anyone else. Ideally, also find a path to it that's uniquely appealing to you.

It's way harder to think about what you want than to hop on to society's defaults (schools, work prestige, wealth, looks, ..). http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html touches on this ("if you admire two kinds of work equally, [choose the less prestigious]").

When no one else is trying to accomplish the same thing in the same way, only absolute measurements matter: how close did you get? How much did you enjoy the ride?

[johw]

Comparing to others is not the problem.

Focusing on differences is.

The solution is to focus on similarities instead of differences.

By focusing on differences, you will always find something to let you feel inferior, let you stop tackling new things, maybe even saying things to others you do not really mean because you feel down at that moment. By focusing on similarities, you will boost yourself. You will see that others are not that different from you.

When you changed your regular comparison strategy for some time, you might even notice that focusing on differences, in the context of a retrospective is not that bad. It gives you the chance to grow.

[onoyoudont]

"The solution is to focus on similarities instead of differences."

Disagree. OP: Focus on what makes you unique. And that probably isn't the obvious stuff. You're in school, surrounded by folks whose talent is that they're good in school. That's not what makes most successful folks successful in life, I can assure you. Or happy.

Maybe you're just natively a generalist and surrounded by folks happy to be specialists. That's great: the world spins because of folks who see the big picture and understand how to connect lessons learned from disparate fields.

How about this: Read Andrew Hargadon's book, "How Breakthroughs Happen"... and then maybe Be That Guy, the one who builds teams and connects networks of experts and puts the whole thing together and makes shit HAPPEN.

School's a terrible place for learning this about yourself, since it's a reproductive mechanism for academics. But today t's pretty instrumental in gaining the necessary credentials and pedigrees. Do your best, but take this as an opportunity to learn about yourself and your broader capabilities.

Onward!

[ankurdhama]

Here is the simple idea that I always use - "Don't take life too seriously - we are not special". When we start to take our life too seriously we start to think about some sort of objective or some kind of success we want to get to. We start comparing ourselves to others to figure out the so called objective and then we find that we are far behind from everyone else.

Now the way I avoid being too serious about life is by thinking about the Universe and how amazing and large it is. At the scale of the Universe we simply don't matter.

[bobbyhooper]

Wow, wow, wow! You hit a gold mine of advice with that question... I agree with all these comments. I hope you can see the trend in most of these comments. It's just too easy to say, "Don't compare yourself to others, it's a waste of time!"- though true... It's easier said than done. I found for me, the moments when I was happiest, balanced & free from all those negative thoughts about myself and where I stood compared to others- is when I focused on me. The best version of yourself has nothing to do with anyone else. I saw a therapist for 2 and a half years. The first year was twice a week. After putting in that much time with figuring out why I felt the way I did about myself, it changed everything. Your emotional intelligence, your soul is not always an easy thing to navigate, but that work is incredibly rewarding. As others have said, you're the only one that can do it. What I'm trying to say most is, begin. May you find a balance in your humanity - be it physical, mentally, & spiritually. And may you find that the compelling question is not how you compare to others or what they may think of you, but rather how you think of yourself. Are you who YOU want to be? If not, begin. You got this ;-) Big things will happen- it's safe to say that they take time.

Oh! and enjoy the ride!! Fuck- Nobody really knows for sure if we get another go at it.

[mrpsbrk]

Dance.

I'm serious. In dancing your bodily similarities and dissimilarities to your partner are in your face all the time, the fitting of them is (in a way) all there is to dancing. You both have to be aware of it and not fight it, you have to work with it. You have to learn to let the differences flow (so it is not enough to learn the choreography, you need to be able to enjoy the dance).

Words do not make justice to the experience.

2¢

[wishiknew]

What's that quote again, 'while in his 30s Julius Caesar once cried because he felt he hadn't done a tenth of what Alexander the Great had done at the same age'? Don't worry about people being faster than you. Build simple sites/apps (read Pat Flynn's blog rather than HN), see which one sticks, and improve it over time. Don't hope for a massive success, build something simple but useful to a limited audience. That's what I did when I was 22 and that site is about to turn into a business + the skills I learnt got me a freelancing gig which eventually got me hired. It's not an easy path, but it's meaningful. Easy paths such as marrying your high school sweetheart and getting hired at a top company in your 20s do look great, but they aren't making these people any more acquainted with the lengthy process of building great things.

[bshimmin]

"It's a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years." — Tom Lehrer

[colorblocks]

Comparing yourself to your peers is the key for personal growth. It's often not easy, in particular in days of Facebook and other social networks but here why I think it's crucial for us:

At the end of the day we are imitating our peers--everyday. When we start as babies we imitate our mother, our siblings and everybody we see. Later in school and university we see what friends and other peers do. Sometimes we think good idea I might try it.

And sometimes we are surprised that in our eyes to us inferior peers try and accomplish stuff which is more challenging, advanced and just more exciting than our life. THIS is the key for personal growth: this feeling that somebody who was inferior all the past overtook us, frustrates us and will lead us into bigger journeys. Especially men who tend to be more competitive cannot stand this feeling and gear up.

I started to raise money because of some 10 year younger guys I met who raised 500k seed with ease. And I found those guys are inferior to me, so I was forced to get on par.

But when I was an office drone deep in corporations I imitated my peers there: worked as little as possible but still climbing the career ladder via office politics, complaining all day how bad the company is, worked just for the weekends (full of partying and girls) and the only goal was planning the next vacation. This was a hollow life where I lacked strong peers and I was slowly degenerating like them for years. I lost time.

This is the good thing about Facebook. Because we have 1,000 of FB friends the probability that we see everyday some big achievement of someone is quite high (and so frustrating) and leads to a very restrictive posting behavior on our side because it tells us: only post if you achieved something special and this initially negative energy might be good: it pushes into new and more challenging activities.

I know not everybody will like my answer but again peers who push us out of our comfort zone help our personal development. So we should see it as something positive.

[11thEarlOfMar]

Realize that what you can achieve in your life depends on the DNA you started with, the life circumstances that got you to where you are today, your world view, perspective and perception, and a healthy dose of luck.

Then realize that there are zero other people in the world who have that same set of attributes. Therefore, no matter who you interact with, see on YouTube, or read about, the difference between the two of you is not going to be explained by something you can control.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/communication-success/2...

[Walkman]

I started learning programming at 27, I'm 30 now, have a full time job and never been happier, so you are definitely not late.

The turning point for me was when I read this article: http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-yo...

It basically says you have to make things and you won't feel yourself worthless.

Start learning and doing hard, that's all!

[mverwijs]

Listen to these for starters: http://www.bornhappy.co/michaelneill/ and http://www.bornhappy.co/love/, possibly this TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr6VawX2nr4

[nyc]

A recent article in the Economist explains why comparing to others makes us unhappy. In short, we keep comparing ourselves to people who are better off: http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21677223...

That said, I think there are concrete things you could do to improve your current situation. First, it sounds like you now know what to do. That's excellent! At 22, you are not far behind at all.

Early in grad school, things weren't going well and I felt like I was falling behind my peers. I ended up finding a lot of comfort knowing there was a CS professor in my department who had trained as a doctor but then decided his passion was in CS. He basically had to start over in school. To know that one could get a later start and still achieve success was incredibly reassuring.

That said, I think you might also benefit from having a mentor. I have found it useful to have someone experienced and successful from which to learn and model myself after. They have given me the confidence to go and tackle larger problems and helped me move forward when things are looking pretty bleak.

[Yokohiii]

HN used to be much more technical and practical. Now you have much more posts about history, biology, astronomy, many thing that are very very far from being (practical) CS. I can only assume that HN readers want to feel even more sophisticated with far fetched intellectual topics. I think HN will make most persons feel miserable just like social networks do, on facebook others have more friends on HN others are smarter than you.

You should stop reading HN. I've been contemplating this for myself for some time. I have to look around more, but so far I see reddits programming subreddit is more condensed and superior if you just want to keep track on programming news.

For your current situation I can tell you that everything is fine. I've got into programming as an autodidact later than you with zero experience and my school career was average at best. Just take your time and go really deep into a single programming language, exercise with meaningless projects, use stack overflow or friendly forums to discuss problems. Just don't compare to others, there are always smarter people than you. But if you train the practical parts really hard it becomes meaningless because the results are the same.

Also if you want to learn something about humbleness, read Herman Hesse's Siddartha, just don't dive into esoterics afterwards.

Good Luck.

[edit] Nice article about depression and social media: http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2015/04/08/new-stud...

[halayli]

I am not being cynical, but I wouldn't recommend using HN to replace a therapist.

[Symbiote]

This is good advice.

The therapist at my university was really useful to several people I know, plus myself.