His Shirt is Whiter than Mine, Why?

Most people of my generation will smile as they recall the tagline of this popular detergent advertisement of 1980s. It brings out our tendency to constantly benchmark ourselves with others. Everyone likes to believe that he is better than others, which is fine so long as it remains a subjective feeling. But the moment we face an objective counter evidence, aren't we prone to get upset? How do we handle such feeling? In my humble opinion, the best way to handle it is to avoid such comparisons.
 
I had my birthday this week, and amid the hustle-bustle of wishes from friends and family members, the thought crossed my mind, “How am I doing in life?” Since I also attended a reunion with my college mates from Roorkee last week, it took an obvious turn, “Am I doing better than my class mates?”
 
As I tried to find an answer to this question, I stumbled upon the first roadblock. I recall vividly that on the evening of reunion, we had such great bonhomie among all the friends… It was apparent that all of us started our journey in different directions and reached different places over the long years; however, each of us seemed fully satisfied with our journey and we felt genuinely happy to be where we are. How to say who did better in this case? How do we define the concept of ‘better’?

Luckily, the engineer in me found an easy answer. Every definition of 'better' has an associated comparison function. Choose your function and you can find out who is better. Somehow, I was not convinced with my own logic. Another voice in my head said, “Comparison functions are meant for inanimate objects. Are you sure they are suitable for human beings? A comparison can tell you who is bigger; but bigger is not necessarily better. Similarly, it is hard to say that faster or higher is better.

It was getting complicated. Life was easier in college, when marks or grades could be easily used to rank the whole class and you could easily find out where do you stand. If only we can find a similar quantifiable measure to apply, we can use it to compare. Some commonly used benchmarks in society are: 

• Education - Degrees, Grades
• Money – Income, Wealth
• Assets – House, Cars
• Status – Position at work, size of business, social status
• Popularity – number of friends / likes on social media etc.

The benchmarks listed above are no doubt objective in nature, but I realized none of these help me answer my original question. To be sure, one can find out whether she is more educated, richer, wealthier, better placed at work, or more popular than others. Does any of it make her better? Not sure. More educated is not always better. Being richer or wealthier does not imply being better as well. People may be more popular or have a higher status, and that also is not an indicator of being better. If we look around carefully, we can find numerous examples around us to support this argument.

So, I was back to square one; it was turning out impossible to benchmark myself with others. Suddenly I realized that it is pointless to compare, when each of us is a unique individual with a different and equally interesting journey. Why bother at all? There is no need to compare yourself with others as such comparisons are often misleading.

I know you are thinking, “This is too idealistic a viewpoint and the real world works quite differently. In reality, we do benchmark ourselves with people around us all the time. We try and be better than them, and a big part of our lives is spent in this race. It is this sense of 'competition' that makes us better each day. If I adopt a no-comparison mindset, won’t it kill my desire to excel?”

Well, why not compare with yourself? Benchmark yourself with what you were yesterday and try to improve upon it. This is also easy to do as you can do it in small steps, and be on a continuous path of improvement and excellence. This is a good way to keep your motivation to excel.

Let us take the example of a marathon to understand it better. Hundreds of people take part in a marathon, and a big majority of them take much longer to complete it than the winner. Do these people compare their timing with the winner to motivate themselves? In fact most people running a marathon are happy to just take part in the race. Even the performance conscious runners try to do better than their previous run, instead of competing with fellow runners. We should run the race of life like this marathon. It is not important how many people are ahead of you in the race… more important is how far you have come.

A friend has an interesting observation in somewhat different context. He says,”If you compare yourself with people around you (similar background, same location etc), in the best case you'll be slightly better than them. So if at all you're going to compare and compete, do it with the best in the business. It will be easy to tell yourself several reasons why you can't be as good. Not letting those reasons stop you is half the work done!”

I fully agree with his suggestion of benchmarking yourself against the best, as the idea encourages us to aim high and have BHAGs (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals). However, an inherent limitation of external benchmarks is hidden in the observation as well. Any external benchmark places an upper limit on how great we want to be or can become. With whom did Newton compare when he invented gravity? Did Mahatma Gandhi compare with someone on his road to greatness? Do you think Mark Zuckerberg needed a comparison to take Facebook to such heights of popularity?

So do aim high by all means, but when you switch from external benchmarks to internal benchmarks, you will be set to fly much higher.

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About This Post

The thought behind this post was triggered by a Facebook post by a friend, with a valid point about choosing to benchmark against the best. The thought also resonates well with the idea of BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goals). I admit I am guilty of misunderstanding his point at first, and he had to clarify it before I got it right.

However, the post triggered my thoughts about my deep rooted belief about the futility of external comparison.

Disclaimer - I am a firm supporter of the idea, and the anecdote in the post about me trying to compare with my friends is not real - it is there just to help me make the point more dramatically.