#87: You're overlooking your unique value
Did you know that your brain never devotes more than 0.5% of its power to important things like finding food, avoiding predators, thinking, perceiving, and feeling? And that this is because you're always bloody using the other 99.5% for comparing yourself unfavourably to other people? Admittedly, I just made that up - but you do spend far too much time and energy on comparison. You know you shouldn't, because it makes you feel bad. But there's another, seldom-recognised reason to avoid comparing yourself to others: comparison is a completely inadequate and very biased tool for self-evaluation.
Episode transcript:
Comparing yourself to others is an even worse idea than you realised.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode. You might be able to hear the rain hitting the window as I record this. It’s actually one of my favourite sounds. I grew up on the coast - in Pembrokeshire, in south Wales - where the weather can be quite wild (which is a romantic-sounding way of saying: very wet and windy). When I was a child I used to like being tucked up in bed and hearing the rain hammering against the windows outside and the wind lifting up the roof tiles. I would feel extra cosy snuggled up in my bed. It was less fun if it was still going by the time I had to leave for school, arriving at the bus stop soaking wet and with my hair plastered to my face. Even less fun doing cross country runs along the beach with the rain coming in horizontally during PE lessons - I mean, I’d love that now, but these days I don’t have to shiver through double maths in a crumpled and damp school uniform afterwards. Anyway - yes, guys, I’m pleased to announce that The Academic Imperfectionist is now a podcast about the weather. Once a fortnight I’ll release a new episode in which I update you on what the weather is currently like where I live, and reminisce about memorable weather events from my past.
Just kidding - as you know, this is a podcast about my cats. Not really, but before I move on, let me tell you that something exciting is happening today. 3 of our cats began their lives as strays in Canada, before being adopted and eventually imported to the UK by a lovely woman who adored them, but whose daughter ended up being severely allergic to them, so now they live with us. I keep their previous owner updated with how they’re getting on - and she’s coming to visit them today with her kids! I’m excited about the emotional reunion. The cats better not let me down. And they better not pretend that they never get fed or that the other cats bully them, or any other such bullshit.
Ok, now I really am going to get to the point. This week’s topic is one of those that, from time to time during coaching sessions, I think to myself (and sometimes even say to the person I’m coaching), ‘I really ought to make a podcast episode about this’. It comes up a lot, and it seems in particular to affect people who have taken unusual career paths, perhaps moving between several industries or lines of work, and also academics who work across several disciplines. In a nutshell, the problem is this: people whose careers have spanned a few lines of work, and academics who are interdisciplinary, often - at least, among those who come to me for coaching - fall into the trap of comparing themselves to people with more linear career paths, and find themselves coming up short. So, for example, someone who has worked as a school teacher, an accountant, and a journalist, before turning their hand to law in the last couple of years, ends up comparing themself to their current lawyer colleagues - that is, to people who have spent their entire careers working in law - and finds themself lacking. Or, an academic who works in a psychology department but whose PhD was in biology and who these days collaborates mainly with sociologists ends up comparing themself to their dyed-in-the-wool psychology colleagues and feels like a fraud. You get the idea, hopefully. Can you tell that I’ve worked quite hard to avoid having to say the adverb form of ‘interdisciplinary’? The internet tells me that it’s ‘interdisciplinarily’, but I’m going to end up with a migraine if I have to say that more than once.
Now, this is going to be ringing a loud bell for those of you whose career paths have zigzagged across several fields, but I think this issue affects even those whose paths have been pretty linear too. That includes people who have taken a career break to have children, to care for someone, to recover from or manage illness, to travel, or to do anything else that feels like a bit of a diversion. And, to a less dramatic extent, it also affects people who have decided to focus their energies into one aspect of their job or their lives rather than another - academics who choose to prioritise their teaching, or their research, or their leadership, or their public engagement over other aspects of their work, or just people who have set boundaries to prevent their work encroaching into their private lives. If you’ve ever said something along the lines of ‘I can’t seem to stick at anything for long’, or ‘My colleague is so much better at this stuff than I am’, or ‘I feel like everyone is moving forward and I’m being left behind’, then this episode is for you.
The problem here is, of course, comparison. The thief of joy. There are always ways we can compare ourselves to others, and find ourselves coming up short. There’s even a scientific account of how we do it - social comparison theory, which was described in the 1950s by the psychologist Leon Festinger. When you compare yourself to others, you effectively use another person’s life as a template, or a set of standards, for your own. If there’s some way in which your own life doesn’t match theirs - which is always going to be the case - then you end up feeling inadequate. There are plenty of reasons why you should resist comparing yourself to others, but the one I want to focus on here is this: comparison, kind of by definition, doesn’t reward uniqueness, which means that the more unique you are - the more unusual your set of skills, the more original your approach, the more distinctive your background, and so on - then using comparison as a way to evaluate yourself is going to leave you with an absolutely whopping blind spot. You’re going to end up overlooking exactly what it is that makes you valuable.
I can’t help thinking of a particular friend of mine when I’m talking about this. This friend is a philosopher, and we’ve collaborated together a few times over the years. But whereas I’m - academically speaking - a straight-up philosopher whose qualifications are all in philosophy and who has only ever belonged to philosophy departments while studying or working in universities, my friend’s background is more diverse: there’s some philosophy in there, but they’ve moved around a bit more and worked in a few different disciplines. Occasionally they’ll say things like, ‘I’m not really a proper philosopher, I’ll never be as good as X, Y, and Z’, where X, Y, and Z are straight-down-the-line philosophers. The thing is, this friend is probably right. Evaluated solely against a philosopher template, there are much stronger people around. But my friend has never been aiming to fit the philosopher template. They have done some super interesting and original work, but it’s all interdisciplinary, and nobody but my friend is out there doing the unique sort of work that they’re doing. Sometimes, jokingly-but-not-really-jokingly, I ask my friend if, in addition to complaining about what a mediocre philosopher they are, they also go around complaining about how mediocre they are in the other disciplines they work in. I expect the answer is yes. And all the while they’re focused on what an underwhelming researcher they are, they’re overlooking what’s obvious to everyone else: they’re outstanding, in a league of their own, mould-breaking, incomparable.
There’s an under-recognised lesson here about comparing ourselves to others. Comparison gets a bad rap - and rightly so, given how miserable it can make us. But there’s another problem with it too, a huge problem, and it’s this. Comparison only tells you how good you are at living by someone else’s standards, of fitting someone else’s template. There are times when it’s useful to do that - if you want to be a competitive job candidate, or a competitive anything for that matter, it helps to know where you stand relative to other people - but as a means of evaluating your worth, it’s a very limited tool. If you use comparison to evaluate yourself, you’re going to miss anything that doesn’t fit the template, any box that’s not checked by the person you’re comparing yourself to. What you’re doing to yourself is the equivalent of walking up to an Olympic athlete while they’re having a gold medal hung around their neck and berating them for yet again having missed out on this year’s Nobel Prize for physics.
Now, in theory, there’s a problem with what I’ve just said. If you’re a self-assured sort of person, you might object that when we compare ourselves to others, we don’t just see the good qualities that other people have that we ourselves don’t have. We also see the good qualities that we have that are lacked by the people we compare ourselves to, right? I mean, sure, that’s true. But, unless you’re Donald Trump, you’re probably not in the habit of using comparison to highlight how much better you are than everyone else. The reason that comparison has been called ‘the thief of joy’ - by Theodore Roosevelt, apparently, although to me it has the whiff of the sort of remark that gets ascribed to pretty much everyone with an air of wisdom about them - comparison is the thief of joy because for most of us, the urge to compare ourselves to others comes from a place of anxiety or insecurity. We compare ourselves to others because we’re already worried that we don’t measure up. In our heads, we’re compiling a checklist of good qualities that they have, and using it as the standard that we need to meet, which inevitably we don’t. Very often the checklist we compile doesn’t include the good qualities that we have and the other person doesn’t have, or if it does, we’re dismissive of those qualities. Why? Because, duh, the entire reason we’re doing the comparison in the first place is that we’re anxious about not measuring up, and part of that anxiety is the worry that maybe we’re doing life all wrong, in which case the fact that other people aren’t doing some of the things that we’re doing probably means that those things aren’t really worth doing. And, what’s more, that anxiety doesn’t lead us to compare ourselves to people who are obviously not doing as well as we are. Instead, we compare ourselves to those people we really admire. And then we draw very general conclusions, don’t we? It’s not ‘This person is doing better than me in this particular respect’. It’s ‘I’m rubbish’.
For some reason, this is a really ingrained bad habit. We start doing it as kids, when we complain that our friend at school has this thing that we don’t have, or is allowed to do that thing that we’re not allowed to do. Weary parents and carers everywhere remind their kids that while that might be true, what about this thing that you have that your friend doesn’t have, or that thing you get to do that your friend doesn’t - but, if you’ve ever been one of those weary parents or carers, you’ll know that it never quite hits the spot. The kid you’re trying to reassure still ends up sloping off huffing about how they never get to do anything.
So, what can you do about it? As ever with things like this, the first step is noticing when you’re doing it. And then break down exactly what it is that you’re doing. Remind yourself that the person you’re comparing yourself to isn’t a template for your own life. It helps if you know what the template for your own life looks like - and luckily for you, I have some tools that can help you with that. The Core Values exercise, the Wheel of Life, and the Ideal Life Instruction Manual can all be downloaded from the Resources page of the Academic Imperfectionist website without needing to register or give your email address or pledge your commitment to let me spam your inbox for the next few decades. Realising that you and whoever you’re comparing yourself to want different things from life can be a helpful check on your comparison anxiety.
Next, if you’re on the job market, or if you’re applying for study or for grants, you have an important tool at your fingertips that you’re probably not using as much as you could be. Updating your CV - or your resumé - and writing letters and filling in forms that are supposed to highlight your unique set of skills and experience and qualities is not just a pain in the arse. It’s also an opportunity for you to review what’s valuable about you, if you allow yourself. Whenever former students of mine ask me for a reference for their applications for jobs or further study, I ask them to send me - in addition to the usual academic stats - a bullet point list of positive things I can say about them that I wouldn’t get from looking at their academic record. They sometimes feel awkward about this so I have to tell them that this is definitely not the moment for modesty. I ask them to be as positive about themselves as they would be about a friend who they were enthusiastically recommending for a job or a study position. The same ‘don’t be modest’ advice applies to you, too. When you’re next filling in one of those ghastly forms, swallow your awkwardness and your modesty and advocate unashamedly for yourself. At the end of the process, when you hit ‘submit’, you might find you walk away with a sense that, contrary to what you usually like to think, you actually do have some positive qualities. This was always my experience after updating my CV or having to describe a research project. I’d end up thinking, ‘Wow, this is actually an interesting and exciting project I’ve dreamt up’, or ‘I’ve actually done more than I realised’. When you have thoughts like that, don’t just let them drift away. Spend a couple of minutes noting them down. They’re exactly what you’re overlooking when you compare yourself unfavourably to others.
Finally, there are ways that you can turn the unpleasant emotions that arise from comparison - envy, resentment, and so on - into a positive force. The philosopher Sara Protasi has written about this in her wonderful work on envy, which I talked about in episode #41: Dealing with uncool emotions: envy, jealousy, resentment. If you can resist that initial, child-like impulse to yell ‘I’m never allowed to do anything!’ whenever you compare yourself to someone impressive, you can look to those you admire for inspiration rather than merely using them as a stick to beat yourself with. What can you learn from them? What lessons for your own life can you draw from what they’ve done?
Most importantly, though, try to remember that comparison is a very limited and biased tool for self-evaluation. It tells you only how good you are at living life like someone who you’ve hand-picked precisely because they are better than you in some respect that you feel insecure about. Whenever you notice yourself comparing, try to use it as a prompt to reflect on what the comparison overlooks. What if your uniqueness, that part of you that doesn’t show up in your comparisons, is your strength?
Catch you in a couple of weeks, my unique, imperfect friends.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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