Have you heard the adage, “don’t compare your beginning to another person’s middle.” It goes something like that…

The point of this adage, the reason we have to take heed, especially us entrepreneurs, is that we often see where is a person is today and we play the comparison game. The problem is that we don’t know how long that person has been in the game. How many hours they work every week, grinding, sacrificing, investing time and money, etc. We don’t know their story or their struggle. All we see is the glory, we don’t see the guts. 

This breeds that hungry green eyed monster, E-N-V-Y.

Envy of the Competition

When you’re resentful that your competition has what you’d like to have, or accomplishes what you’d like to do, that’s envy. While it can be natural at times to feel envious, when you envy the competition, you can end up doing a lot of harm to yourself if you don’t let it go.

 

Envy arises because we worry about the entrepreneurial experts. They’re so polished. They know just what to say. Hundreds, if not thousands of people seem to hang on to their every word.

Every idea they churn out seems to turn into a money-maker. When you see these experts and their booming business, you resent that you don’t have that, too. But what you’re not realizing is that no expert’s success story was ready-made.

Rose Colored Lenses Are Cloudy

A successful person didn’t simply get up one morning and put on an aura of success. They build their success just like everyone else does. A piece at a time. When you look at an expert, you don’t see the rough road they walked to get where they are.

You don’t see the times when they struggled. Or the times they were afraid. You don’t see when they worried about the next move or the money flow. You don’t know what they went through to get where they are.

When you envy the competition, what happens is you’re setting yourself up in the comparison game and no one ever wins that. It’s played on a concept where there will always be someone who’s better in business than you are.

But there will also be someone who’s worse than you. Comparison is a measuring stick that will ensure that you come up short. It’s the key to berating yourself and it creates low self-esteem.

You might not realize that when most people compare themselves to the competition, they never choose to compare themselves to someone who’s failing. They always choose the experts – the huge success stories.

When people compare themselves to others, they NEVER choose small. They always choose experienced experts. Click To Tweet

Every Path Is Unique

What you need to realize is that how they become a success isn’t the exact same business model that’s going to work for you anyway. If you do compare yourself to the competition, only do it to create the determination to be better than they are and not to make yourself afraid or to feel bad about yourself.

You don’t want to become a lemming and follow whatever the competition is doing. There are enough lemmings. Enough carbon copies. Choose to be an original and bring what’s unique about yourself and your business to the masses.

Choose to be original and bring what’s unique about your story to your business. Click To Tweet

When you do that, when you choose to create a business that’s all you and you’ll find your own success story. You’ll become the person that others look to with envy because you’ve followed (and achieved) your dreams.

Ciao,
Miss Kemya