22: How to Stop Comparing Yourself to Other People | Deep Dive

Transcript for Deep Dive | How to Stop Comparing Yourself to Other People (Episode 22)

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:00:00]  We've been doing social comparisons since the time we were kids. So for most of us, we have decades of these ideas about ourselves that are built up from self comparison. They're already established. We might not always know they're there, they might be subtle or subconscious, but they're definitely there.

Jordan Harbinger:  [00:00:16]  Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer Jason DeFillippo. On this episode, we'll be talking with my friend Gabriel Mizrahi. Today, we'll talk about why you compare yourself to other people and how to stop. We'll learn why we all compare ourselves to other people, what purpose it serves us and why we tend to compare ourselves to those that are most similar to us, often to the detriment of our relationships. And we'll discover the two types of comparisons we make between ourselves and other people and what purpose each of these comparison types serves. And last but not least, we'll explore some strategies to stop the unhealthy types of comparisons we make and learn more about how to make ourselves better in the process. Don't forget we've got a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify all your understandings of why and how we compare ourselves to other people and what you can do about it. That link is in the show notes at JordanHarbinger.com/podcast. Now, here's a Deep Dive with Gabriel Mizrahi.

[00: 01:14]  So a few weeks ago I go to a conference and Jenny and I are sitting with a group of successful friends, pretty successful guys, and I can't remember how this topic came up, but someone said, “Oh, you know, I always comparing myself to this, or these conferences are great, but you meet all these successful people, but I'm always comparing myself to all these other people.” And then another guy goes, “Well, I feel like I compare myself less to other people.” And then another guy across the table said, “You mean less than other people? You compare yourself to other people less than other people?” And we all started laughing because we've realized that even when you think you've kind of gotten over this, you've gotten through this, you don't do this -- we all compare ourselves to other people. It's just that a lot of folks think, “Oh well you know the way I do it. Well this isn't what I mean by that. Or we don't even necessarily know. We just think as long as we're comparing ourselves favorably or something like that, then or maybe we don't do it as much, then it's okay.” But it actually has this kind of nagging deleterious effect I think on our personality and on our self-esteem. So I wanted to talk about that today with you, Gabriel, who comparatively speaking, compares yourself to other people, more or less.

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:02:27]  That was the best introduction we wanted to talk to you because you don't do this quite as often, but you still do it. Yeah, totally. Well we all do it. I mean it's such a human thing to do and we do compare ourselves to other people even when those comparisons aren't particularly meaningful or useful. Like even if they don't make us better, sometimes they make us feel better or sometimes they make us feel worse. And I think a lot of us feel like it makes us feel worse, which is why we want to talk about it. Especially like why do we compare ourselves to other people even and despite the fact that we might be advancing in our careers or feeling pretty good about ourselves, you know, psychologically, mentally, pretty okay. And yet it still seems to happen almost subconsciously. And you know, is there any benefit to seeing how we stack up against other people? And if there isn't, how can we stop?

Jordan Harbinger:  [00:03:14] Right. How can we stop? But I think one of the problems is that we're always comparing our blooper reel to other people's highlight reel. So even if it's like you got promoted, you met someone special, you just got a new apartment, your project at work is going well, you just took a great vacation. You just got 10 new Instagram followers, whatever it is. Then you're like, “but my cousin's friend, she just got a new car and she got promoted.” And you're like, “Oh, I need to get a new car now.” Or, but you're not necessarily having that conscious conversation with yourself. You're just thinking, I'm just raining on my own parade just a little bit because somebody else has something that I don't or, maybe has something perceived that I don’t.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:03:58] Totally, absolutely. I mean, I think a lot of people feel like comparing themselves to other people has gotten worse. Like it seems like we do it more or that it feels worse than it used to. And I think social media has a huge role to play in that. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But I think it's important to notice that we compare ourselves to other people because human beings are designed to understand themselves. So like this capacity for self-reflection is one of the things that makes us humans, right? We have this fundamental need to evaluate ourselves and the most immediate and relevant way to evaluate ourselves as in comparison to something. But because we're human beings, the most meaningful comparison is to someone else and the closer those people are to us in proximity and similarity.

[00:04:44]  So if they're in the same room or building or city or life stage or are doing the same things we are doing or want the same things we want, then that comparison gets really intense and that's when we start to look to other people to tell us about ourselves. It's a peculiar thing, but we are designed to understand ourselves in that way and actually that's been around for that understanding has been around for quite some time. In 1954, there was a guy named Leon Festinger, social psychologist, and he really was the one to unpack this peculiar drive that makes humans humans and he called it social comparison theory -- very apt name, and basically he said that people evaluate their opinions and their abilities by comparing themselves to other people and they do it -- this is what's interesting -- they do it for two reasons. The first is he said, to reduce uncertainty in the areas in which they're comparing themselves so that they can be more certain about what they believe and second, to learn how to define themselves. So this is the paradox because on the one hand, I think a lot of people, certainly you and I have talked about this, I've met a lot of people listening to this are like, I'm tuning in because I want to know how to stop doing this. And yet it seems like we almost don't know how to even understand ourselves if we don't do this. So how do we get ourselves out of that paradox? That's part of what we're going to be talking about.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:53] Yeah. The counterintuitive bit to this was that the tendency to compare ourselves to other people decreases as the difference between our opinion or ability and the other person's increases. So basically somebody who's more similar to us is more likely to be someone with whom we compare ourselves. So we're more likely to compare ourselves to a colleague, somebody we work with, than to the CEO of the company, or if we're an athlete, we're more likely to compare ourselves to somebody we jog with than to an Olympian or to you Usain Bolt. And that's in theory because the difference between me and the CEO is huge. Me and the Olympic runner is huge. So it's not, I mean, I don't know what's going on here in our brain. Our brain just says, “Well, that's not a fair comparison”, but this other person who's kind of close to us is somehow fair game.

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:06:44]  Yeah. I mean, it would be kind of absurd and irrelevant to compare yourself to like, “I need to be as good as Mikaela Shiffrin in the Olympics.” You know, you compare yourself to somebody who is attainable and who's in your vicinity. That probably has evolutionary roots, right? And probably goes way back to like we compare ourselves to people in the tribe, not to people way out there, but also those old brains probably weren't prepared to be able to look at Instagram and NBC when they're showing the Olympics because we didn't even know those people existed. So a lot of this does have to do with that old, ancient brain in a modern world and how we think about it. But for sure we're not going to compare ourselves to somebody whose status is unattainable. We're going to compare selves to someone who's more immediately relevant because that means more to us. So to your point, you're going to compare yourself to that colleague in the next cubicle over more than you are to the CEO. Three levels up in the building.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:32]  It seems like a lot of disorders are probably caused by people thinking, “this person's like me”, when really they're not. So for example, a photoshopped image of a woman or a guy in a fitness magazine, we're like, “Huh, okay. I kind of look like this person and I'm just a couple, maybe I'm just 10 or 15 pounds of fat in my mid section away from this.” And then we don't, we're not evolved to think, “Well that's fake tan starved himself for three days, you know, took diuretic pills to pee out all the subcutaneous water and is on a special photo shoot diet as a model. He will look like this for exactly 24 hours before reverting back to something a little bit more normal.” And because our brains don't have that calculation being made, we just think, “Huh, I'm kind of that guy's build. I should probably have that six-pack”, or “Oh, I'm sort of like this gal, but look how clear her skin is”, because we're not thinking, well this, there's technology that eliminated all the blemishes and added a little bit of rose to her cheeks or whatever. We don't have that. So we can create all these sort of mental disorders by looking at someone and thinking that they're misjudging and thinking that they're attainable or in our league or in our tribe, when really they're not even human. This image.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:08:46] Advertisers and marketers understand that really well. They understand how to create something that seems that it's just within the realm of attainability but aspirational enough to make you wonder if you're good enough. Right? And there's a lot of psychology to that, that is probably beyond you and me, but for sure that's absolutely what's going on. The other interesting thing that came out of Festinger’s research was he pointed out that when we stop comparing ourselves to other people, which again, a lot of us want to do, when we stop comparing ourselves to other people, then this interesting feeling creeps in of like hostility and derogation he called it, which is sort of mentally tearing someone down or taking them down a peg. As long as continuing to compare ourselves to someone else brings unpleasant feelings than stopping to compare ourselves will invite these other unpleasant feelings, but they're more manageable.

[00:09:35]  So we might feel not so great comparing ourselves to that colleague who's a few cubicles over. But if we say, “You know what, I'm just going to stop doing that. I'm not going worry about that person.” Then often subconsciously, you'll notice that you're like, “but they're not that good anyway, but I don't even, they're not worth my time”. Or “is the work they're doing even that good?” And I mean, for a lot of those, it's a bit shameful to realize that we have those feelings, but it's kind of funny once you realize that it's just in the human wiring. But that is absolutely what happens. I mean, it's almost like we swap one set of unpleasant feelings for this other set of unpleasant feelings that makes us feel safer because the comparison was so unpleasant.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:12] So instead of thinking, “Well, you know, this person's business is further along than mine and they're making a lot of money and they look like they're having a lot of fun.” We say, “Oh, but you know, look how out of shape they look. Oh, they're probably not sleeping. Yeah. If I was a workaholic, maybe I could do that. But I have a life. I have a life. I do all kinds of fun stuff. You know, my friends are better. Look at these dorks he's hanging out with like”, and that makes you feel better for a minute because then you realize, well it's kind of funny cause that still seems like a comparison. It just seems like you're taking the comparison and then you're like, well let me chop the legs out from underneath.

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:10:48]  That's very good. That's an interesting point.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:51] So still, you're still sort of comparing them.

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:10:53] You're picking and choosing sort of what you're choosing to compare yourself to in them. And that's something that we'll come back to in just a moment. That's a really interesting insight. You know the other interesting thing that came out of the Festinger research that we should just mention is that the important thing about social comparison theory is that the more important we think a certain group of people is, the more pressure we'll feel to conform to that group. Now that's might seem kind of obvious but this explains why there's so much pressure to like kick ass in your orange theory class or in your soul cycle class, but like not so much pressure to compete with a runner who happens to be running, you know on the same street at the same time as you because the tribe or the group you're comparing yourself to in the running case is not that meaningful.

[00:11:40]  You don't know that person. You guys aren't part of some bigger brand or group or movement, but in a certain class where you've paid to go where you know other people pay to go, where the opinions and the level of ability in that room mattered to you. In those cases, you are going to think that comparing yourself means a lot more. Those people's opinions of you will mean a lot more. Again, just the human wiring. So that's actually really also really useful because that explains why we feel this drive to self-compare in scenarios that have a lot of stakes for us. Like at work, like you really matters what your opinion, what your colleagues think of you or what your boss thinks of you. And probably on a more superficial level it matters a lot with the people in your bootcamp class think of you or your family. I mean families are very influential, like the opinions of our families to most people it means a lot. So you're not going to care so much about the opinions of people in a random elevator. Even if you're stuck in that elevator for awhile. It just doesn't, it's not important.

Jordan Harbinger:   [00:12:34]    And I think yet another disorder caused by social media is sometimes and especially younger people who are kind of digital natives, which is weird cause I guess we're sort of in that, but we're right on the cusp. Yeah. Like I remember when there was no internet, no phones, and it was not that long ago. I was in the high school. I was just driving and it's like, “Yeah, I've AOL but nobody else has it so I don't use it that much, right?”

[00:12:59]  This episode is sponsored in part by The Great Courses Plus. Alright, love this. This is a cool product. The Great Courses Plus is bomb. There's over 9,000 and I remember just a few months ago they were like, “Oh, we got to up it to 8,000 from 6,000”, now it's 9,000 lectures, and virtually any category and you can listen to them through The Great Courses Plus app at anytime.

[00:13:20]  I know. It's like, “Oh, you can stream it to your TV, your laptop, your tablet, your phone.” Really, I listened to these because I don't know. I'm an audio guy. I got a face for radio. I resent those that don't, what can I say? There's probably some deeper psychology here. I recommend checking out The Art of Negotiating The Best Deal. I love negotiation stuff because it is really at the height of psychology, right? As humans we’re going to do everything we can to save, make whatever money, make deals, and there's just great tools in here for both our professional and personal lives and psycho -- anything to do with negotiation. Just like in a study in human behavior that doesn't really lie. So whether you're negotiating in a collaborative setting, competitive setting, it's important to show respect, humility, empathy, establish credibility, the rapport, all that stuff is covered in this lecture series.

[00:14:10]  So I know you're going to get a lot out of The Great Courses Plus. I've arranged a special limited time offer for you, which is a free month of unlimited access to enjoy any/all of their lectures. So you got to go to our special URL, TheGreatCoursesPlus.com/Jordan, TheGreatCoursesPlus.com/Jordan. Support for the new show also comes from our friends at Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans. This is the mortgage company that decided to ask ‘why’. Why can't clients get approved in minutes rather than weeks? Why can't they make adjustments to their rate and term in real time? And why can't there be a client focused technological mortgage revolution? They're answering all these questions and more with Rocket Mortgage. They give you the confidence you need when it comes to buying a home or refinancing your existing home loan, and I know a lot of people think mortgages are kind of like boring, but let me tell you, when you try to go buy a house or when you have a mortgage, this stuff gets interesting real fast.

Jason DeFillippo:  [00:15:01] The funny part about this is when I wanted to buy a house back in the day, I heard so many horror stories about how hard it was to get a mortgage and all the paperwork that you had to go through that I'm like, “Screw it, I'm going to rent.” I wish we had Rocket Mortgage back then.

Jordan Harbinger:  [00:15:15]  My rubric is if I see something and go, “Wait, that doesn't exist already?” That is a brilliant idea in general for something mass market like this for a mortgage, so whether you're looking to buy your first home or your 10th home, Rocket Mortgage, don't make it a transparent online process. You can make an informed decision Apply simply. Understand fully. Mortgage confidently -- with Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans. To get started, go to RocketMortgage.com/forbes, that's RocketMortgage.com/forbes. Take it away. Jason.

Jason DeFillippo: [00:15:01] Equal housing lender licensed in all 50 States NMLSconsumeraccess.org number 3030.

Jordan Harbinger:   [00:15:49] The disease that I'm talking about or the disorder that I'm talking about is people will start to then miscalculate what matters and you hear about this and I see this in my inbox for Feedback Friday. It's like, “When I post things, they don't get enough likes. I delete them.” I know that this is weird and that's totally what's going on here. Someone cares what the internet thinks of them because they're extending this imaginary tribe of important people out to the people that they're friends with on Facebook or that follow them on Instagram. So it's in a way some of these, I say, disorders, but there's nothing clinical here yet that are caused by social media are like caused by a weak boundary wall between, “Hey, these people really matter? Your family, your close friends, people at your church or whatever, and your classes and your business.” And then you just go, “Well, wait a minute.

[00:16:39] Let's extend that out to this invisible mass of people that are anonymous, don't have your best interests in mind and things like that.” So you see people who should have it together and have a great home life and other ways cause these neuroses or allow these neuroses to creep in. And then somebody who comments like, “You look fat” on their random Instagram picture, who's trolled them for a year but somehow is still not blocked because this person values their opinion and then they're getting cyberbullied suddenly or they're cyberbullying themselves really because they're allowing this sort of negative stuff to creep in because we can't stop comparing ourselves or allowing other people to compare themselves to us.

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:17:23] Our Instagram feed, our Facebook social graph becomes the new tribe that we assign value to. Even though it could be made up of people, A. you wouldn't even know existed potentially if this technology weren't there. And B, might not share the same values or care about the same things that you do and yet they're in this, as you put it, this like movable boundary that's grown the tribe, the so called important tribe out and that's become bigger and that's a lot of the problem with comparing ourselves because we're comparing ourselves to this new group of people who actually might not be that relevant but feel super relevant.

Jordan Harbinger:  [00:17:55]  It does feel super relevant because they're allowed to do it in public like in your space, right? But even if you don't have social media and you say, “That's why I don't use social media, I don't need this episode”, you're still probably comparing yourselves to other people because unless you live in one of those like fuel tanks in the middle of the desert like a lot of hermits do. I saw a documentary about it. Of course, then you're still probably comparing yourself at some level unless you're like my friend who I was eating with the other day who says that they do this but not as much.

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:18:22]  But not as much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And why he quietly checks his phone and on the table? So the question now becomes, so what? Right, like, so what? So  okay, we compare ourselves. It almost seems like we don't have a choice because it's in our wiring. Isn't that just the way we are? Don't we need to compare ourselves to understand how we measure up? I mean in a way that could be a healthy thing. Like if we need to understand how well we're doing or how smart we are, how talented we are, how much more we have to grow, couldn't it be useful to compare ourselves to other people? The short answer is yes, but there's more to it than that. So is comparing ourselves to other people really so bad. And to answer that question, we need to understand our motivation for comparing ourselves to other people in the first place. And I think that's where we should really delve into it because in the motivation is the answer to our question. How can I compare myself in a way that doesn't make me miserable?

Jordan Harbinger:  [00:19:15]  So I would love to do that.  And I've of course I can think of an anecdote or plenty of anecdotes for me that are a little bit, not shameful, but you know, painful because these comparisons that we have often stayed with us for a really long time. I mean hammer them in – hard.

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:19:30] Tell me this is good. What I find interesting about this topic is every time people start getting honest about it, you realize that everybody does this and that with the stuff that feels shameful really isn't that because it's so universal. Yeah. So I would love to hear how this has shown up in your life.

Jordan Harbinger:  [00:19:47]  So for years, I listened obsessively to as many podcasts as I could fit into my day. I would listen to tons of different shows. I would listen to crappy shows and sometimes I’ve been purposely picked crappy shows. And I'll talk about why in a second. Although the answer might be really obvious. I listened to NPR stuff and then really niche produced in a basement stuff, mainstream stuff. I'd take some mental notes, I pick up some tips and tricks here to try to get better. I would look at real broadcasters and television hosts and take notes on that and figure out how I stacked up against role models like Larry King and then peers, other podcasters and things like that and I was researching and I put that in air quotes because it started off that way and it started off with good intentions, but it definitely did not.

[00:20:35]  It definitely did not stay that way. It started to become a little bit of an obsession, almost like an OCD type of thing, and I did it over time. The reason I was able to spot those behavior in other ways too was because I didn't just binge in once and then take a bunch of notes and then be done with it. I started off that way and then I'd started to do a little bit each day, or especially when I was feeling bad and I realized I was propping myself up by listening and watching some of this stuff. I would go, I mean this wasn't conscious, but it would almost be like, “I'm going to listen to this show just so that I can see how crappy this person is compared to what I just produced.” And I realized I was starting to do that when I started to feel down or tired or burned out and I realized I was propping myself up on other people's perceived failure, right?

[00:21:22]  I would be measuring my own progress, but a lot of it was, “Oh, I already know this or I can do this. I'm putting out a better show than this.” And then other times, unfortunately I'd find something where I probably could've learned something and I would hopefully take a little bit away, but I would also then go, “Oh man, I'm never going to be as good as this. This is his natural talent. Am I going to be able to match this? How much work is involved here? Did they go to school for this? Where can I go? How long is that going to take? Is that going to be years of training?” There was all kinds of stuff like that. That was bad news. I knew this was going to be a problem when I started avoiding the useful comparisons or the upward comparisons of people that might actually teach me something and started to focus more on people that I thought were underneath me on the totem pole to make myself feel better because that was easier for me to sort of go, “I'm the best person that I've listened to today because I avoided all of the professionals.”

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:22:14]  Right, right. So what you're really saying is that when you were comparing yourself to other people, there could be two motivations and sometimes they were happening at the same time. One was to try to figure out how good you actually were so that you could get better and improve and understand how you fit in to that community. And the other was trying to make yourself feel better. And if you couldn't do that, then sometimes it was about feeling worse for that moment because you weren't as good or there was more to learn or whatever it was. And what's interesting is that sometimes we do one or the other, but sometimes we move back and forth between the two seamlessly. So we go in thinking we're here to just find out, you know, how good we are and whether we have more room to improve. And it turns into this very different thing, which is like, but how can I leave here feeling better about myself? Understanding the difference between those two motivations is the key to figuring out how to stop being miserable when we compare ourselves. Because if you are comparing yourself to evaluate, to self-evaluate, to understand the objective quality of your work or your ability or your talent, then that could be in the right amount. A totally normal and healthy thing to do. And I would argue that to some degree, it's essential.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:21]  Yeah. To get better. Otherwise you don't really have any kind of... is rubric the right word?

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:23:27] Yeah, it's part of the rubric. It can't be 100% of the rubric, but it's very useful to understand because to your point, there are people who have been in your tradition for longer than you have. You want to know what they've done to get better. You want to understand how you fit into that tradition. That's all you really use for. Yeah, and that applies to anything that could apply to marketing and apply to podcasting and applies to writing and it applies to athletics. The other motivation is to enhance yourself and that's to see yourself more favorably. Or if you can't do that, to see someone else's less favorable. And that is the kind of comparison that gets us into trouble. And what's interesting is that in either way, either motivation, you're comparing yourself, it's about your reasons for doing it, what you're trying to get out of it.

[00:24:10]  And if you can differentiate those two, then it is possible to compare yourself in a healthy way without feeling really bad afterward. So self-enhancement, that's the one that gives us a distorted view of ourselves. And the reason is that as we know, we've talked about this a lot, but the research shows that we tend to prioritize feedback that makes us look good and desirable and cool.

Jordan Harbinger:  [00:24:31]  Yeah. Like me looking at the people that I thought, “I'm just mopping the floor with these guys. Look how bad this is compared to what I put out yesterday.”

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:24:39] Exactly right. We've all been there. And then we tend to discount or ignore feedback that makes us look weak or undesirable or generally less than.

Jordan Harbinger:  [00:24:47] Right. So yeah, of course NPR shows sound good.  They have like 20 people working on them. They got all kinds of tax money. If we had that we'd be 10 times better than what they produce.

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:24:56]  Yeah. If only I were PBS, then we could totally do this. So even if we “succeed in making ourselves feel better”, our brains are often playing this clever trick with the data we're using to arrive at that conclusion because we're over prioritizing information that makes us feel better and we're under prioritizing information that would force us to take a good look at ourselves and have to be honest about where we are. So enhancing ourselves is where this gets us into trouble. And it's often when that is a subconscious goal that it gets us even into even more trouble. Because the example you gave is interesting because you did it subconsciously for a while, but then it kind of became obvious. You were like, “Oh, this is what I'm doing.” Right? Like I'm listening to these things. I have a little bit of an agenda. I'm picking out things that will make me feel a certain way or whatever. But for a lot of us, and I would say, this happens to me all the time. You do something, you just don't even realize that this is what's operating under the surface.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:25:49] Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I think the way that I figured it out was turning on something new and going, “No, I don't want to listen to this.” And then thinking, “Wait, why? Oh because it's good. Well, wait a minute. What's my goal here?” I just had to be a little bit honest with myself. It was actually not that hard once I started asking, “What's my goal for this particular thing, not just entertainment because I don't like this show. Oh wait, I'm listening to this because, because I don't like this show. You know? Well, what's the value? What's that about?” The value is it makes me feel good. Why does it make me feel good? Let me sit down and think about that. And I remember turning on other shows and going, “No, this is too good. Wait a minute. What the hell am I doing?” Right? Why am I turning something off? That's good. That's what I should be learning from in comparing myself to why aren't I doing more of that? Well, because it makes me feel like I have such a long way to go. I don't like that feeling. I like to be patted on the head like everybody else. So then I realized, “okay, this is useless.” You know, I'm just trying to avoid envy or shame or getting angry or something. But that's where the growth wise for a lot of us.

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:26:58]  Amazing what that does when you just bring it consciously to the surface. I mean you said that you just a little bit of honesty and oftentimes that's all it really takes. But it's actually really informative. Once you look at it, you can learn a lot about yourself and you realize, “Oh, this is why I'm doing this. This is the motivation. Like what am I really getting out of this by doing it for this reason?” So back to our original question, is it really so bad to compare ourselves to other people? Well, the answer as you pointed out with your stories, it depends. If we're comparing ourselves for self-assessment, then wondering how we stack up is natural and healthy. And as we said, I think for a lot of fields, super important, it's probably even necessary in the right amounts. But if we're comparing ourselves for self-enhancement to make ourselves feel better, look better.

[00:27:46] That's when the process can get obsessive and toxic and oftentimes very confusing and that might've been a little bit of what was going on that table. You were talking about the beginning of this thing where it's like, “Oh, I do do this. Okay. I don't want to be seen as doing this very often and maybe it's because my reasons for doing it are a little bit mixed.” Yeah, like if you were, yeah, if you were sitting at a table and you said, “I totally look at other people. I compare myself to other people at the time. It's really important for me to understand whether my talent is stacking up or living up to the standards I want it to. Here are my heroes. I would love to be as great as them. I need to know.” That's one type of self-comparison, but if it's the other, it's like, “Well, yeah, I do it all the time because I need to know how I feel and if I'm good enough and if other people trust me as much as that person down the hall.” And that's a very different thing and that's when we tend to not want to talk about it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:28:34]  That's true. And I think whenever, here's a common example from my own life, someone will say, “Oh, hey Jordan, you should meet my friend Bill. He's got a podcast.” Then Bill will go, “Oh, you have a podcast?” I'll say, “Yeah, The Jordan Harbinger Show”, and they're like, “Oh yeah, I know it. Yeah. I just have this little tiny audience and you know mine’s nowhere near as good.” Nobody ever says, “Yeah, I listened to your stuff so that I can learn what I can do better.” They always just say, “Mine sucks compared to yours.” And people often will say things like, “Oh, you know, I'm learning how to cook vegan food.” And nobody ever says, “All right, I watch her emulate vegan chefs on YouTube or television in order to find new recipes and figure out what I want to do.” They usually say something like, “Well, compared to this, so-and-so, famous vegan chef, I'm nothing, or I'm no Emeril Lagasse but I do know how to cook some noodles.” Like there's very rarely do you hear someone talk about self-assessment comparisons? Usually we're talking about self-enhancement comparison.

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:29:37]  Yeah. And that's where the anxiety starts to creep in to your point. Yeah. So problem is that when we compare ourselves, we're often doing both of these things simultaneously. That's what's hard about it is that you can move between the two so seamlessly without you don't even realize you're doing it. So you can start off by trying to self-assess and you end up trying to self-enhance. Or once you realize, “Oh, I'm trying to self enhance”, you're like, “Hmm, got to get back to that self-assessment”, right? Or you walk away entirely. So this is one of the biggest paradoxes of self-help and self-improvement. Like we need to study other people in order to measure our progress. But by measuring our progress, we often end up inflating ourselves or tearing ourselves down or toggling between the two. And we often do that at the expense of the person we're comparing ourselves to, right?

[00:30:19]  Like mentally we start to rewrite our story about them like, “Oh, they really are as good as I thought. I'll never be as good as they are.” Right? And it just spins out of control or you're like, “You know what? Not going to compare myself to that person anymore. But you know what, Andrea in marketing, honestly, I don't get it. She's not that good at the job, you know? Or like people don't really like her as much as they seem to.” So it's really funny how that, how that brain does that trick.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:30:44] It's a toxic hall of mirrors.

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:30:46] It's a toxic hall of mirrors. Absolutely.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:30:50] This episode is sponsored in part by Credible. Talk about something I wish existed 10 years ago. Student loans can completely wipe you out if you don't get a handle on them. I know people don't think about this stuff, but you have to. This is like one of the first adult responsibilities and there's just no way of getting out of it unless you don't have loans in the first place. How do you get a handle on this stuff? credible.com -- credible.com is an online marketplace for student loan refinancing and using their simple platform. It takes less than two minutes to find out if you're overpaying on your student loans and pro-tip/ hint/spoiler alert, you are. Plus you can save thousands by refinancing. This is not chump change. All you have to do is visit credible.com/jordan C R E D I B L E.com/Jordan. You answer a few questions right away

[00:31:38]  you get real rates, not like a range of rates that might be this. You get that from multiple lenders. credible.com is completely free to use and checking your rates itself. Checking your rate itself is not going to affect your credit score so you don't have anything to lose. Go see if you are overpaying for your freaking loans. The average user who refinances through credible.com saves almost $19,000 over the life of their loan. That is a freaking car. Think about what you could do with 19 grand. Well, you could pay off your student loans faster or you could lower your monthly payment, whatever works for you. And right now our listeners are going to get a $200 welcome bonus when refinancing through credible.com/Jordan. So go to credible.com/jordan click ‘find my rate’ to see if you can save by refinancing. That's credible.com, C R E D I B L E.com/Jordan. This episode is also sponsored by Varidesk. Today's top talent, selective about where they work, preferring workspaces that are flexible, active and engaging.

[00:32:37]  And one way that you can do this is to encourage more movement in any workday. And frankly, look, if you're hiring for talent, you've got to have this, but even if you're working from home, you have to have this. Being more active at work, standing more, sitting less improves health, boosts energy and productivity. And for me, this fixed a lot of my, I had a hip flexor issues, you know what I mean? I sat all day, studied all day. I still have some, but now that I work standing up a lot of the time, Oh my goodness, it is so much better. There's just no, and you can't, don't get a crappy fake or cheap DIY. Don't be putting cinder blocks on a desk and then putting your computer on top of it. I've seen that. I'm not kidding. It's ridiculous. It is a good use for your old legal textbooks, but it is also really ghetto.  Like you got to grow up

[00:33:20]  people, come on. Varidesk now has a Pro 60 Electric standing desk, which makes it really easy to create that active workspace for yourself or for your employees if you got them. It's designed with commercial-grade materials, so there's durability, stability. It's fully assembled in under five minutes. That's no small feat yet. This isn't going to take you an afternoon to get together and then find out there's three extra screws that went somewhere around step two out of 80 ,it's just really, really easy and all their products are made to last. They're designed to be super simple to set up and be able to be moved. It's not going to have to be disassembled and you know, “Wait. And now I have seven extra screws.” Whenever you move something that always happens to me. You can also try Varidesk risk free for 30 days with free shipping and free returns if you're not satisfied. Learn more at varidesk.com/forbes, that's V A R I D E S K.com/forbes.

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:34:12]  But there is another reason that comparing ourselves to other people makes us so unhappy.

Jordan Harbinger:  [00:34:17]  Just in case it wasn't bad enough already. There's more, there are more reasons why it's bad for you.

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:34:22] There are more reasons. There's one more reason, but we're talking about this because if we can get super clear on this, then I honestly believe that we can compare ourselves without making ourselves feel miserable. So it's worth talking about. So the other reason that it can make us unhappy is that oftentimes when we compare ourselves, we're actually doing it to get in touch with ideas that we already have about ourselves. So here's the way we've been talking about comparison is like you compare yourself to someone else, you tend to think of it like, “Okay, I need to know how good I am. I need to know how much people trust me at work or I need to know how fit I am in my bootcamp class or I need to know how good of a writer I am”, whatever it is.

[00:35:01]  And you look out into the world to the people you want to compare yourself to -- the person in your bootcamp class, another blogger on the internet, a person in your Instagram feed, whoever. And you study them and you try to figure out how you stack up and then you form an opinion about yourself. But in reality, the process is a lot more complicated than that because when we compare ourselves to other people, we almost always have some pre-existing idea about how we stack up. Like that is that idea already exists before we decide to look at somebody and compare ourselves. So remember we've been doing social comparisons since the time we were kids. So for most of us, we have decades of these ideas about ourselves that are built up from self-comparison. They're already established. We might not always know they're there, they might be subtle or subconscious, but they're definitely there and those opinions, they make up our self-concept, our ideas about ourselves, our self-esteem, psychologists call these ideas, self-views.

[00:35:55]  It's like a very broad term, but it's basically the opinions you hold about who you are fundamentally as a person. So our self views, they're really important to us, to each of us, whether they're right or wrong, accurate or inaccurate, healthy or negative, they're really important because they are how we think about ourselves in the world. They help keep the world stable and consistent. So when we compare ourselves to other people, where we're often doing is looking out there for data that will prop up those self-views because we don't want to lose them. Because if we really looked at that person down the hall, if we really looked at Andrea in marketing or really looked at that person in our boot camp class and were honest fully about the feedback we were getting about ourselves, how we stack up, how we look compared to them, whatever it is, then we might have to adjust those self-views.

[00:36:42]  We might have to be like, “You know what? I'm really not as awesome at work as I thought I was.” Nobody wants to do that. Nobody does. Well, certainly not naturally, right? Or you might have to be like, “You know what? I actually, I am a pretty responsible person. I'm not this like irresponsible mess that my family thinks I am.” Either way, whatever the beliefs are, it's more important to the human mind to keep those beliefs stable and consistent. Than have to actually revisit and rewrite them so when we compare ourselves to other people, it's not really a blank slate that we're beginning with where we're like, “Don't know how I stock up at work. Let me look to Andrea to figure that out.” Or “I don't really know if I'm a responsible person or not, but let me look at my family to find out.”

[00:37:26]  We already suspect, we suspect that we might be irresponsible or that we aren't as fit or that we aren't as good or are as good or are amazing, whatever the opinion is, but then comparing ourselves is the way for us to confirm that.

Jordan Harbinger:  [00:37:37] Right. So we're not looking in the mirror for the first time. We're looking in the mirror for the 5000th time just to see if we've gotten a little bit fatter. Like we knew what happened.

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:37:48] Exactly, yes. Or conversely, we look in the mirror to confirm that we're better than everybody else, that we're amazing or that we're killing it at work or that nobody could be as good as us. Either way it could be negative or positive. So we seek out feedback that confirms those views by comparing ourselves to other people with that opinion already in mind. And that motivation, that is called self-verification.

[00:38:10] It's the third motivation for comparing yourself. It was actually developed by William Swan and other social psychologists. And now we can add that to the list of the three main motivations for self-comparison, right? You have the self-assessment, which we talked about, which is just finding out how you stack up so you know, objectively, how good or talented or correct or whatever you are. There's self-enhancement, which is designed to make us feel better about ourselves. And then there's self-verification which is I already know how I feel about myself, but I'm going to go out there and confirm it for myself so that I know that whatever I believed already was true.

Jordan Harbinger:   [00:38:43] All right, so in the end, what does this all mean for us? And the key takeaway or one key takeaway from me is that when we compare ourselves to other people, we're not really comparing ourselves to other people. We're comparing our ideas about ourselves or our pre-conceived notions or subjective weird little label that we put on ourselves in each little category. That's what we're comparing to other people. And then we're using our observations about other people, about those with whom we compare ourselves to validate those pre-existing ideas. So essentially, like we said earlier, you're never really honestly looking at yourself or anyone else. You're just looking through different filters, which are your idea that you have of them, the reason that you're comparing yourself, which you might not even be aware of. And then comparing that to this set of ideas that you have about yourself based on whether you've had your coffee that morning or ate crappy or worked out or…

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:39:40]  or your mom was nice to you, right?  When you're young, or your dad told you that you were awesome when you weren't always or whatever those are.

Jordan Harbinger:   [00:39:47]  Exactly. Yeah.  And so now, compound all of that baggage and then put it under the giant magnifying glass slash bullhorn microphone that is social media. And we mentioned this a little bit earlier, but now we're comparing ourselves in that totally inaccurate way or, and I put ourselves in air quotes, we're comparing our image or ideas of ourselves to other people in that totally inaccurate way that we'd just described. So then we're going to look online and see other people's edited, curated version of themselves and then create ideas based on that and then compare that to these ideas that we have about ourselves so it just gets even worse. Everything gets magnified.

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:40:26]  The abstraction is crazy because you're comparing an idea you have about yourself to someone else's idea about themselves, but that idea they have about themselves is also based on an idea they have about themselves, right? Like nobody puts up a photo on Facebook to look however everyone else wants them to look, right? They put it up because they have an idea in mind about what other people want them to look like. Can you imagine the levels? It just multiplies like we think we're comparing ourselves one-to-one. Like I'm looking at Facebook and I'm comparing myself to him but I'm not. It's the idea I have about myself compared to the idea I have of him based on his idea of himself based on his idea of what my idea of him is like. Insane. You could take that as far as you want, but it is a hall of mirrors.

[00:41:10] It is literally the metaphor, literally the metaphor. How's that for literally the metaphor? It is the definition of the metaphor is what I meant to say of the way a hall of mirrors work. So you talked about this at the top of this episode, but that right there, that's why comparing ourselves to other people feel so much worse now. I really do believe that in last five to eight years, self-comparison has gotten more acute. We always did it. It was always in our species. But the question was how easily could we do it and how abstracted where the ideas we were comparing ourselves to. They weren't until we had social media.

Jordan Harbinger:   [00:41:49]  Right. Because you could compare yourself against the other guy in your basketball team who was about as good as you. And then you had your super all-star player who everyone looked up to and then you had everyone else right in the circle around you. And then when you went home, you weren't around those guys anymore. So you watch TV and then your comparison shifted to your brother and you were feeling pretty good about it that day. And also he's your brother, so whatever. It's in the family, it's fine. If you had that or if you're an only child, you just watched TV and those people are too inaccessible and far away to make any kind of difference. Now you're comparing yourself to the kids on the basketball team and then you go home and you look at your phone and you're comparing yourself against all these strangers on the internet and “Ooopp, there's that kid on the basketball team again. Aw man, he's doing something fun and I'm just sitting at home. Oh he's with that girl that I like, Oh this sucks, my life sucks.” And then you go to bed and the last thing you do is you look at your social media again just to get one more dose of how boring and lame and ugly and fat and slow you are compared to this random other person who maybe plays basketball but lives in Canada.

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:42:47] Yup. That's pretty much nailed it. And it's also the other big takeaway is that it's easy to forget that while we're comparing ourselves to other people, other people are comparing themselves to us. Everybody does it. So we might not be aware of it. We probably, in many cases, we're not aware of it, but every single person does this to somebody and multiple people in most cases. So that also adds a whole weird layer to it because we could be comparing ourselves to somebody who in turn is comparing herself to us and then their ideas about us and our ideas about them and we don't even know that that's happening.

Jordan Harbinger:  [00:43:22] Yeah, that's a good point. Because you don't sit around and go, “Uh, this person's better looking than me.” And they go, “Man, this Jordan's funnier than me. I wish I were. I wish I had a quick on my feet personality, and I'm like, I wish I was six foot four.” Right? So you don't have that exchange where you realize, “Oh, everybody's got things like this”, because we don't sit around and go, “Hey, does anyone compare themselves? Post your deepest fear here on Instagram.” Right? And that doesn't happen. Instead it's more like post a picture of you flying in a jet because it makes you look cool.

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:43:50]  At the end of the day, it really is about the pre-conceptions that we have about ourselves that determines whether comparing ourselves makes us miserable or doesn't make us miserable. So when we compare ourselves to other people, we really are often just confirming ideas we already have. And if we do that in order to verify the self-concept of these self-views, the most fundamental ideas we have about who we are, if we're doing it to verify those feelings and not to develop new or accurate ones, then in almost every case comparing ourselves to other people will make us miserable because it'll either reflect back to us what we already believe. And usually that's pretty negative or we will use it to confirm something that we want to believe that's positive, that isn't totally accurate and you have to be so aware and subtle and onto yourself.

[00:44:38]  It was like you listening to the podcast where you're like, “Wait a second, what am I doing here? Like, am I going into these podcasts with an idea already? Yeah, yeah, I probably am. And if I am doing that, is that going to make me happier or better? Probably not.” So you have to be super on top of yourself to notice that there that those ideas are there and that that's the motivation for doing it. And if we were truly honest about the comparison data that we received, then we'd have to rewrite all of those beliefs about ourselves. Well, spoiler alert, like rewriting those beliefs can be one of the most interesting and profound experiences, but it takes a lot of conscious work to be able to be willing to do that and not to compare ourselves to uphold the old ones. So that is, I think really at the heart of what people are describing when they say, “Man, like I'm comparing myself to other people. I don't know how to stop. Sometimes it's useful, but a lot of the time it's really making me unhappy.” Well, is it making you unhappy because you're finding out things you don't want to find out or is it making you unhappy because you're looking to them to give you something to make you feel better or to confirm something you already believe? And if the answer is yes, then you're like, that's half the battle. That's already, you're already on your way to figuring out how to do this without tearing yourself down.

Jordan Harbinger:   [00:45:51] So we developed that self-awareness to over time be more mindful of when and why we're making these comparisons. And then we have to ask ourselves what the motivation really is. You know, is it to assess ourselves and our abilities, our opinions? Is it to enhance our sense of self? Is it to verify those beliefs, as you'd mentioned before? And then I think we have to figure out how to control those motivations. Right? Or at least realize that we're in control of those motivations all along.  And then pick and choose maybe stop the negative habit of, “I'm going to look on Instagram because I'm very tempted to” -- like we tell ourselves we're just bored and we're killing time. But really deep down we're thinking, “Okay, well I want to see what this other person is up to or what did I do today and how does that stack up against someone else?”

[00:46:38]  And that's never going to help you. That's never going to help you. So it's not we're using social media as an example here, but it's really not just that, we do this when we walk into work and we see somebody wearing something or we see somebody giving a presentation.

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:46:52]  Or we walk into a party and look around the room. Yeah. It happens in the most mundane situations too. It's not just when we choose to seek it out, because we need to find out how we compare. It just kind of sneaks up on us. It does. What's funny about this is, you know, the good news, as you pointed out, is that we are in control. We're in control of those motivations. As soon as we see them for what they are, it gives us a measure of control over them. But this also means that we have to give up some ideas we have about who we're blaming for being miserable when we compare ourselves because a lot of people, probably a lot of people listening to this, I was, one of them would be like, “Well yeah, that's why Instagram sucks, right?” Like social media is a problem and you know what? I really hate those people at work who are always trying to look good because then I'm constantly worrying whether I'm good enough and people trust me enough and if I'm going to get promoted and it's like, “Wait a second, those people are there no matter what.”

[00:47:46]  What are you doing? Why are you looking at them? What is your motivation for comparing yourself? And as soon as it comes back to you and you realize that to some degree you do have some control over whether you allow those motivations to take over, then you can't really blame the other people around you for making you feel miserable all the time, right? They're just doing their thing. As we've said, in most cases they are comparing themselves to other people, including you. So it really comes down to the motivations you have inside of you and whether you're going to be honest about those. So the good news is that you have control over. The bad news, if you want to call it that, is that you have to give up your idea that everyone else is to blame for making you unhappy.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:48:28] Right, right, right. But we're never going to really stop comparing ourselves to other people. So I know a lot of people are thinking, “Ikay, get off social media, develop self-awareness. As soon as I feel myself comparing myself to other people, stop doing it.” Not going to work. We've evolved this. It is instinctual. It is wired in you. You will not be able to stop. It's not something that, there's not even an internal dialogue that I can imagine that exists without that.

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:48:54] No, it seems like we're wired that way. And as we've said, in many cases it can be really, really helpful. But you can notice when that tendency to self-compare creeps in and just by noticing it, refrain from doing it when it's motivated by something kind of unhappy or unhealthy.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:49:10] Right. So we have to make sure that we're comparing ourselves for reasons that are productive and healthy rather than toxic, egotistic or egoistic. I never know if there's a difference between those words actually.

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:49:20] I think it depends on the context, but yeah, I got you. I know what you're talking about.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:49:25]  I hope everybody else does too. And we have to also not hang on to these negative comparisons or these ideas and then use them. What I've done, and I know people do this too, we'll hold onto this negative comparison and we're like, “Well, I don't want to deal with that right now.” And then later when we're beating ourselves up about something else, we'll drag out that idea and go and also this person did this other thing and we use it to just, we just kind of used them as bats and weapons to beat ourselves with later on. We flog ourselves with these negative ideas.

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:49:57]  Yeah. Yeah. And so that's why these questions that we've been talking about are so helpful because it really just comes down to like these handful of really fundamental things and you can come back to these over the course of your life. I do it all the time. Why are you comparing yourself? What are you trying to understand about yourself? What are you trying to confirm about yourself? Are you walking in here to really find out about yourself or do you already kind of have an idea of who you are and you just want someone to confirm it? And what conclusions do you find yourself drawing? Not about yourself, but about other people and the world? And if you answer those questions honestly on an ongoing basis, this isn't a one and done thing. This is a practice. It's really, really hard to compare yourself to other people and still be miserable.

Jordan Harbinger:  [00:50:40]  Well done, Gabriel. Thanks for coming in.

Gabriel Mizrahi:  [00:50:42]  My pleasure. Thank you for having me as always.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:50:47] All right, so Jason, this type of comparison thing was sort of near and dear to my heart because one, it's so hard to stop this set of habits and I don't know if anybody completely eliminates it. And it seems like the more high performing amazing people that you and I meet, the more these people do this, or at least the more we talk about doing it and how much we hate it.

Jason DeFillippo:  [00:51:08]  Yeah. But the great thing about this episode that there's some really solid tools to try and avoid it when you can identify it and do the right kind of comparison instead of the wrong kind of comparison.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:51:18]  Yeah, it's really, you know, I didn't even know before Gabriel and I decided to explore this issue, that there were two different types. I just thought, “Eh, it's all bad, it's all unhealthy.” And then when you try to stop doing it and you're like, “I'm going to run my own race.”  It doesn't quite work out. So we really did have to sass out these two types and Gabriel did a great job of explaining this. So I'm really glad we did this episode because I know a lot of people sort of suffer from this malady -- myself included. Great big thank you to Gabriel Mizrahi. If you enjoyed this one, don't forget to thank Gabriel on Twitter. That'll be linked up in the show notes for this episode, which, as always, can be found at JordanHarbinger.com/podcast. Tweet at me your number one takeaway here from Gabriel Mizrahi on this Deep Dive about comparing ourselves to others.

[00:52:00]  I'm @JordanHarbinger on Twitter and I'm also on Instagram, @JordanHarbinger. And don't forget, if you want to learn how to apply everything you heard from Gabriel, make sure you go grab those worksheets in the show notes at JordanHarbinger.com/podcast. This episode was produced and edited by Jason DeFillippo. Show notes on the website are by Robert Fogarty, booking, back office and last minute miracles by Jen Harbinger. And I'm your host Jordan Harbinger. Would love to get a review of the show in iTunes. We are so close to it, that actually by the time this airs we’ll be over a thousand but let's go for 5,000. How's that? Make sure there's a little tricky review glitch going on. You've got to make sure you have a unique nickname because otherwise it just won't post and it also won't tell you why it just the submit button just doesn't work.

[00:52:45]  So I don’t know, maybe use your stripper name, which if I recall from high school is your middle name and the street you grew up on? Is that how that works, Jason?

Jason DeFillippo:  [00:52:51] I'm pretty sure that was it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:52:52] Because you don't want to just add a bunch of numbers because then people are like, “Oh yeah, these are fake because it said Jim (4747475). You know, make it look a little bit reasonable but you can't write Jim Smith because there's just already 10 of those and it's not going to post. So a lot of people have been having trouble with that. If you need further instructions on how to write a review, those are at JordanHarbinger.com/subscribe and yes, it does help. Thank you very much. It does help. So share the show with those you love and even those you don't, we got a lot more like this in the pipeline. We're excited to bring it to you. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen and we'll see you next time.