Comparison is something we all do to one degree or another. It’s generally a harmful activity: we are naturally self-critical. When someone says something negative about you, it’s hurtful, but when you say something negative about yourself, it’s much worse. It stops you moving forwards, it closes down opportunities and it causes you to do the opposite of growth.

Comparison happens because we are all different. It will probably always happen. But how you handle comparison is what can make it a good experience or a bad one.

Comparison can be a really destructive force. It can wreck your confidence, ruin your self-image, cause you to try to be something you’re not. It can poison friendships with jealousy. It can cause you to give up on something you enjoy doing, or that you’re good at. It can discourage you from reaching a goal. It can make you devalue your existing achievements.

This is bad comparison. There’s also good comparison. Good comparison is what happens when we meet an inspiring person. There’s a sense of admiration and also the feeling that you could do what they have done, or if not that, then something similar. Good comparison can cause you to move towards better things. It builds confidence. It makes you feel good about your future. It turns intimidation into inspiration.

It’s a bad one if it causes damage to your confidence, or if it causes you to give up. It’s a good one if you learn from it and grow from it.

Turning bad comparison into good comparison is simple, but takes a bit of effort. The basic rule is the same one that underlies good mental and emotional health. Apply positivity to negativity. Stick with that, for long enough, and you will see vast improvements over time.

There are two things that I do when I feel intimidated by someone else, and they both begin with A. Accept and Appreciate.

Accept

Acceptance is telling yourself the truth about a situation. It means you stop lying to yourself, and you’re honest with where you’re at. Here’s a truth that’s painful to accept at first: there will always be people better than you at any given task. Once we accept that and make peace with it, we will be a lot happier and a lot more productive. You’ll begin to realise that you’re valuable because you’re you, not because of what you’re good at.

Acceptance also means you accept yourself just as you are. We place all kinds of standards and requirements on ourselves that we have to meet before we’ll consider ourselves OK. This is a difficult barrier to overcome, but with persistence you can bring it down.

Sometimes just saying, “I like myself” can take the pressure off. Say this before you meet your goals. Say this even if you don’t have any goals. Having a kind and gentle attitude towards yourself is actually really important. It’s worth investing into, and it’s not a selfish thing to do.

Appreciate

Comparison very easily turns into jealousy. Jealousy happens when we’re done damaging our own self-image, so we move onto other people! When we’re jealous of someone, we start looking for ways to bring them down. We look for failings, character flaws, mistakes — anything that makes them look worse so we can feel better. It’s a really ugly attitude, and it doesn’t do anyone any good.

Jealousy is worse than a waste of time. It’s a harmful use of your time and energy. It damages you. Instead of allowing jealousy into your soul, find a way to appreciate that person and the talent that they have. Admire it like you’d admire a good painting, or a piece of music. Analyse how they do it to see if you can learn from them. If you know them well enough, ask them a few questions.

If it’s not possible to learn from them, just be happy for them. Do everything you can to apply positivity to negativity. If jealousy is a struggle for you, remember to treat yourself with patience and kindness while you’re learning to get it under control. Jealousy already beats you up on the inside — there’s no point beating yourself up any more!

I hope this helps. Comparison is something that can really do a lot of damage to people, I really hope that these ideas have inspired you!

It’s such a massive cliche, but it’s really true. It’s just about being positive, but pro-actively positive.

I’m a natural depressive and pessimist. That means, I immediately spot the problems in ideas, the costs, the downsides, the ways it won’t work, the reasons why we shouldn’t do it.

Let me tell you, if you’re the same type of person, that being loyal and faithful to that side of your character will close down your life. You will get smaller and smaller till one day you realise that you’ve no life to speak of. Better for that revelation to come when you’re still young than when you get old, believe me!

The trick is to keep building positivity. Invest into a habit of positive thinking. The more you do it, the better you’ll get. The more you train your brain to be positive, the more opportunities you’ll see for good things. Sometimes the trouble isn’t that there’s not any opportunities, it’s that you see them all as problems. Problems are opportunities, it just depends what glasses you have on: the rose-tinted ones or the poo-tinted ones (remember diamonds and dog turds?).

Poo-tinted glasses see the turd. Rose-tinted glasses see the diamond. I guess in “reality” both the diamond and the turd are there. In one sense, pessimists and optimists are both realists. It’s not so much a case of seeing problems/opportunities, it’s more a case of whether you value the benefits enough to pay the costs. If you’re starting a business, do you value it enough to go through the hard times setting it up? If you really want to build your own house, do you value that dream enough to go through budget problems and design flaws and materials running out, etc. Pessimists don’t care enough about the dream to go through all the hard work.

Building optimism is hard work, but the more you do it, the easier it gets: the less unpleasant it is to say yes to things you can’t be bothered to do and the more you enjoy the process of getting there.

Other people are probably the biggest cause of pain in our lives. It probably outweighs financial and career woes in terms of heartache. Maybe you have an unappreciative boss, or your parents never affirmed you much, or you have a lazy colleague who takes the credit for your hard work.

These things are truly painful circumstances to deal with. They’re burdens to carry.

The way to deal with them is to do just what you do with a burdern — bear it. Because these are problems that involve other people’s free will, you can’t solve them like you do other problems. Let’s not be lazy: you should try to solve them as and when you can. But do so with the utmost care, and recognise that A) it will take a long time, and B) it may never be solved.

So what do you do? Here you are with a big, emotionally costly problem that will be around for a long time.

The answer is to let the burden strengthen you, instead of weaken you. If your boss is unappreciative, stop trying to please him and just do the best you can, and count it all as generosity towards the company you work for. You end up being a bigger person as a result. If your friend is controlling and bossy, learn to stand up to it, and use the emotional pressure as a motivation to get some steel in your backbone. If your parents are critical, take the difficult but incredibly rewarding journey towards a more independent self-esteem.

Above all, learn forgiveness. Forgiveness isn’t for their benefit, it’s for yours. It doesn’t mean being a fool and staying open to the hurts, but it does mean refusing to see the other person as a monster and letting hatred eat you up on the inside. Twisting the knife only ever happens in your own guts!

Imagine a harbour when the tide is high. It’s full of water, and the boats are afloat. The sun sparkles on the sea, and everything is fine. Now picture the tide going out. The boats sink and sink until they lie at the bottom of the harbour, tilted to one side. There’s a bad smell. The walls are covered with seaweed and slime, making it difficult or impossible to climb out.

Mood swings are just like this. When you’re happy, the world looks great, full of promise and wonder. When you’re down, everything is horrible — abject misery, and doom, doom, doooooooom. I’m being dramatic but actually it’s not far off how you can feel. I’m not just talking about feeling a bit blue, I mean the long term down-ness that can affect people (read: me).

Some people are less swayed by their emotions than others, and it’s certainly wise to make every effort to be consistent regardless of your feelings. But for those of us still on the journey, how do you keep going when the harbour’s empty? I ask myself, what’s at the bottom of the harbour?

In amongst the rusty nails and seaweed and dead fish, I find a few gems. There’s one called, “I am not a victim”. I may not be in total control of a situation, but I can change the way I see it. For example, I can choose whether I see a long day in a job that I am not passionate about as another example of how the world is rubbish, or I can choose to see it as an investment in the bank of “Time to start following your dreams!”

They don’t even have to be particularly clever, these gems at the bottom of your harbour. Another of mine is, “Life is good and it’s worth carrying on.” You know, when you feel fine, it’s embarrassing to remember that sometimes you need a bit of a boost. But when the tide is out, it’s good to remember that things didn’t always look this way, and that they will get better.

I also have a picture of my dreams. Your dreams are like mountain-tops, a long journey away, but there all the same. When you’re at the bottom of the harbour it’s not always easy to see those mountain tops, because they’re obscured by the walls. Looking at the photo isn’t as good as looking at the real thing, but it reminds you that you still have dreams, even if they seem impossible at the moment.

I keep photos of my family there too. And there’s a laptop connected to all the blogs I read! And of course there’s always prayer. It’s inestimably helpful to have God knocking around in your desperation. (Although he does have a habit of turning seemingly bottomless pits into mere hard work, so watch out for that if you were holding out for a pity party.)

What’s at the bottom of your harbour? Make sure that amongst all the detritus and debris that life strews across your path, there’s something that you put there, too. Otherwise it’s just rusty nails, seaweed and dead fish …

So, currently I am going through a trying time. I feel like I’m facing up to a problem I’ve not really wanted to face up to before. I have no idea how to solve it (well, that’s not true, I have snippets of ideas, and vague ideas, and general principles and stuff like that, I’m not totally without weapons to fight — just nothing specific).

It’s a good time though, I’m seeing this positively. I guess you can call this the “quarter life crisis”. (This is assuming I live to the age of 100. Which, actually, I do.) Mid life crises are when you ask yourself, “what have I done with my life?” Quarter life crises are when you’re old enough to understand the urgency of that question (I’m 5 years away from 30!) but still young enough to make an impact on my future. I have two questions, then. What have I done with my youth? And, What am I going to do with my life?

So that’s the background. Part of this is decision making, and this is why I wanted to just decide about some things that interest me. Seems basic enough, I guess, but let’s get some structure.

(Maybe this seems a little egotistical. Well, take a cue from the title of this blog … I have a website where I write about my life, and it’s named after me! I think that’s far enough, one more post isn’t going to hurt)

So then. Starter for 10. I love websites. I love reading blogs, listening to podcasts, designing websites, programming PHP, writing wordpress plugins, supporting people on the wordpress forums (not done that in a while, actually) — I just really love it. So there — I have publicly given myself permission to be a web geek. If you are a web geek, you need to do the same.

I love writing. I can’t think unless I write something down. I have an urge to be read. Not just to think about stuff, but to show it to other people. Why live just on the inside of my head? This ties in with the paragraph above. I love writing as a means of communication, but I actually enjoy the physical process of writing, especially typing. (Sorry if I’m boring you by the way — if you want me to be funny, meet me in real life. Or add me as friend on Facebook, I’m quite funny there too. Gonna start being funny on this blog again any time soon!)

So that this post isn’t totally selfish, I want to write about passions in general. How you get passionate, what to do with them, that kind of thing. I spent a good deal of my youth not really knowing who I was or what I wanted to do, and it’s not a happy place to be. Passions are a road of that fog. They’re clues as to who you are, and they’re really important, I think, to living life to the full.

I am not naturally Mr Enthusiasm. (I’m more like Eeyore.) I have had to learn to be passionate and enthusiastic. And I’m still learning! These are some of the lessons I’ve learnt.

Prise your fingers off pessimism

It’s hard to do! Pessimism seems like it protects you from making the wrong decisions or wasting your time, but it doesn’t. Life is basically very good, even though it has its shockingly terrible moments. Refuse to believe that life is nothing other than an opportunity.

Passions don’t just suddenly appear

They grow, like babies or trees, from small things at first. It might be something you always thought about as a kid. I used to play with sentences in my head, to see how the tone affected the meaning of the sentence, even though it was just the same words. I spent ages as a teenager messing around on computers. Not playing games, just wasting time, really, but now I’m not at all fazed by technology. As a student, I spent most of my time writing this very blog. While my degree suffered (due to lack of time management, not writing this blog, I might add) I learnt loads about web coding, which is now making me money.

So these things didn’t just pop into my head, fully formed. They’ve grown as I’ve found like-minded people, and seen them from new angles. Did you know that you can become wealthy from blogging? You need business skills, yes, but you can do it. And did you know that you can change people’s lives? Or make relationships with people on the other side of the world? It started off as a geeky obsession, but now it’s a passion. And a possible income stream!

Nurture them properly

I once talked to someone about knowing what I wanted to do with my life, and I replied with the almost obligatory vagueness. They said, “so you’re still waiting for something to crystallize.” I thought it was an excellent picture, and then forgot about it.

Then years later, I was miserable because I was in a crappy job and I suddenly remembered the comment. it occurred to me that crystals only form in saturated solutions.

Let me explain that …

You’ll never grow a sugar cube out of a glass of water with only one teaspoon of sugar in it. You have to keep adding more sugar until no more will dissolve. Then the crystals start to grow. It was the same with the inside of my head. The more miserable I was, the more negative my “dreams” were — because they had nothing else to be made out of.

I changed (painfully, slowly, step-by-step) the way I saw the world, and now my head is a happier place to be. I’m still on that journey, but it’s worth it for the positive dreams that are coming into my head.

Anyway, this post has gone on too long, and I have shopping to do. So long!

You’ve got to love your brain! It’s the organ that has the most fascinating function in your body: it’s the computer that runs … you! Why punish it by forcing it to work in ways it doesn’t want to?

Found this video just now. I think it’s not only effective and efficient, but also beautiful — the best ideas embrace form and function. I will certainly be using this in the future! (I already take notes that are full of pictures and decorative lettering.)

Exams: How To Mind Map With Tony Buzan

Hope you enjoyed it. For me, it’s back to boring audio editing. But life is still good!

It’s ridiculously simple: stop watching TV.

I have nothing against TV. There are many great programmes that can expand your mind, challenge and inspire you, present new opportunities and show you things in a new way. The trouble is watching TV doesn’t teach you to think.

Your brain is a learning machine. You never stop learning. There’s no choice about the matter: you automatically learn, whether you pursue it or not. The choice comes in what you learn.

If you don’t take control of what you learn, you learn at random. You learn some good things, and some bad, but there’s no direction or theme to what you learn. And by learning, I don’t mean just learning facts or theories, I mean habits of thought, points of view, skills. Random learning is great for trivia collecting, but that’s about it. All you will do is turn your mind into a museum of curiosities.

You have to direct your learning because your mind is what guides your life. If it’s full of good things, your life will be good. If it’s full of rubbish, your life will be rubbish!

The king of all the things you could possibly learn, and the skill I most try to develop, is creativity. Creativity allows you to find the beautiful solution to an ugly situation. Right now, creative problem solving is making people rich in the midst of a recession — right now, as you are reading this. Doesn’t that annoy you? With creativity you can turn being fired into the best thing that ever happened. You can take your broken past and turn it into a beautiful future.

The problem with watching TV is that it doesn’t train your brain to do anything but take in. Did you know that your brain is less active when you watch TV then when you’re asleep? It goes fully into input-mode. It’s almost trance like. There’s no other state that I can think of that’s like it. Maybe being a passenger in a car comes close — I always completely zone out, and have to really concentrate to make conversation. But even then I’m thinking.

While you’re in this trance-like state, advertisers can implant things straight into your unconscious mind. Most adverts are designed to make a brand feel cool, or friendly, or helpful. Advertisers rarely sell things based on hard facts: they go for subjective feelings. This particular cleaning product loves your kids and wants them to be healthy. This particular food is traditional (even though it’s sold online and is made in a factory). This university is better because it’s established and full of “heritage” (or is it stuffy and old-fashioned, while the glorified polytechnic will give you more practical skills?).

The other thing with TV is that it gives the impression that you’re doing something (being the hero, winning the race, being a business success … whatever) when really you’re just watching other people doing that — or pretending to do that! No matter how much 24 I watch, I will never be Jack Bauer. No matter how much Secret Millionaire I watch, I am not helping disadvantaged people with my millions!

Simply switching off the TV forces you to find other things to do, think new things, meet new people. It’s painful at first. You have to face up to the fact that you don’t know what to do with free time! But it gets easier as time goes on. And you get better the more you do it.

If you want a better job, don’t spend your evenings in front of the tube. Read blogs like Escape From Cubicle Nation and Ittybiz and Entrepeneurs-Journey.com. If you want to improve your relationships, go out more! Learn the art of small talk that leads to great conversations. It feels awkward at first, but it gets better. If you want to learn how to cook, buy Delia Smith’s book — don’t just watch her on TV!

If you can’t rid yourself of TV altogether (and who does?), just set a goal that you’ll spend an hour or two doing something creative before you veg out. And TV isn’t completely wrong. When I can’t sleep, watching TV is great for closing down the insomnia circus* that seems to visit my head from time to time.

Free your mind. Switch off the TV!

* Damn, I was funny back then! When did I get all serious on this blog!?