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!

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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!

We worry about a lot of stuff. Money, family, jobs, school, university … whatever. Since we do it such a lot, it must be really helpful, right? Let’s take a look.

(Take a while to go through these questions, actually. It’s not just a gimmick I came up with.)

• Does worry help you sleep?
• Does worry help you solve problems?
• Does worry make you feel better about difficult situations?
• Does worry promote well-being in any important area of your life (relationships, finance, job)?
• Does worry help solve problems that you can’t really solve anyway (e.g. the recession)?

So does worrying have any kind of positive impact whatsoever in your life? No it does not! So why on earth do we do it so much? Genuine question! What’s the point?! Worry does nothing. You are not being irresponsible by refusing to worry about something. Worrying about a problem isn’t the same as trying to solve it, so it’s at best useless, and at worst, harmful.

I realised this one night when I was in bed. As ever, my brain sprung into action, winding itself tighter and tighter around a problem area in my life at the moment.

I suddenly realised that now was not the time and place to be trying to come up with solutions, much less make them larger in my head. It was the time for restful sleep! Since my brain was being naughty, I told it off.

Seriously, I literally told my brain off. “Listen up, brain, now is not the time for such rubbish!” And such like. Sometimes you literally have to prise thoughts away from your own mind, like getting a stick from a dog. It’s a sheer act of will.

Practical steps

When you take something away from a baby (scissors, screwdrivers, the cat’s tail) you need to make sure you give it something else or it will miss the thing it was holding before. Your brain is just like that. Stop the worrying with willpower, and then force yourself to think about something else. If you’re trying to sleep, think about the sea, or a summer’s day or whatever New Age-y imagery you want to use to help you sleep. For me, it has to be a pleasant day dream that develops naturally without much effort.

Writing down concerns is also helpful. It lets your worry-brain know that you’re taking its concerns seriously. Listening can be a really powerful tool.

If you’re worried about a job or some problem, I find a physical aid like a brainstorm is really helpful. It gives me something concrete to focus on instead of the formless crap inside my head.

Also, the more good stuff inside your brain, the more likely it is to come out. So fill your head with helpful books, films, TV, conversations, music. Then you’re more likely to produce positive stuff!

Read more

• Anxiety Culture
• How to stop worrying
• How to stop worrying and why

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 …

I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad * by Robert Kiyosaki. Robert is a very successful entrepreneur, and this book is about his journey. It’s great for “thinkers” because it show you how to use your mind to make money. As a thinker rather than a doer, I found it really encouraging and liberating to learn that I can be successful too. If you’re a follower of this blog, you’ll know that I’m prone to exaggeration, but for once I can say that with all sobriety that this book has changed my life. (I’m not rich — not yet — but it’s dramatically impacted the way I think).

One of the principles he talks about is the need to acquire assets in order to make money. Assets are anything that make you money rather than lose it. So, for example, if you own a house and rent it out, you make money from it (people pay you to live there). On the other hand a car, traditionally seen as an asset, in fact loses you money because it goes down in value and you spend money on it (fuel, repairs, tax, etc).

I think the same principle can be applied to confidence. Spend your time getting things that add to your confidence. Just like if you buy some houses to rent out, you’re acquiring money-making assets, you can “buy” things in your life that will give you a return on your investment in terms of confidence (and a whole host of other things, such as optimism, experience, wisdom, growth).

If you have an unhealthy habit, say smoking, quit it! Don’t see this as getting rid of something bad, see it as acquiring something good. Quitting it will give you a sense of accomplishment. You can then reinvest this accomplishment into new projects. Your thinking will be, “I quit smoking, I could … ” (you get to choose what you do next).

A great source of confidence for me is past accomplishments. As a teenager, I had quite low confidence and spent a lot of time with my computer instead of, for example, going outside and getting a life. However, that investment (the cost here is time … and a social life) is now producing results for me. The confidence I picked up in learning to do something I couldn’t previously do can now be applied to learning things I can’t do at the moment but would like to do. For example, learning how to make money. I learnt PHP, I can learn to make money.

Build these assets in your life and they will never stop producing confidence for you. The trick is to use that momentum to go on to the next thing. Regularly remind yourself of your past achievements. (If you feel you don’t have any achievements, think again. I’ve learnt that that what I look for, I usually find. Don’t look at your life expecting to find failures, look expecting to find successes.)

* If you use this link to buy this book, I get some money from it. It doesn’t cost you any more, but it does help me to keep writing this blog!

Crazy, beautiful design.

Did I say that already? Can’t remember, and can’t be bothered to check my archives …

It can be magazine articles, fashion, web sites, posters, fonts, home decor.

I love quirky or odd things that are done with real artistry and a sense of style. It’s pointless just doing something “to be different” but when you break the mould with panache and boldness, it comes off really well. You can transcend the ups and downs of fads — style never goes out of fashion. Just think, women are still wearing dresses with high waist-lines that come straight out of Jane Austen’s time.

It’s interesting, we only really hate the style that’s just gone out of fashion. Now we’re passed the 90s, everyone loves the 80s again. Ten years ago it would have looked passé. Now it looks really sharp. Isn’t that great? I love how “fickle” people are. It fuels so much creativity.

People with depression

There’s a lot of things in me that I’m not proud of, but one of my favourite bits of me is this growing sense of value I have for human beings.

I’ve just been visiting a site about depression. There are videos of people talking about their experiences the illness, and it suddenly made me angry and sad that these incredible people should be so broken down. It struck me how valuable those people were. They’re not famous, or great leaders in the business world, but there was something about their expressions that caught me.

I’ve struggled with what I would say was mild depression. I’ve never been diagnosed with it, and I’ve always been able to manage it and come out of “episodes”, but I would still call it depression. I think giving it a name helps. It gives you dignity and self-respect. Fighting depression is a noble task. Knowing that you’re fighting something big is like a little piece of daytime that you can hold onto when all the lights go out.

Everyone gets a bit down from time to time, and depression is like that, but more long term. You can wake up feeling empty and worthless, and then as the day goes on you fight it and the feeling lessens and you can feel quite good about life. You feel proud of yourself, hopeful about the future. And then the next day, all that progress is lost, and it’s like starting from square one.

Imagine doing that every morning for a couple of years, and you can see how discouraging and frustrating depression is. I write this to help people understand a bit more how depression is not just a character weakness, and is a real illness. It takes a heck of a lot of self-discipline just to not give up on life, and this needs to be encouraged and praised.

So that’s another couple of passions to add to the list. (Which, incidentally, I keep to provide me with anchor-points for when I lose my bearings — a good habit to get into.) Depressed people: you are valuable and of great worth, keep fighting, it’s worth it. Get all the help you need, because you can recover.