Why Do I Compare My Work to Everyone Else's?
The Pattern
You finish something and instead of sitting with it, you find yourself measuring it against other people's work. The comparison is rarely objective: you tend to compare your least polished, most uncertain work to other people's most finished, most visible work. The comparison produces a conclusion about relative worth that then influences whether you continue, share, invest further. The comparison has become the primary mechanism for assessing the value of your work, and therefore the value of yourself. External validation dependency in creative work is the extension of the core wound into the creative domain. The child whose worth was not affirmed unconditionally, who learned to assess their own value through other people's responses rather than through an internal sense of their own merit, carries that dependency into their creative life. They do not have an internal reference point for whether the work is good. They have a comparison mechanism that monitors how the work stacks up against external benchmarks. The child whose worth was relative, always measured in comparison to siblings, to other children, to standards of achievement, learns to perceive their own value as inherently relational: only assessable in comparison to others. Absolute worth, the settled sense of your own value independent of comparison, is not available if it was not given early enough. The comparison is the only apparatus available for making the assessment. Social comparison theory, developed by Leon Festinger, describes the human tendency to evaluate the self in relation to others as a fundamental social cognition. The problem is not comparison itself: comparison is a normal and sometimes useful cognitive function. The problem is when comparison is the only available means of self-assessment, when it is compulsive rather than chosen, and when it is systematically calibrated toward unfavorable conclusions.
Origins & Context
Leon Festinger's social comparison theory identified the drive to compare oneself to others as a basic feature of social cognition, particularly when objective standards for self-assessment are unavailable. The person who lacks a stable internal sense of their own value will automatically compensate with social comparison, because comparison provides the external reference point that internal stability cannot.
Albert Bandura's research on self-efficacy, the belief in one's capacity to execute behaviors necessary to achieve goals, shows that self-efficacy is largely built through direct experience of mastery rather than through comparison. The person who evaluates their own capacity primarily through comparison, rather than through their own felt sense of what they can do, has a fragile self-efficacy that is continuously vulnerable to being undermined by the next unfavorable comparison.
Brene Brown's research on perfectionism and shame connects the comparison compulsion to the shame-based belief that worth must be proven rather than assumed. The person who is running from shame will seek evidence of comparative adequacy, because if they are better than or as good as others, the shame verdict is temporarily suspended. The comparative assessment is thus not neutral. It is the ongoing management of the shame belief.
The comparison is not an assessment of the work. It is the worthiness wound still looking for its verdict in someone else's scorecard.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You follow the work of people in your field with more vigilance than is useful for your own development. The following is partly learning and partly the constant calibration exercise: where do I stand in relation to this, am I above or below, is my work more or less valuable than theirs.
You feel a complex response when peers succeed: genuine pleasure for them that is also accompanied by a deflating comparison. Their success registers not only as good news for them but as a data point about your own relative standing. The emotional complexity is exhausting and produces guilt about the mixed response.
You cannot assess your own work independently of how it compares to what you have seen recently. If you have been consuming excellent work, your own seems inadequate by comparison. If you have been in a comparative vacuum, your own seems more worthwhile. The assessment is not about the work. It is about what the work has been measured against.
You find it difficult to be genuinely happy for your own work's successes because the success is always temporary. Within a day or two, the comparison has relocated the metric: someone else has done something better or been received more enthusiastically, and the brief satisfaction of your own success is replaced by the renewed comparison deficit.
Named in the Literature As
Named in the Literature As: Social Comparison Theory (Leon Festinger), External Validation Dependency (various developmental psychologists), Self-Efficacy and Comparison (Albert Bandura), Perfectionism as Shame Management (Brene Brown), Comparative Worth Assessment in Conditional Love Environments (Alice Miller). Related entries in this library: why-i-hide-my-creative-work, why-i-procrastinate-on-what-matters-most, why-i-cannot-take-creative-risks, why-i-always-feel-like-something-is-wrong-with-me
Nikita's Note
The comparison was so automatic that I had to actively learn to notice when it was running. It was not a thought I decided to have. It was a background process that had always been there, calibrating and recalibrating, and I had to choose to interrupt it and ask: what do I actually think of this work, when I am not comparing it to anything? The answer was often kinder than the comparison had produced. Learning to access that answer first, before the comparison had run its assessment, was the practice.
Your work does not need to win the comparison to be worth making. It only needs to be yours.
From the work
The comparison is not an assessment of the work. It is the worthiness wound still looking for its verdict in someone else's scorecard.From You Are the Love You Seek by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in You Are the Love You Seek — available on Amazon.