someonewhothinks

[someonewhothinks]

Improvement a day keeps the doctor away

It's really easy to get frustrated with not making progress. Seeing others succeed while not being able to yourself can leave you feeling kinda useless. Here I want to discuss ways to deal with the act of comparing yourself to others in a healthy and productive way.

The overused quote "Don't compare yourself to others", while coming with good intent, often falls flat due to lack of explanation. The Brain compares itself all the time with other fellow humans and comparison in itself is a helpful tool for evaluating your current position on your journey towards things. So you shouldn't opress thinking of comparisons altogether. The point is that ultimately comparisons are not very effective at actually pushing you forward. The reason is, that it demotivates us to see others find success while we struggle to get our own while thinking, that we should be able to since the other person did it. The presumtion of this line of thinking is, that the comparisons we make are objectively true. This is not the case though. When we compare ourselves to others we do that on the basis of limited information of the comparison group or person which ultimately leads to a flawed judgement about our own skills. Another danger of comparing yourself to others is that it leads to jealousy. This is a path to the dark side. Feeling jealous means, that you resent someone for their achievement or success. This often leads to a bitter and cinical attitude, which is not helpful in making progress. Comedian Jimmy Carr said on a podcast, that instead of feeling jealous we should try to be envious instead. The difference is, that with envy we wish we had something while with jealousy we resent other people for having that thing. (podcast with Jimmy Carr: https://youtu.be/ms02ezkAcYw?si=cnPG-jfwHJg8kQOh) So how do we evade the misjudgement and jealousy through comparison? One suggested strategy from famous psychiatrist Jordan Peterson dodges the act of comparison towards others altogether. It suggests, that we compare ourselves to us, instead of others. He often advocates for comparing yourself to who you were yesterday. If you just improved on who you were yesterday, then you made progress. Peterson also points out that the first steps might be embarassing in the beginning, since your progress is very little, but that this shouldn't discourage you. He describes progress as being exponential, therefore the first steps might be small, but they get increasingly bigger over time. Consistency is the priority here I think. (podcast where peterson talked about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEP5ubPMGDU&t=8652s) One other way to approach comparisons is to think of your idols (people you compare yourself to) as a direction rather than a goal. On the one hand you confess, that the other person has something you want (success, some sort of skill, profession), but on the other hand you also recognise that there are individual differences between you and your idol. Therefore instead of desperetaly trying to achieve the exact thing they have, you take the direction of the thing and apply it to your individual situation. This can be combined with the previous strat from Peterson. I hope you got something out of this, thanks for reading.

[someonewhothinks]

Indecisiveness

I wanted to share my thoughts about the character and nature of indecisiveness. I'm currently listening to an episode of the "Modern Wisdom Podcast" with Jordan Peterson and in one section of it he talks about indecisiveness, which I found quite interesting. He described indecisiveness as one of the two options when faced with a decision. Either you try to make the decision and trust your abilities to face the consequences of that decision, or you postpone it. According to Peterson, by postponing the decision you recognise and reinforce a certain set of values, including for example the belief, that deception prevails. What I find really interesting about this, is the approach to decision making, through the lense of chosing between set of values. Either you chose courage and bravery through accepting, that the decision brings consequences you will have to deal with (thereby trusting in your ability to cope with the situation), or you chose the other path of avoiding to make a descision and therefore admit, that you think that you are not ready to face the consequences of your actions (which reveals a lack of trust in yourself and your abilities). The reason why this hits close to home for me is, that I often find myself scared of making a descision, but not really knowing what I am actually scared of. I also think viewing descisions this way improves your abitlity to distinguish bewteen procrastination and reasonable postponing of decision you have to make. Podcast I'm referring to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEP5ubPMGDU&t=8652s

[someonewhothinks]

Forgiveness: a change of perspecive

So I've had a catholic upbringing, and although I'm somewhat distant in regards to the idea of god as an entity, I do believe, that the core values of christianity hold value and are helpful. Recently though, I have had some conflict about one of these values, that I wanted to share my thoughts about, that being: forgiveness. What sparked my interest in the topic was an upsetting experience with a teacher I had a month ago. He was the teacher who should have helped me with my scientific paper that I need for graduation, but throughout the process he repeatedly talked down to me and stressed me out (although he probably wasn't the only factor involved, he was one of them), which caused me to procrastinate, and - in the end - to fail. The buttom line is that he treated me poorly and didn't help, when help was needed. After this situation, I sort of distanced myself from the situation mentally and thougth about how to deal with it in a healthy manner, since I would meet that teacher again in class. Here the story becomes relevant: First I thought about forgiving him completely. I recall thinking of forgiveness as a reset-button, that would obligate me to change my behavior towards the person I'm forgiving and restart from the beginning. What else is forgiveness good for, if not for changing your behaviour towards the person that did you wrong? In hindsight, this is a pretty naive view of forgiveness, since it is completely onesided and leaves you vulnerable to repeated mistreatement. It presumes, that through your benevolent act of forgiveness the other person will suddenly change and recognise that they did you wrong. Unfortunately, this chain of events is an ideal and is most likely not going to happen (interestingly enough, this actually may be the philosophy that the bible wants to preach through Jesus, since he never fought back and endured all the pain that came his way - but that is ). I recognised this, when I discussed it with my father during eastern. He thinks, that forgiveness does not exclude the setting of boundaries. We should forgive people in order to move on and come to terms with the situation, not only to expect the other person to change in an instance. The value of forgiveness doesn't come with any forcecul change of behavior on your side, rather it comes with the less spiteful inner attitude that you internalize by forgiving. Then you take less damage from the situation and prevent it from continuously carrying it around as emotional baggage.

I read this fitting quote about it online: "Pardoning doesn't mean you have to let them back in."