Comparing Yourself to Others in Business – Lesson Learned

Jealousy is a normal human emotion and we are bound to feel it now and then, especially when you’re comparing yourself to others in business.

And I admit, I fell into that comparison trap last week and it led me to spiral down a “poor me” rabbit hole for longer than I’d like to admit. In this episode of the Wealthy Coach Podcast, I’m opening up about my run in with jealousy and comparison – and the consequences it has on our mental health.

I learned a very important lesson and I hope this lesson can be helpful to you too!

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Wealthy Coach Podcast Contest
• Human Design
• My YouTube channel

Listen here

So there is this coach who I loosely follow. We started our businesses around the same time, and we serve similar people. And recently, he shared on Instagram his income statement and how he had made, and it was pretty impressive. Okay – really impressive. I do not make that much money a month. But what kind of triggered me was when he said his expenses were $10,000 a month. Which is extremely low. If you’re generating what this guy is generating (which was $140k a month), that is a very low level of expenses.

The truth is, as you make more money, typically your expenses will go up and it’s not uncommon to pay 40 – 50% of your earnings in expenses. Because you need to hire people, you need to pay for professional development, services, etc. 

I spend $10,000 a month in expenses. And that’s around 25% – 30% of my earnings. And I actually expect them to increase as I make more money. So I was in a tailspin about this guy’s astronomical gap of expenses vs income.

I was totally down that ‘comparing yourself to others’ rabbit hole. 

Am I spending too much? What’s wrong with me? Am I inadequate?

Eventually I went on to learn that this business owner’s wife and son work with him in his business. And suddenly it started to make more sense to me. I also went on to learn that he works upwards of 60 hours a week. 

I realized that the tailspin I had put myself into was ridiculous because I could never have a business like that. So it was a really good lesson for me, and hopefully a lesson for you when you compare yourself to others in business. It’s so important for us not to compare ourselves to others because we’re all different. And we all have different lifestyles. We all want different lifestyles and we all have different levels of ability to work. I really believe the quickest way to make yourself feel bad about yourself is when you’re comparing yourself to someone else. And that’s really easy to do on social media. Because we don’t have the full picture and especially with how people are presenting on social media. It’s truly just a small piece of who they are.

You should never compare yourself to others in business to your own business. You never saw the struggle and the frustration and the pain that others went through to get to where they are today. People don’t necessarily share that.