Progress Over Comparison

I stopped comparing myself to others. I sound like a broken record when I say comparison is a thief of joy, because you hear that all day from a thousand different people, from a thousand different places, but if you hear it that much, then there's got to be some truth to it. Now, have you ever just picked your phone up, you started scrolling, and then immediately after, you start to feel worse about yourself? You seeing people's highlights, you seeing them buy new cars, buy new houses, launch new businesses, maybe they're getting married. Everybody's life on the internet looks better than your own. And you start to wonder, well, what am I doing wrong? Am I not where I'm supposed to be yet? Am I just doing the wrong thing right now? But you got to remember that you're only seeing people's highlights. That's literally it. It's very rare that you're going to see somebody keep it 100% real on social media. You might see somebody driving down the road in your dream car and you're thinking you want to be that person, but you really don't know where they driving to, where they're driving from, or the true situation of what you even see beyond the screen. You start to measure your real life with all the struggles, all the things that are going bad for yourself against somebody's perfect image online. And that's not a real fair fight. So comparison, of course, was something that I struggled with. And a lot of people do, right? It's very common to want more or want better for yourself and to see that in a lot of other people. So I used to be so locked in to what other barbers are doing, what other creators are doing, what other business owners are doing. I'm looking at their numbers, the deals that they doing, what they launching. And I used to really just want to see myself in a different position so bad that it drove me to a bad place. You start to put so much unnecessary pressure on yourself. You're looking at everything around you like it's do or die. It has to happen now. This is the only time that I have to succeed. That constant comparison, that pressure, that stress of feeling like you're not where you're supposed to be took out my daily joy and gratitude for where I actually was. And when you look back on your journey, even if you looked a year back, you're so much further than where you were and you're probably a lot closer to where you want to be. But if you look at what everybody else is doing, it's hard for you to feel that gratitude for those things. So this is the thing that stuck with me. The grass always looks greener on the other side, but in reality, it's greener where you water it at. Everybody's yard looks better than yours, but you...