Stop Comparing Your Life to Others
Comparison loses its grip when you get clear about what you actually want, because once you know your own priorities, someone else's numbers are simply their goals and not a measure of you.
Asked how someone should respond when everyone around them appears to be doing more, Dandapani starts with the fact that time and energy are finite and most people never decide consciously where theirs goes. He asks you to replace slowing down with simplifying to your priorities, to get granular about what you want and why, and to stop measuring yourself against a number that belongs to someone else.
What this talk covers
- Time and energy are finite: you spend your energy each day, sleep, rebuild it, and then choose again, though most people never make that choice consciously.
- He does not like the phrase slow down and prefers simplify, meaning proportionately investing the energy and time you have into your key priorities rather than spreading it thin across many things.
- It is very hard to say no if you do not know what you are saying yes to, so clarity about what you want and why comes first, reached through daily self-reflection in a focused state rather than meditation.
- Much of what entrepreneurs do is driven by what is around them, someone selling twenty houses or growing ten percent, and once you can name your own goals that pressure and anxiety go.
- Get granular, because wanting to be healthy is not enough when health could mean a marathon or a kilometre, and when entrepreneurs ask what his number is he says it is not a number but a kind of life, how much time he spends with the people he loves and what the business needs to do to make that possible.
It's very hard to say no if you don't know what you're saying yes to.Dandapani
Questions
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Get clear about what you want for yourself. Once you can articulate your own goals, another person doing well is simply their goal being met, and the pressure and anxiety around their results falls away.
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He prefers simplify to slow down. You have a fixed amount of time and energy each day, and the work is to identify your key priorities and invest that time and energy proportionately into them instead of spreading it across everything.
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For him it is not a number at all. He asks what kind of life he wants to lead, how much time he wants with the people he loves, and then what the business needs to do to fulfil that.
Transcript
982 words · 4:42
So if somebody comes to you and they say, hey, I'm, I'm doing pretty well, but I'm really struggling to get to the next step in this. I'm struggling with like the challenges of real estate right now. It's harder than it used to be. And I don't know how, you know, I sold 10 houses last year and how do I, how do I really do what everybody else is doing where they're saying they're doing 30 or 40?
Yeah. I would say, you know, in that sense, the first step is to see the way I approach it is we have to first have a realization that our time is finite and the amount of energy that we have each day is finite. So every day I invest my energy into things and people and then at the end of the day I'm exhausted, I go to sleep and depending on how
well I sleep my energy builds back up again and the next day I have choice as to where I invest my finite amount of energy. So how do most people don't make conscious decisions as to where they invest energy? So the first step really is gaining clarity. Okay I know my time is finite, I know my energy is finite. What are my priorities in my life? So the common phrase you hear people
typically say is that I need to slow down. I don't think those are the right words to use. I prefer to use the word we need to simplify. We need to simplify our life to the key priorities in our life because it's about taking the X amount of energy we have each day, the X amount of time, and then proportionately investing into those things. I always start there. I find that most
people are just spreading the energy way to send across so many things. And it's very hard to say no if you don't know what you're saying yes to. So the first step is really gaining clarity of what it is I want in my life, right? And why do I want that? And the only way to get to that is to be able to spend time each day in self-reflection. And this is not meditation, but just really inquiring
and asking yourself through a focus state of what do I want in life? Because so much of what we do often as entrepreneurs is driven by around us, you know, so-and-so sold 20 houses, so-and-so's business grown by 10%. So I feel like I'm not doing that.
But that's their business. That's what they're doing. What do you want? And we don't spend time figuring out what we want and what actually serves us.
And we're quite driven by everything around us and how everyone else is doing. And if we could just articulate clearly and have the clarity around what we want, then it's so much easier to focus our energy and go like, hey, I know Joe is doing this. He did so great that you're good for him.
That's his goals. My goals are completely different. This is what I want. Then all of a sudden, you don't have the same pressure. You don't have that anxiety. You know what to say yes to because you know what you're saying no to.
So I would start there before thinking about even, you know, how much do I need to grow my business? Okay, so somebody says, you're like, hey, what, so what do you really want in life? And I think maybe one of the most common things that I want to, I want to grow my business, I'm going to do this, but you would say actually like, go deeper or go different.
If someone's doing this self-assessment, you're like, hey, what do you, like, like, what do you want in life? Like the, how do you want to live? Like they're like, Like I want to be healthy. I want to spend time with family or friends.
I want to, you know, is it like that? Is like, if you're telling somebody to do the self assessment. And getting granular, right? Not even just saying, I want to be healthy.
What does that mean? Right? What does healthy mean? You may be able to run a marathon or run a kilometer.
And I think the more clear we can get around those things, the less pressure and anxiety and stress we have in our life. Because it's very difficult to go through life as an entrepreneur and not compare yourself
to what's happening around you. It's kind of almost a natural human thing to look at others and go, wow, they're doing so well. They did this much this year and I didn't do as well.
But for me, I hear often entrepreneurs will say, you know, what's your number? What's your number that you wanna get to? I'm like, for me, it's not a number.
For me, it's like, what's the kind of life I wanna lead? How much time do I wanna spend with the people I love, with my friends? What do I wanna do?
And what do I need to do from a business perspective in order for me to fulfill that. Because at the end of the day, I'm very clear what my priorities are in life.
And those priorities, I know when I focus on those priorities, make me feel the most rewarded, the most fulfilled and happier.
So it's not really about pursuing a number or looking at people around me. It's getting clarity of what I want for myself. And what I want for myself
may not be what somebody else wants. And that's okay. That's their life and I have mine. But working on getting the clarity is the biggest thing.