Love Life with Matthew Hussey - (Rewind): How To Stop Comparison From Ruining Your Happiness

Episode Date: August 4, 2023

Do you find yourself always measuring your life against other people you know? Or are you worried about whether you have achieved enough, made enough money, or got the right partner by a certain age? If so, you know what it's like to be stuck in the "comparison trap". While it can be useful to have goals to keep us motivated, we have to remember we are often comparing ourselves to people with completely different lives and experiences than us. In this clip, Matt explains his own struggles with comparison and how to keep your happiness and get perspective so you're not always focusing on other people's journey.

Where am I in relation to other people my age? Where am I in relation to the person who's two years older than me? Am I on excited to share this clip with you today. Let's get into it. Okay, Jameson, here's what I'm thinking about right now. I'm going to make this fairly brief, but just an important life lesson. I think I have spent so much of my life in comparison mode with other people. I'd like to say I haven't, but I have. And it's always some kind of comparison that I wouldn't say has always been bad. It's sometimes been very motivational. It's the comparison of where am I in relation to other people, my age, where am I in relation to the person who's two years older

than me? Am I on track to be where they are by the time I'm their age? And, and of course the other comparison is with myself, with where I thought I should be by this point in my life or where I think I should be five years from now. And it's all a kind of game I'm constantly playing with myself that's based on a story, a story of what's supposed to have happened by now in life, where I'm supposed to be in life, what life is supposed to be. And I'm frequently reminded that life doesn't care about the straight line trajectory you have planned for yourself. that just is all about an ever

upwards trend towards financial independence towards relationship bliss towards familial connection and bliss, toward more peace, toward less problems, toward a less cluttered set of cupboards in your house. It's, you know, so many of us have this line that we're drawing between now and the end of our days that's just all of these things are getting better and life does not care about that line it will capriciously take people from us that we didn't intend to lose at the time they were taken it will clutter up new drawers while you clean out old ones. It will injure you at a time when you were really excited about getting yourself in shape and then you can't.

It will rob you of your finances in a bad business deal that you thought was a sure thing. It will rob you of a relationship that you thought was forever. Life is constantly disrupting these plans we have. And it makes me think about how often in life, well, two things really. One, we can always feel like we're grieving the loss of some future because we've already crossed over lots of things or enjoy lots of things. Life can be quite long. And there are always chances to reinvent ourselves. There are always chances to have a growth spurt. There's always chances to learn something new or to get better at something. It's interesting, Jameson, the, I heard the average age for successful startup founders is,

or the peak age for successful startup founders is 45. Peak age. It was either peak or average. Maybe it was the, no, I don't think it was average. I think it was the no i don't think it was average i think it was saying the statistic was saying that people who have fought who start at 45 are disproportionately

successful at creating startups um the reason being that by that time they have experience they have contacts they have wisdom from failures they've done it wrong they've been unprofessional they've screwed it up they've done all those things and when they start later in life they have all of that under their belt and that should be really encouraging to a lot of young people who feel like they're not on track to be where they want to be. I was always deeply inspired by Anthony Bourdain. You know, I beat myself up sometimes because I'm doing jujitsu and I'm about to cross over shortly into blue belt. And that's taken me a while. It's taken me years. And it's like, oh my God, like, you know,

there's all these guys that started before me and they're already at purple belt and they're younger than me. And then you get into that game again. But then I look at Bourdain and he was 58 when he started, when he started. And you just realize, oh, life is really long. It is a marathon. It is not a sprint. And not only is it a marathon, it doesn't just trend in one direction. Life is cyclical. It's cyclical. We can be having a phase where we're doing really well at taking care of ourselves at the same time as someone we used to know who used to take really good care of themselves is going through a phase where they don't feel good about their body. And that could be reversed in five years. Life is cyclical, which is why we have to take our focus off of other people and put it back on

ourselves. But it's also why we have to, because life is a marathon, because it's so easy to undo progress, because progress over the long term is difficult with lots of setbacks along the way, we may as well settle in because it's going to be a long road. Whatever it is we do, whether it's with our bodies, whether it's with our finances, whether it's with our careers, whether it just say okay firstly i'm not going to be any happier once i get there most likely um the the results of us either being made much happier or much sadder by what happens are not that exciting. That we tend to have a baseline we return to regardless of what happens to us.

So as Sam Harris puts it, the good or the bad isn't going to affect us nearly as much as we hope or we fear. And if that's the case, then really the focus is on how much can I, A, make the process sustainable, because I'm never going to achieve my goals if my process isn't sustainable. So how can I do this in a way that I'm going to do it for a long time? And B, how can I learn to enjoy the process more which doesn't i'm not just talking in very direct

terms about enjoying what we're doing like you you have to work every day so try to enjoy working i'm not just saying that i'm even saying build things in that make the overall picture enjoyable as you do it there's a bit of a you know there's been for a while now this cultural thing of this real like indulgence over pain and this feeling of making everything as difficult as possible because that means that it somehow makes it more meaningful or it somehow, you know, that's part of the sprint of getting to where you want to go is just enduring the pain. But the people that I've seen that are really successful long term are the people that can keep doing it. They're the people that can keep going and the people that can keep going tend to be the people who make the process more enjoyable they find time for friends

they find time to do things that they really love outside of this thing that they do every day they they find time to actually build in checkpoints or breaks or relief. And that's what allows them to keep going. And it's a very short-sighted thing that we do in the name of trying to get ahead, in the name of success, in the name of making things happen, is we sprint at a rate that we cannot possibly maintain. And then the periods of burnout and the moments where life forces us to take a giant pause because of the way we've done it, the way we've worked ourselves, we've burnt out in dating, we've burnt out in our careers, we've burnt out with our gym routine. Those setbacks, those take us out of the game altogether. So the game in life is longevity and longevity comes from

recognizing that it is a marathon and that enjoying the way we live now without ever relying on the achievement of our goals to be happy, which won't work anyway, is the name of the game. All right, everyone, that's it for today. Before you go, though, I have some big news. We have dates for the live retreat. It is going to be from the 9th to the 15th of October. It's taking place in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. We are going to be spending six days together by the beach

working on your greatest life challenges. Whatever you're trying to work on, deal with, get over or create in your life, we are going to do it together for six days. To apply, go to mhretreat.com and it is my sincerest hope that you and I get to spend those six days together this October.