There's an expression that I've heard many times throughout my life that rings very true
Especially for me right now and it is that comparison is the thief of joy
Which were weren't said by Theodore Roosevelt and it's so damn true and also so hard to break out of a scarcity
comparison based mindset many times from my life
I have made myself miserable looking over the shoulders of others to see what they have that I do not in fact
That's the reason for why I'm making this piece. I have felt like this year in particular
there has been this weight building up on my shoulders and I
You know, I think it would be helpful for me to put this out there
Let it go and move forward despite our world of abundance. There's always somebody that has more than you
I mean
Can you imagine what people from 500 years ago would think about the world that we live in many of us now have access to?
incredible resources that even royalty from that time period
Couldn't have dreamt them and yet it's hard to make the case that were that much happier
So something else is going on here. The problem is everything is relative and it's human nature to compare
It's hardwired into us
We compare this year's model of iPhone to last year's or the GDP of one country to another or the price of that pair of
Shoes compared to that one
It's how we make sense of the world and it's actually a very efficient way to arrive to
Conclusions and for better or for worse the same goes for people
we're always comparing and we're always being compared to our siblings our
Classmates our co-workers our peers and whenever you put yourself out there in any capacity
People either in your personal life or online will try to pin you down and tell you what they think you are
I can imagine that must be a reason why so many people move from small home towns to bigger cities it can feel
suffocating
Inescapable we all want to be unique and to have the opportunity to define ourselves
It's a cliche at this point that in your 20s you're searching for yourself
But there's a reason why these themes these topics come up so often is because it's it's a rite of passage
It's something that we all go through at some level or another and these comparisons are not all bad
Okay, so I do have some funny examples in my last video alone
Li, I posed like Steve Jobs in the thumbnail, which was completely unintentional
But you know
I was very flattered to receive those comments and also that I'm looking like Harry Potter
Which I imagine is because of the glasses, but Harry Potter was never bearded
So maybe they really meant that I look like Daniel Radcliffe, but Daniel Radcliffe doesn't wear glasses at all
So I actually don't really know what they mean more than anything
It just goes to show how quickly people want to connect the dots, you know, and that's just the tip of the iceberg
I'm a young man trying to prove myself in the world and my ego desires
external validation whether I like it or not and sometimes the
comparisons that people make can feel like they cast this huge shadow over you I hate being put in a box I hate being
Oversimplified and I completely understand how pointless and futile it is to seek for external validation
But the truth is that's where I'm at right now
You know, I'm no monk and I believe that the vast majority of all of us are at that place as well
None of us are getting enlightened any time soon. So we're not shedding our egos our identities our attachments
And so there's no quick solution to this
And so I've struggled with this and in my competitiveness
I often invent opponents and rivals and place my focus on them instead of on myself
Which is what I should be doing. That's all that really matters
This is exhausting and truly one of the things that I most dislike about myself
it creates feelings of envy and inadequacy and I think I've made progress over the last few years, but it's still something that
Really affects me that I haven't fully worked through
the first time this happened to me publicly was like three years ago when I was living in Argentina and
Trying to create content and not really getting anywhere and I started getting a lot of comments
comparing me to this other guy Dustin Luke, he was and still is an American with a beard that also creates content online and
speaks Spanish with an Argentinian accent
Which is not very typical for Americans to learn the outside similarities were obvious
Like I get it even though I wasn't even trying to make content like him
He had already been at it for several years and he was already at that point. Well known and established in Argentina
So Argentinians were like hey, this kid reminds me of this guy. Most people mean
well
I think but some comments do hurt people would say that I was like the cheaper version
A copy a ripoff because he came first I can see now how a lot of those comments were actually hilarious in hindsight
But at the time it really hurt because it felt like all of my time and energy was going nowhere meant nothing
I felt like I was reduced to the cheap
Plastic version of the real thing and even if it's a small percentage of the comments those are the ones that sting and stick in
Your mind and plant seeds of doubt. This is a pretty well-documented occurrence. It happens
You know, wherever human being is to pretty much anything in sports and in the arts we compare athletes actors
Novelists even just in the YouTube space alone
I can remember for example the ubiquity of the Casey neistat's style where everybody was trying to do the same thing
And I don't think he was out of ill intent
People were just inspired and to a lesser extent that has happened with a whole bunch of other content creators as well
This is my younger brother Skyler calling him. I realized that we've had very different experiences being siblings
I wanted to ask you
was this like a is it was a
Recurring problem for you while you were growing up. Like did you feel like you faced being?
In my shadow, or I guess reference to me many times or was just something that happens
I can remember that being what people would say like at summer camp and stuff like that
I actually remember that being like very common hearing that. Oh you guys are brothers. I
Think my perspective was very different because I never like I was Skylar's brother, you know people automatically made me like that
I didn't have to deal with that. Basically, you know, I mean
Like if they knew you at least it just never really made sense to me why you would use
Because let's say I was a kid who didn't have a sibling how would that teacher then talk to me?
Yeah, I'm assembling you know
It's like I want to know what that would be like your response to me to me
If I didn't ask you were telling you just yesterday that you don't like little bro
Like I legitimately didn't even know that I didn't know that you didn't like that
Understand that I say that affectionately or it doesn't matter basically
The one who's always been the younger sibling
It's crazy to me that even at you know, you're 19 now you would think people would cut it out, but it's still happening
We let apart in terms of interest
It's
Possible. I think you know without having any resentment over any sibling ship or anything like that that we've been able to work together in
Iraq
The reason I'm making this video is because the comparisons
Really started up again for me this year when my video started to take off
It has weighed very heavy on me and I haven't been fully clear on what?
The right thing to do is basically I've received a lot of comments that I creates similar content to Matt the Avella
And by a lot, I mean like thousands of messages over the last few months
and again, I know that people most of the time mean really well in fact
It's a huge compliment the quality of what he does is super high. I also get where this comes from
You know, there's not a lot of content creators in this particular niche of self-improvement
I also think it's rare to find people that don't talk all big and you know, fake like that and oh god
I just hated doing that and also have some filmmaking background, you know
So I see the similarities but a lot of comments are not so nice and they trigger something
Ugly within me. It basically feels not good enough, you know in the shadow again
And that's I recognize that's 100% my ego right there. And so I haven't been
Clear on what the right thing is to do that respond. Do I ignore?
I'm trying to approach this topic as mindfully as I can because I'm I don't want my words to be misunderstood
I'm not trying to bring anybody down here the growth of his channel is no accident, you know
He and his team have put out a lot of fantastic content and it was only like eight months ago that I made
basically a fanboy video about him and
You know, basically a lot has changed in a short period of time in a way
This has very little to do with any particular
Single person and moreso to do with how I feel how uncomfortable I feel in this situation
I have a friend that I made while living in Mexico City
His name is Matt, Athena, and I called him for a very specific reason
So
you're basically
one of the founders of intro 50v which now has
Like 21 and a half a million subscribers. I just checked this morning
It has over seven and a half billion views. So we're talking almost the population of the world at this point
I mean do the comparisons ever stop because it's so public
It's so big you have like everybody's eyeballs, right? Yeah comparisons at least
Speaking from experience. The 21 million mark doesn't do anything with
comparisons in our personal experience we get compared all the time because
Humans are pattern recognition machines. Do you feel like you've struggled with this?
Over time with within 250 V or other projects of yours, and if you have I guess what has been your mentality
with regards to dealing with it one of the tools I
I used where the team is
Making them understand they are in control of their own narrative meaning that if they react
Poorly, they are making the story
Skewed in the way. They precisely didn't want to and
There are some things that you can do to be in control of your narrative
but there have been some things that have been very emotionally involving for me and
the way I tried to detach is
Again, it's through story
Like what am I?
Catastrophizing and what is an actual variable? Hmm what you're going through? It's not unique to our maybe it's unique to
Anything that has any sort of emotional state?
The strange mixture of feedback and my own kind of personal thoughts on the topic
Has created this sense of pressure that I don't want in my life
Because I feel like I need to measure up somehow or distinguish myself, which is like stupid and pointless
I'm simply not Steve Jobs or Harry Potter or Dustin Luke or
Machiavelli or any of the people that I have been compared to or have compared myself to throughout my entire life
I'm not trying to beat anybody else
I don't want to be anybody else and I couldn't be anybody else
Even if I wanted to I really only want to be Nathanael drew, but I don't fully know what that means yet
And as I feel like I've mentioned in almost every single one of my videos
I'm not here to provide the answers or be a guru or an expert on anything. I really just want to share
where I am at this stage of my life as
Honestly, and as vonner ibly as I can to essentially share where I'm at with things and I only recently just turned 22
So I fully understand how clueless I am whether I like it or not
And honestly, we live in a world where nothing is original anymore
I mean at best we take things that already exist and add our own little twist. That's it and as we've seen with the Stoics
We're largely dealing with the exact same problems the human problems that existed thousands of years ago just as there seems to be in
relation between comparison and joy, I feel like there's a direct relationship between
Gratitude and joy, so it's a simple question. I think of
Reorienting my attention to the things that matter every single time
I get off track
Ignoring this the comments and the things people are going to say ultimately I don't need to justify what I choose to create anybody
I would invite you to not watch if you don't like what you see
But I guess I can't tell people what to say or do. That's the fundamental lesson
I'm taking away from all of this whenever you put something out there be it a video or a photo
Or an article or a book or a piece of music?
It's no longer. Yours. You got to let it go people are gonna do whatever they want with it
I'm not proud of the things that I shared in this piece, you know my pride my ego
But that's not the point. The point is to be ever more honest in spite of what anybody has to say
I cannot let the words of others distract me from the work that I have to do
You