We’ve all done it… fallen into the trap where we compare ourselves, our experiences, our worth, our value against another person’s.
There’s a name for it. Comparisonitis.
It sounds made up, but it’s very real, and if you’ve ever been in the middle of working on something you were genuinely excited about, only to open social media and find someone else already doing it, you know exactly what it feels like.
The excitement drains.
The momentum stalls.
And suddenly the thing you were building feels like a copy of something that already exists, even though you were building something original. Yours.
I’ve been in that place more times than I’d like to admit. And there was one season in particular where it stopped me completely.
When The Rabbit Hole Wins
Here’s how it usually starts for me.
I’m working on something – an idea I’ve been turning over, a piece of content I’m genuinely energized about. And then, on a break, I go to scroll…
And there it is.
Someone else’s version of the thing I was just building.
Already out in the world.
Already getting traction.
The thoughts come fast.
If I do it anyway, will it look like I copied them? Is their version better than mine? What’s the point?
And before long, I’ve talked myself out of finishing – or starting – altogether.
I remember one season where this happened so consistently that I stopped producing anything new for months.
No new content.
No newsletter.
Nothing.
Because everything I wanted to create seemed to already exist somewhere else, done by someone who got there first and, as I perceived it at the time, did it better.
What I didn’t understand at the time was that I wasn’t reacting to competition.
I was reacting to fear.
And comparison was just the shape the fear was taking that day.
What Comparison Is Actually Doing
Comparison feels like a rational response to the marketplace. Like you’re doing research, assessing the landscape, figuring out where you fit.
But that’s not really what’s happening.
What’s actually happening is that you’ve shifted your focus from your own work to someone else’s, and once you do that, your work loses the thing that made it worth doing in the first place.
Your perspective.
Your experience.
Your specific way of seeing and saying the thing.
No one else has that.
That’s not a motivational poster. It’s just true.
The way you explain something, the experiences you draw on, the particular combination of who you are and what you’ve been through – that’s not replicable. Even if the topic is identical.
Two people can write about the same subject and produce completely different pieces of work.
Not because one is better than the other, but because they’re coming from different places and speaking to different people in different ways.
When you lose sight of that — when you start measuring your work against someone else’s instead of against your own intention — you’ve already stepped out of your lane.
The Advice That Actually Helped
I remember being in the thick of a particularly bad bout of comparisonitis and posting about it vulnerably in an online community I was part of at the time.
I wasn’t looking for solutions; I just needed to say it out loud.
What came back was simple, and it came from someone who’d heard it from someone else: keep your eyes on your own paper.
That’s it.
Stop looking at what other people are doing.
When you sit down to work on your content, close the other tabs. Put the phone down. Don’t give yourself access to the comparison until the work is done.
It sounds almost too simple. But it worked because it addressed the actual problem.
Not the competition. Not the marketplace. My own attention and where I was choosing to put it.
When I stopped looking sideways and focused on what I was trying to say and why, the work started moving again.
What This Has To Do With Your Valued Experience
Here’s the deeper thing I’ve come to understand about comparisonitis, especially for the kind of work I do and the kind of people I work with.
When you’re building something personal, a business that reflects who you are, a body of work that carries your actual perspective, comparison is particularly corrosive because what you’re building isn’t interchangeable with what someone else is building, even if it looks similar on the surface.
The valued experience you’re creating – the one that’s specific to you, your clients, your way of doing things – cannot be replicated by anyone else. And it cannot be evaluated against anyone else’s version. It has to be measured against your own intention.
Are you doing what you set out to do?
Are the people you’re serving feeling the impact you hoped they would?
Is the experience you’re creating matching the one you envisioned?
Those are the questions worth asking – not: Is someone else doing this?
Someone always is, and someone always isn’t. Neither of those facts has anything to do with whether your work is worth doing.
A Few Things That Help
When the comparison spiral starts, I’ve found a few things that actually interrupt it:
- Close the tabs. Literally. If you’re working on your content, don’t give yourself access to anyone else’s.
- Come back to your own why. What were you trying to say before you started looking sideways? Go back to that.
- Remember that the people who resonate with your work are coming to you specifically. Your audience isn’t looking for the generic version of this topic. They’re looking for your version.
And if something you wanted to build has already been built, build it anyway.
Nothing has been covered by you yet. That’s the only version that’s missing.
