Stop comparing your success to others this new year

Happy New Year, and happy Monday! Welcome back, everybody. I’m sure you all have read plenty of pieces discussing New Year’s resolutions and their pros and cons. Most people seem to either love or hate the idea of these goals many of us set for ourselves. Some of us make a note on our phone and a sign for our bulletin board detailing our plan to better ourselves. Others claim that if we wanted to change ourselves, we would have started when we conceived the idea, rather than waiting until midnight on a specifi c day to start living our lives a certain way. Both of those opinions are valid, I think. Obviously, we don’t have to wait, but Jan. 1 seems as good a day as any to start living our lives the way we want. I’m not going to tell you that you should feel one way or the other, because, truth

fully, I’m not convinced I feel one way or the other. However, the thought of New Year’s resolutions calls to mind a problem that applies to this topic and to most topics: comparison. Comparison can be a benefi cial or toxic concept. It helps us achieve our best selves, because we often may not know what we are capable of without other people. However, comparison can lead us into a pit of anxiety and stress. It’s easy to think that other people’s successes are equivalent to our failures, especially if something they accomplish is along the lines of something we wanted to accomplish. I’m not speaking from a place of success. I’ve personally struggled with this for as long as I can remember. From money to friendship, from academics to extracurricular activities, it can be hard not to compare ourselves to others. It would be easier to stop if it didn’t matter how other people did, but, truthfully, it affects us. So many things we value, from admission to this university to a bid from a Greek organization, heavily depend on competition. We can say all we want that we get where we want in life by our own merit. I do, to a degree, agree with this statement, and I do not think we should ever feel as though our success is out of our hands. However, we need to acknowledge that comparison is a component of our lives. The fi rst step to getting over this is to recognize that it is a problem. Completely ignoring it is almost as bad as completely succumbing to it. Once we acknowledge it, we can combat it.

Combatting it doesn't mean ridding our lives of anything that could invoke competition or comparison, but merely realizing that it's a problem and trying to focus on our own efforts, instead of other people’s efforts. There is nothing we can do about other people’s efforts. We can only control what we do. By thinking that we can somehow impact other people’s efforts, we are more inclined to sabotage them or only do just enough to stay ahead of the pack. This is not the way we progress as a society. We cannot achieve our maximum potential by just trying to be better than other people. If we realize this and try to overcome it, we can be the best people we can be, independent of others, for 2017 and the rest of our lives.

Taylor Cavaliere is a UF journalism and psychology sophomore. Her column appears on Mondays.