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I’ll admit something that used to embarrass me and now sets me free. I have never had an original idea in my life, including this one.
Most of us were raised to believe that if we didn’t invent something from scratch, our offering had no worth, or worse, that we were stealing! So when someone decides to start a business, write a book, or try something new, the voices arrive right on schedule. Someone’s already done it. The market is saturated. In my case, it was “Everyone and their aunt is a Life Coach. You’re late to the game,” and “You’ll never make a living doing that.” And the best one of all,” No one is going to take a fashion executive seriously as a Life Coach!”
The outside voices were only half of it. My own competitive wiring had me measuring myself against Tony Robbins and concluding, before I’d coached a single person, that I would never measure up.
I was failing in advance by refusing to start—a behavior that today brings so many of my clients to my door. That, friends, is what comparison does when we let it run unsupervised.
It stops us before we can take a single step forward.
And here’s the trap I want to take apart, because for years I had it backward. The usual advice is to stop comparing yourself to other people.
I tried.
It’s impossible.
I genuinely believe that we are built to compare, and every system we’re raised inside—school, work, the whole machinery of achievement—runs on it. Telling a person to stop comparing is like telling them to stop noticing the weather.
So the trick was never to stop. It is to compare for better reasons, and to better people.
Look closely at the things we admire and the whole picture changes. Inspiration is a form of comparison. A role model is a form of comparison. Being coached is a form of comparison—you are, by design, learning from someone further along than you. None of these are toxic tools; rather, they're ways to let comparison do its best work.
I’ll say it again. The problem was never comparison itself.
The problem was what I was comparing myself to, and why.
When I compared myself to how small I was measured against another, I froze. I swung between doing nothing in the real world and bingeing other coaches’ content, hunting for the secret that would finally make me enough. That is comparison in the service of the ego, and the ego literally has only one move.
My own coach, Steve Chandler, put it in a way I’ve never forgotten. The ego can’t create, he said. It can only compare. When we hand it the wheel, creativity shuts off.
The achievements our souls actually want come from creativity, and creativity, in my experience, comes from inspiration. So I ran an experiment. I decided to let myself be inspired by, and even channel, the very people I’d been comparing myself to and losing to.
I let Tony’s passion inspire me and I felt an energetic shift. I let Steve’s steadiness inspire me and my patience increased. I let my clients’ courage to be vulnerable inspire me and I watched my empathy balloon. And I let my mother, a working author, inspire me with her discipline to sit down and write whether or not she felt like it that day, and my focus increased.
Imagine this. I come from a family of professional writers, and I’d spent years deciding I could never write like them. That decision kept me from writing altogether.
The brutal voice in my head had a ready objection: “That’s just copying other people’s work.”
But with some good coaching, time, and practice, I realized that’s a false charge.
Taking what came before, running it through your own hands, and giving it back with your own twist is not theft. It’s how contribution works. If the Beatles could be openly inspired by Elvis, if nearly every original mind credits a predecessor for the spark, then I could stop pretending I was supposed to arrive from nowhere.
There’s a case to be made that the Big Bang was the only genuinely original event, and everything since has been a fresh take on something already here.
Once I stepped off the comparison I’d been using to shrink myself, and onto the kind that pulled me upward, the work finally started. I wasn’t recreating anyone. I was curating what I loved in my own voice, and that turns out to be enough.
Two things worth thinking about this week. The first is that you will compare yourself to other people, so the only real question is how. The second is that comparison can make you feel smaller or make you reach, and you get to choose which one you practice.
Compare yourself for better reasons and to better people.
So here’s something to try. Catch yourself in one comparison this week, the envious kind that leaves you feeling less than, and turn it over. Instead of letting that person be proof of your inadequacy, find the specific thing in them worth being inspired by, and let it pull you toward your own work rather than away from it.
There are more extraordinary ideas already in the world than any of us could use, and a limitless number of ways to remix them for our own small corner of it. You only have to be the first to curate the past in your voice.
