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Comment by ivanhoe | Hacker News Reader

Jordan Peterson has come up with this rule: "Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today". Aside all the controversy that surrounds him, this is really deep and solid advice IMO. You don't live the life to impress others, so who cares if you have to show "something", you did a tones of projects, you got knowledge and experience from those projects, that's what you can (and should) show - and if you also got yourself a normal, stable life, family, friends - what else do you need really? Fame, boosting your ego by getting stars on github, is that really such a big deal?

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His advice is applicable to those wanting to impress others, it's really a healthy way to look at making progress in your endeavors by focusing on said progress rather than all the way you still have to go.

Pretty sure that Jordan Peterson didn't come up with that.

I can't claim that he did or did not, I quoted him simply as I first heard it from him in this form. And it's not really important who come up with the idea first, in some way it is really an obvious thing, but we all forget about it too often. With the rise of Internet we stopped comparing ourselves with people around us locally, instead now you compare yourself with the whole damn planet. Instead of competing with few hundreds or thousands, you've now set yourself against billions of people - and that's a recipe for depression.

The internet is sort of like a local neighborhood in that regard, it's just that your neighbor next door is The World's Biggest Genius in [whatever your passion is] and down the road there's a few more contenders.

Now you could look at others too but when everyone around you talks about the same few people over and over, it's hard not to think that "unless I'm as good as them, I don't matter".

You actually said he came up with that, so I corrected you.

I meant that it's one of the rules from his book 12 Rules for Life.

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