I want you to take a moment and picture someone you know in your mind. It can really be anyone that you know. And this person could be someone you work with, it could be a neighbor of yours, it could be a friend, it could be even your own spouse or your children or really anyone that is in your life. The amazing thing about these relationships that we have is that without our active involvement, we compare ourselves to these people. The person that you brought up in your mind, you almost certainly have compared yourself to at some time or another in some way or another. And that's what we're talking about on today's episode, the perils and also the opportunities that we can find in comparison. My name is Jonathan Cutrella. You're listening to Developer Tea. My goal in this episode is to share with you is to help developers like you, driven developers like you, find your career purpose so you can do better work and have a positive influence on the people around you. It's a very simple goal, pretty straightforward. And really, we're trying to do this through a series of thought exercises, through a series of exploration and finding what other people have figured out. Research, reading books and reading studies, primary academic research, but also talking to people who are in the industry. We do all these things and more on the show. I hope you will subscribe if you're interested in this concept. But I'm really excited to talk about comparisons today. This is inspired by quite a few posts that I've seen on Reddit and in other places on Twitter, you know, on message boards for developers pretty much everywhere. We see the developer who's in college or who is trying to learn how to be a developer and they're depressed or they're frustrated or they're anxious or they're depressed or they're anxious or they're anxious or they're anxious or they're anxious or they're concerned that they're not going to be up to snuff. It's not even necessarily imposter syndrome, but rather that the other people around them seem to be learning faster, seem to be more capable than them. And in this way, they're making a immediate direct comparison of their own abilities to the people around them. And this happens very often, especially in colleges, because the year that you're in, in college, for example, if somebody younger than you gets an internship, or if your classmates all seem to understand how to do something that you're not quite picking up on, or maybe everyone around you has side projects and you can't seem to figure out how to get one started. There's so many ways that you can evaluate this, but ultimately this happens to all of us at some point. And we're going to peel back some layers here. It's not just developers that this happens to. We compare ourselves all the time. And I want to talk about this because it's such an important subject. Before we jump in, I do want to mention our very first non-developer related product sponsor, Mad Monk Tea. Now you've probably expected us to talk about tea at some point in the life cycle of the show. And it's taken almost 500 episodes to get to the point where we found a tea that we're willing to put our name next to. And Mad Monk Tea is that company. Mad Monk has teas from around the world, and it's all kinds of styles of tea. So black, white, green, long, pretty much anything you can imagine. On top of that, they do special teas like aged teas. So they have all kinds of options. If you've never had loose leaf tea, then you've had an entirely different drink with the tea bags. That's what I was used to before I tried loose leaf tea for the first time. And it's a totally different experience. If you've never enjoyed hot tea before, then I encourage you to go and check out Mad Monk. Head over to madmonktea.com. And use the code developer tea with a space in the middle, developer tea, and you'll get 15% off your order. Thank you to Mad Monk for being our very first non-developer related product sponsor. So we're talking about comparisons on today's episode. And I'm really excited to talk about this specifically social comparisons. This is us comparing ourselves to other people. And there are times where we do this consciously. There's times when we engage this concept consciously. We try to find a way to do this consciously. And we try to find a way to do this consciously. And we try to find a way to do this consciously. And we try to find a way to do this consciously. And we try to find a way to do this consciously. And we try to find a way to do this how much another person is making salary wise, right? We may try to figure out if another person is a better programmer than us. We also compare our relational capabilities with other people. So is that other person's relationship with their spouse, are they more compatible than my relationship with my spouse? But the reality is, this has been happening for pretty much all of human history. And it's been happening for pretty much all of human history. And it's been happening history. You see, the truth is, underlying all of our cultured and sophisticated minds, we have this old brain, a much more primitive version of the human brain still exists deep down and still it drives a lot of our behavior. So one of those behaviors is comparing ourselves to others so that we can size up where we fit. In other words, we can identify if that other person is going to be a threat to my livelihood. So our brains are doing their jobs when we do this comparison game. The problems that arise as a result of comparison can leave us in a really bad position. Even if somebody isn't trying to be antagonistic towards you, for example, your boss, let's imagine that you're comparing yourself to your boss and typically your boss, on the average case, your boss is probably going to make more money than you. Right? Research shows that when you compare yourself with an upward direction, in other words, when you compare yourself to someone that you will ultimately evaluate to be above you in some way, in this particular scenario, we're talking about salary, but it could be anything. When you compare yourself to someone that you perceive as above you in some way, you actually elicit negative emotions. And these emotions are the same ones that are associated with your behavior. A more accurate way of describing this is that the part of your brain that is lit up when you are envious is also lit up when you're doing a comparison with someone who is you perceive to be above you. Similarly, when you perceive someone to be below you, the opposite happens. You feel a sense of reward. You feel as if you have accomplished something. And all of this happens only because of comparison. Now, again, if you're doing a comparison with someone that you perceive to be above you, you're not really envious. You feel as if you are. You feel as if you are. You feel as if you are. You feel as if you are. You feel as if you are. You feel as if you are. You feel as if you are. Your brain is encouraging you to become better than other people. Unfortunately, our primitive brains, they don't really care too much about a social good. They don't care about society or furthering the efforts of a group of people. Our brains have one job, and our primitive brains more specifically, have one job, and that is to keep us alive and to continue building our relational capacity. So it's very important to recognize that, once again, this is our brains doing their job, but in an advanced society that we live in, this can have detrimental effects. More specifically, if you start creating a connection of envy with your boss, then when you walk into work, that connection will still have some effect on you. It's going to have some effect on your perception of your boss. And so how do we correct this? Or how can we kind of reverse engineer the way that we compare ourselves with other people so that we can approach it from a more healthy perspective and actually use this to our advantage rather than allowing ourselves to build up a lack of humility when we're looking down on someone and simultaneously building up a store of envy when we're looking up at someone? This comparison game, is difficult, and we're going to talk about how we can use it to our advantage right after we talk about today's sponsor, WooCommerce. If you have shopped online more than three different stores, then you've almost definitely used WooCommerce before, and you may not have even known it. WooCommerce is built on top of WordPress, and it's totally customizable. You take all of your data with you, no matter what happens, and you can pay with almost anything through WooCommerce. For example, Bitcoin powered by Stripe, or you can even use Apple Pay. So this is a super flexible opportunity for pretty much any e-commerce situation you can imagine. On top of this, WooCommerce has a community, a strong community, like WordPress. And as a result of being open source, there's an active worldwide community of developers who share their knowledge at things like meetups, and they even have a WooCommerce Slack channel and forums. So there's a lot of information out there. You're not going to be stuck. You won't buy this and then have to only resort to looking at out-of-date documentation or something like that. There are other people who are using WooCommerce actively and are excited about it and are excited enough about it to create a vibrant community of WooCommerce users and developers. If you have a need for an e-commerce solution, you should check out WooCommerce. Head over to WooCommerce.com slash developer T. And if you use WooCommerce, you're going to be able to get a lot of information. developer T. You'll get 20% off. This is good until the end of March 2018. So go and check it out. WooCommerce.com slash developer T. Thank you again to WooCommerce for sponsoring today's episode of developer T. So this comparison game that our brains kind of automatically do is social comparison, trying to size other people up, whether we're doing it on purpose, kind of in our thinking mindset, or if we're doing it accidentally. We're doing it, you know, kind of passively or even without realizing what we're doing. This comparison happens all the time. On top of that, it's actually fueled even more now because we have more access to seeing what other people are doing. We're more interfaced with the lives of others as a result of social media than maybe ever before in human history. So what this means is that as we're browsing through our Instagram feed, or as we're going through Facebook, we're seeing more and more people. And we're seeing more and more people or even when we're browsing Hacker News, or even when we're browsing the anonymous postings of people on Reddit, we have the opportunity with each of those personal posts to compare ourselves to that person, compare our food to that person's food. We compare our, you know, our vacation to that person's vacation, our exercise to that person's exercise. So this is a pervasive thing that we, we do. And it's very important for us to understand it because there are detrimental effects that this can have on our relationships with the people that we're comparing ourselves to. And it can also have a detrimental effect on our relationship with ourself. As we continue to compare, it is very possible that we will go down the path of thinking that we're not somewhere in the middle. So in other words, we can either become incredibly inflated and lose all humility, or we can either become incredibly inflated and lose all humility, which is extremely detrimental to our career path. Or we can believe that we're kind of at the very bottom of the totem pole and that everyone else around us has something better than we do, that they are better at something that we're at. And if we allow this to spin out of control, especially if we allow ourselves to lose our entire self-worth, or if we lose all of our humility, then we ultimately become isolated. So how can we avoid this? And how can we avoid this detrimental effect of over-comparison? Well, first of all, it's important to recognize that you're not going to stop comparing yourself to other people. This is still an important part of our understanding of the world, and it's not going to just turn off overnight. There are a few things that we can do to make it kind of work for us, though. First of all, we need to start seeing other people not in light of how different are they, but rather, how are we similar? How can I find common ground with this person? The excellent comedian Pete Holmes describes a way of doing this. He says, whenever you find someone that you feel intimidated by or scared by, and I'm paraphrasing Pete Holmes here, he says, remember that everyone sleeps. So this idea is that even the most terrifying person you can imagine, or the most powerful or smart person you can imagine, is going to sleep. And so this idea is that even the most terrifying person you can imagine, they also, just like you, they sleep. And they flip their pillow over to the cold side, right? All of the things that we do that make us human, we share those things. And therefore, we also share this idea of growth. We share a common ground with everyone around us. So that's the first step, to help this work better for you, so that as you see someone that you're comparing brain to, you're going to be able to see them. And that's the first step. So that's the second step. So that's the third step. So that's the fourth step. So that's the fifth step. So that's the You can also recognize that perhaps you could have been in their position, had things gone differently, had your luck been different, right? The other side of this is that when you see people who are in positions that are superior to you for whatever reason, or in whatever metric, you can see yourself in light of what you can learn from them, rather than what you need to envy of them. The second thing we need to do is recognize that our brains are lazy. Our brains are incredibly lazy. They want to make things simple for us. They want to give us some way of understanding hierarchy, social hierarchy, that is absolute. And the reality, we have to remind ourselves of this, the reality is that things are more complex than that. There are more things to consider than a single metric of status. For example, if you're a person who's a social worker, we may reduce our status to our yearly income, our salary. But this is not a complete understanding of who we are as people. And this is really kind of going back to that common ground. We are all human, and every human has their faults. Every human has their struggles. They have weaknesses and strengths. No matter what you do to try to compare, you won't be able to see that full picture. You won't be able to definitively see that full picture. You won't be able to definitively see that full picture. You won't be able to definitively see that full picture. You won't be able to put a ranking between you and another person. The only way you can really create that ranking system is on a single or on a group of metrics that only pale in comparison to the reality of the complexity that every person faces every day they're alive. So recognizing when you are engaging in this kind of comparison, especially when you start feeling self-doubt, and when you start feeling a lack of self-confidence, and when you start feeling a lack of self-doubt, and when you start feeling a lack of self-worth, or when you start feeling like no one around you understands you, and that you're superior to everyone around you. When you have these feelings, remind yourself that things are more complex, that everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, that comparison is only a rough metric to help you survive. You can thank your brain for trying to help you survive, but then move down the road and remember, that the best thing that you can do in any scenario when encountering any person is remind yourself of your own humility. Remind yourself of the things you're grateful for. Remember that you have something to learn from everyone. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. I know this is a much more relational and kind of a neuroscience-oriented episode, but I believe that this subject is really important for developers who are going through this struggle. I want to be the first to tell you, you have common ground with the best of the best. You have common ground with the most capable developers. They experience very similar things that you experience on a day-to-day basis. Your life is not so far removed from the people that you admire, from the goals that you pursue, from the goals that you pursue, from the goals that you pursue, from the goals that you have. Remind yourself of this every day, that everyone is human, and that we all have an opportunity to take advantage of those things. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. Thank you again to today's sponsor, WooCommerce. Head over to woocommerce.com slash developer tea and use the code developer tea, all one word, to get 20% off. That code is good until the end of March of 2018. Thank you so much for listening, and until next time, enjoy your tea. WooCommerce.com