Everyone grows at their own pace and That’s ok

Dinesh Selva
3 min readDec 2, 2021
“Comparison is a drug of choice”

“When you stop comparing yourself to others, you can accomplish great things,” says wheelchair athlete Dean Furness.

What is comparison? He is wearing a red t-shirt today, so I’ll wear a red t-shirt too. she’s 2 inches shorter than me that makes her look cute so I’ll cut my legs off to get the same height or vice versa. Ain’t stupid Yes, it’s stupid to compare yourself to others.

In our life, we don’t do 100-meter races where we start the race at the same time (unless your comparison is your twin brother/sister), the same route, the same distance, and ultimately nobody is on the medal like we were the first to finish the race.

Our tracks are different, our point of departure, our distances are all different, we have to understand that.

Do you live your life at your own pace or someone’s pace? All parents want their child to be a successful person in society. So they started pushing the kids and comparing them to their age group. In this case, the parents started the comparison. They just wanted their children to be successful in life and there is nothing wrong with that. Parents mostly want their children to achieve things they couldn’t, or they indirectly force them to take a path they wanted to take. Comparisons started with test results and today with our salaries and work performance. It stops facing the challenges that lie ahead.

When we look deeply into our society, our respectful aunts and uncles encourage comparison, and it has become an important topic among them when they meet. That is the problem of our society today. Because of this, most teenagers are scared and avoid meeting their relatives. Instead of getting in touch with their loved ones, they prefer to use social media very often. By comparing, they tend to hide their feelings and make it seem like they can talk on social media, but social media leads to a lack of confidence.

Social media has taken social comparison to a whole new level in recent years. We see who does what we don’t, and we can get stressed out wondering if we are doing enough, making enough money, enjoying life enough. We compare our normal life to other people’s best memories. We don’t know if they are just posting their highlights and the best photos out of dozen or if they are really sharing spontaneous events that happen.
Anyway, a lot of people find that social media makes social comparison worse in the worst possible way, which makes many of us feel worse.

Most comparisons are considered dangerous and harm our positive mental health. The only comparisons that are considered healthy are the ones that inspire you to change your life for the better.

We compare ourselves without knowing the reality that doing so could slow down our own process and pace. We should take some time and focus on ourselves rather than others. By doing this, we can win those challenges and really begin to achieve so many great things.

On a TED talk show, wheelchair athlete Dean Furness shared the real story of the accident that changed his life. He understands the pace of life when going through difficult phases in his path. We are never too late to start and we are never too late to understand our own pace. His speech reflects that I am writing this blog.

“Embrace your own pace”

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