The other day I got a call from a friend. He was concerned about the package and promotion his peers got. He got a decent hike as well. But that didn’t make him as happy. How Rancho topped the class was a bigger concern for Farhan and Raju rather than them getting passed. Happens with all of us right? Sometimes it’s money, sometimes it’s the job title, sometimes it’s the seat at the table. We don’t like our peers or juniors doing better than us. Period.

We start comparing what we didn’t have that our peers have. Sometimes we go into an overdrive into acquiring skills that make our peers privileged. But even that doesn’t work because probably the skills we are focusing on aren’t the ones that worked for another person. Or the skills which worked for other person, aren’t your forte. So we lose. Because we are participating in someone else’s race. The thing with rat race is that you can’t win it. If we focus on our peers, to set out our goals, we will always be disappointed. The goal post will always keep shifting as we move from one job, company, pay grade etc to another. 

A more efficient way would be to try to determine where we want to reach based on some objective parameters and then set out milestones to achieve them. It’s like how companies decide their revenue target. They don’t say that a competitor has X valuation so we want to have X valuation. Instead they focus on the potential market, their capabilities, their innovations to objectively determine where they can reach in a given timeline.

Easier said than done right? In-spite of all our objectivity, we do tend to look towards our peers and it impacts us. Also sometimes it does act as a fuel to charge us up in a positive manner. Even in business terms competitor analysis isn’t a bad thing. It does give us our standing in the market. But it can’t be our primary motivator as in that case we will always have someone doing better than us. We will always end up being unhappy.

The essence is to find our purpose. When one is truly devoted towards a purpose, marginal utility from external validity begins to diminish. The purpose itself has the energy to give us happiness and in parts covers for the materialistic success and status elevation. Also as one comes closer towards achieving the purpose, material success and status usually automatically ensue in exponential form.

There is also a more passive way. It is to act stubborn to stay happy. If you choose to be happy at any cost, you will ignore anything that has potential to make you unhappy. But then this is like not running the race at all. Running and winning races is fun. Just that the track has to be your own.