Such comparisons can have positive sides--if Kim decided that she was going to work even harder to become an even better writer because she wanted to reach the other student's level, then that comparison would have provided her with motivation.  Athletes constantly compare their times or performances with those of other athletes so that they'll be motivated to work harder and improve.  One thing that you'll rarely see with athletes, though, is for them to give up and never compete again just because someone else is better at their event than they are.  They know that improvement in athletics comes when we compete against ourselves, when we're able to be objective about our performances and work to improve them.

When we compare our own skills or abilities to those of other people, we're doing ourselves a great disservice.  We're often setting a standard for ourselves that is far too high, depending on the area of comparison.  My brother may be much stronger than I, and I could give up athletics in discouragement because I'll never do as well in some things as he does.  On the other hand, I can run much faster and longer than he can, so why do I spend so much time focusing on the comparison that puts me in a bad light?

It's not a ridiculous analogy--I've known hundreds of people in my life who criticize themselves for not being as good as someone else at something.  And when I've pointed out that they have their own strengths, the usual answer is something like, "Yeah, but. . . ."  Somehow, they want to stay focused on the area that makes them look bad.  Perhaps it makes life easier when we see ourselves as poor performers in certain areas, because then we never have to deal with high expectations.  And they want to avoid focusing on their strengths, because doing so just might make them feel good about themselves.

It's a very treacherous tendency.

I wish I could tell all my students and all the people they know that they should focus on their strengths.  I've taken piano lessons and I've spent many, many hours practicing the guitar, and I'm still nothing better than a poor-to-mediocre player.  I decided early on to relegate those endeavors to hobbies, because it was obvious that I never would get that good because of my poor hand-eye coordination where music is concerned.  I had friends in bands, and I would have liked nothing more than to be able to play in a band, but that just wasn't possible.  Rather than get down on myself for not being as good as my friends, though, I focused on the things I did well--writing and running and drawing, for example, and felt pretty good about what I did in those areas.

In our school systems, though, we set people up for this tendency when we make everyone take the same classes, and then we give them grades to let them know how their performance compares to the performances of others.  Kids learn early on to compare themselves to classmates' grades, to brothers' and sisters' performance in school.  "Your sister got all A's; how come you got C's?"  "I got an A on the quiz--what did you get?"  It's a sad system that we have to get over in our minds if we're to make the most of the gifts that we do have, the strengths that are uniquely ours.

If you're going to compare yourself to motivate yourself, then by all means do so.  Use another person's performance to improve yours.  But if you're going to judge yourself and make yourself feel awful because someone else is better at something than you, then please remember this:  you're choosing to make yourself miserable by choosing what to focus on, and by choosing the meaning that you assign to it.  Kim saw the other student's writing as meaning that Kim wasn't a good writer.  The truth of the matter was far from that.

Getting away from Comparisons      Alan Loy McGinnis