If you want to progress much faster, BLIND yourself to "other comparison mode"

Chase

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Many years ago I came across a study that found beginners and intermediates saw the most success when they compared themselves to themselves, and not to experts or gurus. Meanwhile, experts who shifted over to comparing themselves against other experts often achieved more gains that way.

Even though self-comparison reaps far more rewards for beginners and intermediates than other-comparison, you will still find heaps of greenhorns who are caught up comparing themselves heavily against experts. Progress for guys who are doing this tends to be low, if they make any at all.

Nevertheless, new guys and even some intermediate guys get swept up in this habit of "other comparison" against gurus or pop culture figures:

  • You click on a magazine site and there's some guy with ripped abs and a beaming smile relaxing by a high-end pool. "Money, muscles, status, prestige, and happiness," the brain says.

  • You try to watch something and a commercial comes on, with some good-looking guy in an expensive suit driving a high-end car, with a beautiful woman seated next to him, staring at him admiringly. "Looks, style, status, wealth, women," the brain says.

  • You open up social media and right there at the top is some guy with millions of followers showing off his new sports car, or his mansion with a palm tree in the front yard, and in other pictures he's looking off to the side all mysterious as some unnamed hot girl in a tight dress squeezes up next to him. "Fame, money, lifestyle, attitude, sex," the brain says.

The thing is, when the brain gets stuck in "comparison mode" with idealized images (let's just call them 'idols'), it proceeds to imagine a whole mythology around the idol. Then the guy doing the idealizing grows despondent because the distance is so vast between where he's at and where (he imagines) this idol is at it seems hopeless. His progress stalls. "What's the point?" he says. "I can never get there!"

The actual case is the guys in magazines and commercials and social media are just normal humans. They don't look nearly as good during the 99.4% of the time they are not doing a shoot. They have all the same emotional issues and problems everybody else has. Most of the time their girls are not even that hot. If you see the women they are actually with when they aren't posing for pictures or film, you would not envy most of them. If you talked to most of them you would find them no more enlightened or aware and not any cooler than anybody else you'll meet in day-to-day life.

To put a cherry on top of it, here are two articles I wrote blowing up some of the mythology around some of the most idealized men in Hollywood... if you've never deep dived into what life is really like for idols, these'll be eye-opening:



But the brain does not know any of this. Instead, all it sees are idealized images, then fills in the blanks on its own with even more idealized imaginings.

If you're a newbie, or even an intermediate, it is very, very helpful to limit yourself from exposure to any of these kinds of idealized images.

They are not there to help you. They are not honest portrayals of the guy's real life. They're advertising and mythology devised to create followings.

Once you understand this, and can reduce or eliminate idols from your life, you free yourself up to focus on your OWN progress, at your OWN speed, using SELF comparison, which is the correct way to learn.

  • INCORRECT WAY TO COMPARE: "Man, look at the 10 million Instagram followers and all the hot babes and lavish living Joe Instawhore has. I could self-improve for 100 years and I'll never reach his level. What's the point... :("

  • CORRECT WAY TO COMPARE: "This is great! Compared to last month, I'm doing more pushups per set, squats are so much easier, I've shed 3 lbs. while gaining strength, I added 12 new girls to my contacts, half of them hot leads, and I bedded 2 of them with dates lined up with another 3. Not to mention I talked my way onto that project at work that is going to let me develop new skills and connect me with a bevy of higher ups. I'm doing great right now!"

Self-comparison is a much better metric for progress because it gives you detailed, nuanced comparison. It is easy to see if you have made progress vs. you a month ago or you half a year ago (or if you've backslid a bit and have some recovery to do). When you compare yourself to an ideal, progress is near-impossible to measure, because any progress you seem to make appears insignificant next to that ideal.

The fact is, almost all real progress is made while conducting self-comparison. All those guys you are admiring got there the same way -- they were nobodies who concentrated obsessively on certain aspects of their lives and improved through dedicated self-comparison.

This is the core lesson to take away from this:

  1. Comparison to idealized role models leads to paralysis, fatalism, and apathy.

  2. Self-comparison leads to useful metrics and actionable objectives that lend themselves to real progress.

This is one reason why it's good to be careful of your media diet: what you read, what you watch, what sites you surf, what social media you consume.

You don't need to completely cut all that out; just be wary of stuff that triggers "other-comparison" in you and try to avoid it.

You want to focus on self-comparison, at least as a beginner/intermediate.

That's how you get good.

Chase
 

Bismarck

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Great post as usual Chase!

I'd chime in that this is why I don't watch MS TV shows at all (except Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Wire), so avoid things like Friends, etc. Also why I am very careful with the movies I watch.

When I lived in London I saw a movie with a burgeoning actor who had just finished his theatre studies at one of the most reputed academies that teach thespians in the UK. Then one night I bumped into him in a bar. He is a good-looking dude! In the movie, he was a bad boy/pimp. IRL he was sitting by himself with AA in the bar haha, waiting for chicks to approach him.

I believe Gun tells a story of some RSD people who were in Vegas and at one point were in a club or bar of some sort where Matt Damon was hanging out. Apparently, he saw either the coach or one of the students approach this dime single set, and was mesmerized, having commented "That's champion."
 

Kaida

Tool-Bearing Hominid
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Joined
Jul 6, 2020
Messages
541
Had to revisit this. Great post as usual!

—————

Many years ago I came across a study that found beginners and intermediates saw the most success when they compared themselves to themselves, and not to experts or gurus. Meanwhile, experts who shifted over to comparing themselves against other experts often achieved more gains that way.

Even though self-comparison reaps far more rewards for beginners and intermediates than other-comparison, you will still find heaps of greenhorns who are caught up comparing themselves heavily against experts. Progress for guys who are doing this tends to be low, if they make any at all.

Nevertheless, new guys and even some intermediate guys get swept up in this habit of "other comparison" against gurus or pop culture figures:

  • You click on a magazine site and there's some guy with ripped abs and a beaming smile relaxing by a high-end pool. "Money, muscles, status, prestige, and happiness," the brain says.

  • You try to watch something and a commercial comes on, with some good-looking guy in an expensive suit driving a high-end car, with a beautiful woman seated next to him, staring at him admiringly. "Looks, style, status, wealth, women," the brain says.

  • You open up social media and right there at the top is some guy with millions of followers showing off his new sports car, or his mansion with a palm tree in the front yard, and in other pictures he's looking off to the side all mysterious as some unnamed hot girl in a tight dress squeezes up next to him. "Fame, money, lifestyle, attitude, sex," the brain says.

The thing is, when the brain gets stuck in "comparison mode" with idealized images (let's just call them 'idols'), it proceeds to imagine a whole mythology around the idol. Then the guy doing the idealizing grows despondent because the distance is so vast between where he's at and where (he imagines) this idol is at it seems hopeless. His progress stalls. "What's the point?" he says. "I can never get there!"

The actual case is the guys in magazines and commercials and social media are just normal humans. They don't look nearly as good during the 99.4% of the time they are not doing a shoot. They have all the same emotional issues and problems everybody else has. Most of the time their girls are not even that hot. If you see the women they are actually with when they aren't posing for pictures or film, you would not envy most of them. If you talked to most of them you would find them no more enlightened or aware and not any cooler than anybody else you'll meet in day-to-day life.

To put a cherry on top of it, here are two articles I wrote blowing up some of the mythology around some of the most idealized men in Hollywood... if you've never deep dived into what life is really like for idols, these'll be eye-opening:



But the brain does not know any of this. Instead, all it sees are idealized images, then fills in the blanks on its own with even more idealized imaginings.

If you're a newbie, or even an intermediate, it is very, very helpful to limit yourself from exposure to any of these kinds of idealized images.

They are not there to help you. They are not honest portrayals of the guy's real life. They're advertising and mythology devised to create followings.

Once you understand this, and can reduce or eliminate idols from your life, you free yourself up to focus on your OWN progress, at your OWN speed, using SELF comparison, which is the correct way to learn.

  • INCORRECT WAY TO COMPARE: "Man, look at the 10 million Instagram followers and all the hot babes and lavish living Joe Instawhore has. I could self-improve for 100 years and I'll never reach his level. What's the point... :("

  • CORRECT WAY TO COMPARE: "This is great! Compared to last month, I'm doing more pushups per set, squats are so much easier, I've shed 3 lbs. while gaining strength, I added 12 new girls to my contacts, half of them hot leads, and I bedded 2 of them with dates lined up with another 3. Not to mention I talked my way onto that project at work that is going to let me develop new skills and connect me with a bevy of higher ups. I'm doing great right now!"

Self-comparison is a much better metric for progress because it gives you detailed, nuanced comparison. It is easy to see if you have made progress vs. you a month ago or you half a year ago (or if you've backslid a bit and have some recovery to do). When you compare yourself to an ideal, progress is near-impossible to measure, because any progress you seem to make appears insignificant next to that ideal.

The fact is, almost all real progress is made while conducting self-comparison. All those guys you are admiring got there the same way -- they were nobodies who concentrated obsessively on certain aspects of their lives and improved through dedicated self-comparison.

This is the core lesson to take away from this:

  1. Comparison to idealized role models leads to paralysis, fatalism, and apathy.

  2. Self-comparison leads to useful metrics and actionable objectives that lend themselves to real progress.

This is one reason why it's good to be careful of your media diet: what you read, what you watch, what sites you surf, what social media you consume.

You don't need to completely cut all that out; just be wary of stuff that triggers "other-comparison" in you and try to avoid it.

You want to focus on self-comparison, at least as a beginner/intermediate.

That's how you get good.

Chase

What about if most of the skill you’re trying to improve on requires exposure to experts?

For example, I’m trying to learn how to make beats. Usually when making beats, people categorize their beats based on the style of beat a specific rapper tends to rap on. Ex: “Gunna type beat”.

So in order to learn, I had to listen to a bunch of gunna type beats to get a feel for the style. But like you predicted, they were just so much better than mine that I got discouraged trying to emulate it.

I still try and put the work in anyway but its much less passionate than it was before.

How do I get around this?
 

Chase

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@Kaida,

Well, I can weigh in on this too. I spent four years making beats in college. I got pretty good in the end.

When I was a beginner, I didn't really compare my beats to pros at all. I would listen to songs, and say things like, "Ooh, that's a nice bass line," then use the same bass line but build a new beat on top of it. Or I'd say, "Wow, I like that instrumental flourish. I wonder if I can have something like that in a beat," or, "I like how they sampled opera music there. What if I found a piece of opera music to sample?" or, "It's neat when the strings drop off, then come back in later. I should add that to a track," or, "That's pretty cool how it starts with this intro that is quieter and flatter, then explodes into the full beat five seconds in."

You just find these bits and pieces you like, add them to your own stuff, listen to how it sounds, and keep working on it.

I spent so much time listening to my own beats then too, looking back... lol. I'd make a beat I thought was fire, then I'd just listen to it over and over again, nodding my head at how skilled I was. A year later I'd be doing the same thing with a recent beat, but I'd listen to an older beat of mine from earlier on and go, "Geez, I had some parts okay, but I've really come a long way from there."

So yeah, you pay attention to what pros do. You listen to the music they make. You take ideas and inspiration from them. But you should not really be listening to them saying, "I"m no XYZ big name producer yet." That's not going to help you any. Just focus on creating new beats that are better than your old ones.

Chase
 

Regal Tiger

Cro-Magnon Man
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Mar 16, 2015
Messages
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@Kaida I'll weigh in on that as well, but for me it's poetry

But yeah, basically the same thing @Chase said; you tinker with the parts that get your own creative juices flowing. But you're not actually comparing your work to theirs

If anything, you're genuinely appreciating someone else's work and then using it as inspiration rather than seeing any kind of journey or task
 

SteelbookCollector

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Oct 15, 2023
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55
ya, i look reality from a different mindset, perspective now, and that is, it seems guys, men, are the only gender that were meant to have a mentor, or have mentors in their life, you don't really hear of women having a mentor in their life when they are trying to improve or get better at something.
 
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