Comparison is a con

The most important thing I've done isn't on my CV

I read Ryan Holiday’s post about turning almost 40 the other night.

I’ve always loved how he writes about this stuff - about most things really - about the long arc of a career, the books stacked up behind him, the discipline that put them there etc.

It’s an excellent post.

But in the middle of reading it, I started doing the math, and I realised something: Ryan’s only a few years older than I am.

Literally, he’s ahead by a handful of years.

Well, I’m sorry to say, that realisation was enough to send me into a small-scale (or not so small) spiral.

It didn’t actually bother me that he’s an accomplished chap. Everyone knows he’s accomplished. It was more his proximity to me, and to my life and work. If he’d been twenty years ahead I could have filed him under “different generation, different game,” and gone to bed, and slept quite peacefully indeed.

But a few years…

A few years is close enough that I can’t actually pretend that we started in different worlds. We’re almost the same age, and look at the gap.

He’s published - what, half a dozen books? More? He has a back catalogue, and an absolute machine of a career. He successfully turned Stoicism into a small empire. And I sat there with my phone going dark in my hand, running the tape of my own life against his, and the tape came up short. By a measure of me and my years on this rock and his - I’ve achieved next to nothing.

I have a solo agency. I built it, I love it, it pays my bills, it’s mine, I answer to no one I don’t choose to answer to, and on a good day it feels like a calling. I have a blog I love - genuinely love, writing I’d keep doing if the internet went dark and I had to print it out and hand it to strangers on the street.

These are not nothing.

Lord knows, these are not nothing.

These are, by any sane accounting, a life I would have killed for ten years ago.

But at 1am, alone in a hotel in Berlin, next to Ryan Holiday’s bibliography, none of it counted worth a dime. That’s what comparison does; it never actually weighs your life. It takes everything you’ve built and adjusts it to zero so that the only number left on the board is the one thing you haven’t done.

The one thing you’ve never done.

I haven’t published the books.

So I feel like a failure.

Full stop.

That might be completely fucking insane, but it feels completely true while you’re inside it.

Comparison is a con. It’s a magic trick that works by controlling what you’re allowed to look at. It picks the one axis where you come up short, holds it an inch from your face, and insists up and down, black and blue that it’s the whole picture.

• Books published.

• Followers.

• Revenue.

• Whatever.

It never lets you choose the axis. If it did, the trick wouldn’t work, because the second you get to pick what counts, the whole sham of comparison falls apart.

Well, I get to choose anyway.

Let me pick.

The single greatest thing I have ever done is not my agency. It’s not the blog. It’s not anything with my name printed on a spine in a bookshop.

It’s that I got sober.

And then I stayed sober.

It didn’t come with a launch. There was no pre-order link, no one wrote a glowing review of the night I decided I couldn’t keep going the way I was going and decided once and for all not to jump, and not to keep drinking. There’s no metric for that. You can’t put “didn’t drink today” on a CV and you can’t sell it as a course. It is the most important work I will ever do and it is completely invisible to the scoreboard that had me feeling like a failure because another writer published more books than me.

That’s the obscenity of it. The struggle that nearly killed me, the edge I clawed my way back from, the choice I have to keep making, day after day, and night after night, doesn’t register on the comparison machine at all. The machine only sees output. It can’t see survival; it can’t see the days that were a genuine fight and the only person who knows is me; and it can’t see the version of me that doesn’t exist anymore because I made sure they didn’t.

Ryan Holiday has written more books than me. Good. I hope he writes a hundred more. His career is not a tax on mine. His output does not subtract from my life. We are not running the same race, because there is no race - there’s Holiday doing his work and me doing mine, and the only reason it ever felt like a contest is that I let a stranger’s bibliography set the terms of how I value my own existence.

That’s a damned fool thing to let happen.

And I’m allowed to call it foolish because I’m the one who did it.

The books, if they come, will come. Maybe they won’t. I genuinely don’t know anymore whether that’s the shape my work is supposed to take, and I’m increasingly fine with not knowing. But I know what I’d choose if someone made me. Every publishing deal in the world, or another year of sobriety.

It’s not even close.

Consider this a rare note to myself as much as to anyone reading. When you catch yourself measuring your life against someone else’s highlight reel and coming up empty, check who’s holding the ruler. Check what they decided to measure. Then throw the ruler out, because the odds are, picked the one thing that makes you small and hid everything that makes you…well, you.

Comparison is fucking stupid.

It nearly convinced me I’d wasted my life.

I haven’t.

I’m sober. I built something I love. I’m still here.

Everything else is, as they say, pure gravy.