Week 5 of 54 — The real cancer
One night, in a hotel in a city whose name I don't remember, I wrote a sentence in my notebook, in a single line.
The next day I read it again.
It was this.
"I don't believe in myself, so I always have to prove things to others to make them true."
I had never said it to anyone. Not even to myself. But written in black and white, it was obvious.
And in that sentence was the real cancer.
I spent my whole life wanting to be someone in the eyes of others.
Wanting to be accepted by those I considered better than me.
As a child I would look at people who had something I lacked. A book I couldn't afford. A trip that wasn't even mentioned at home. A lifestyle that no one in my family had ever lived.
And that's exactly how you survive as a child. You look at who knows and you learn. You look at who has and you understand that infinite possibilities exist. Without comparison, no learning. No culture. No progress. Just absorbing.
In 1954 an American psychologist, Leon Festinger, put it in black and white with a simple experiment: when we don't have objective measures to understand where we are, who we are, what we're worth, what's normal, we use others as a compass. That's how the species learned to survive.
Comparison, in that form, is one thing, it's gathering information.
This type of comparison is not a problem. Actually. Keep it, always. Because it saves you.
I would look, learn and inside myself search for a way to surpass them all.
But there's an exact moment when comparison stops being a tool in our favor and becomes poison.
It's a subtle moment. There's no alarm bell. It's not a threshold you consciously cross.
It happens when you stop asking yourself "what can I learn from what others do?" and start asking yourself "where am I compared to others?"
For me it happened around seventeen. I didn't understand it right away. At first it seemed like healthy ambition. It seemed like hunger. It seemed like the engine that would take me far from a town of a thousand inhabitants.
That's how I started catching every wave. Trading. Forex. A blog. Videos. Social.
Thirteen years of beginnings, thinking that the beginning was enough to get me a seat at those tables, to give me "the right to..." be someone.
And every beginning was, even though I didn't admit it then, a way to tell myself: "if I succeed at this thing, then I'm worth as much as them."
Them. Always them. Never me.
It wasn't envy, it was just my inability to be me.
There's something I read recently that took my breath away. In 2009 a group of Japanese researchers put people in an MRI machine and showed them the lives of other people more capable than them. The result was that the part of the brain that activated was the same one that activates when you hurt yourself physically. The anterior cingulate cortex.
That feeling you get when you hear about a victory, you're not imagining it. It's your brain processing it as real pain.
For years I believed that stab was motivation.
Instead, that passage, from information to judgment about oneself, is the real cancer.
It was the desire to prove that kept me standing. It was comparison that fueled all the beginnings I had never brought to an end.
And when the fuel is comparison, it consumes you as you move forward. Because the race never ends. Because in the end there will always be someone ahead of you.
And if you stop for a second, you realize you no longer know what you were looking for.
When everything changed I was in Bali, years later, traveling, alone, in a place where no one knew me.
I was watching people. They weren't rich, or at least not as we usually understand the word. Yet they lived in a way that completely threw me off.
They lived. Period.
Without comparing themselves to anyone. Without looking at others too much. Without measuring themselves.
Not because they were wise. Because they had chosen themselves. They had decided on a direction, even if small, and followed it, deaf to the rest.
In that moment I changed the axis of the question I had been asking myself for thirteen years.
No longer: "where am I compared to them?"
But: "where am I compared to who I want to be tomorrow?"
In this case too there's research that struck me. Hal Hershfield, a researcher first at Stanford then at UCLA, showed something simple. People who write a letter to themselves twenty years in the future, in the following days, become better. They save more. They eat better. They lie less.
Not because they're more motivated. Because they start to feel that future version as a real person they have a debt to.
And that debt, apparently, is a better measure of comparison than any life we see on Instagram.
The real measure: you across time
future you
▲
│
│
● you today
│
others ◄──────────────●──────────────► others
│
● yesterday you
│
▼
you years ago
Shift the axis. From horizontal, me compared to others, to vertical, me compared to myself across time.
Every morning, before taking my phone, I sit and ask myself two questions.
The first: "today I want to do this. But the me of tomorrow, in a year, in five, in a version that doesn't exist yet, what would they want me to do?"
The second: "am I making this decision for that version of me, or for someone else who isn't even in this room?"
The answers almost never match at first.
But when they start to match, something strange happens. The weight of comparison disappears. Not because you stop seeing others. Because you stop measuring yourself against others.
In any case the worst comparison is the horizontal one, because it acts in two phases.
First phase: it convinces you that your life is incomplete until you have what the other has. Even if you have everything. Even if you have more than you had dreamed.
Second phase: it steals the time to build a truly your own life. Because every minute spent measuring yourself against someone else is a minute stolen from who you need to become.
But there's good news. I know because I've seen it within myself.
The cancer of comparison isn't cured by accumulating more, climbing more, showing more. It's cured by changing the axis of the question.
I wrote something else, months later, in the same notebook.
"I don't compare myself to anyone anymore. I know exactly where I'm going and what I really want."
I hadn't had a vision. I had just changed the person I compared myself to. And that person was no longer in that room.
They're sitting somewhere, in a year, in five, in ten. They'll look me in the face and ask me just one thing.
"Are you doing, today, what you would have wanted me to do years ago?"
No one can ask you this question. Only you can ask it of yourself.
And when you ask it everything changes. Your ability to tell yourself the truth changes, to not lie to yourself, to not continue making others perceive you as different from what you really are, like I used to do.
Because you're finally looking in the right direction.
And that's how that information goes from being information to paths to follow. From knowledge to practical actions that guide you toward your future version. And that's how suffering transforms into a map that gives you a great advantage on the path.
We are the architects of our life. The creators of our future.
No one else.
And you, as you are, are exactly who you need to be, just choose it.
Fifty-four attempts to become better. This is the fifth. Best, Stefano.
Up next: the monkey mind.
Fifty-four attempts to become better.
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