Hi, everybody, It's Eric from the one you feed with another mini episode, and um this one. I want to talk about comparing ourselves to others or envy. Teddy Roosevelt said that comparison is the thief of joy. It's the sort of thing that is so poisonous, and it is for me anyway, and I think others feel the same. And it's what you know. Envy is one of the seven deadly sins in Dante's Inferno. The envious have their eyes sown shut. So it's clearly historically been looked at
as a really challenging thing. And I think the problem is that it's one of those things that makes us feel bad about ourselves and about another person, sort of all simultaneously. It eats at my heart. It starts in the stomach and reaches up for a tight grip on the throat. It devalues all that I've done. It can minimize all that I have, and sometimes it feels like it gates all that I am. Comparison is almost always focused on the outside. How do we look, how to
others see us? How much of this do we have? How much of that do we have? Comparing ourselves to others is a losing game under the best circumstances, but we tend to stack the deck against ourselves when we start comparing our insides to other people's outsides. People tend to look pretty composed, pretty happy, pretty confident on the outside. We all work to project this, and yet we compare how we feel on the inside and worth what somebody else is projecting on the outside. And it's always a
bad idea. Everybody has their share of concerns and anxiety and fear, and and to think that there are these people run around out there that don't really lands us in a lot of trouble. So what do we do with this? They're surprisingly little written about the best ways to cope with comparison and envy. Nothing that's got any substance to it anyway. Interestingly, I came a raw something by Danielle Laporte, who I interviewed a little while ago, and we're trying to get the episode done and out
to everyone. We're having some audio troubles, but um she has a quote that says, rather than comparing, imagine, imagine yourself feeling the way you want to feel, successful, brilliant, free, healthy, connected. That's it. You're not making yourself less than or more than anyone else. You're simply giving yourself permission to want
what you want. What I found interesting about Danielle's interview we did with her, and we also talked about the same thing in the interview that will be coming out Tuesday with Christine Hassler is this idea of we tend to think that we want this thing, or we want that thing, or we want to look like this, and so we focus very much on that form instead of
focusing on the feeling that's behind it. So an example would be what she's suggesting is you focus on how you want to feel first, understand what that is, and then you can make better decisions about what the things are that lead you to that. And so it's the same thing that Christine talks about form the New car versus the essence. I want to feel energized, I want to feel successful, I want to feel important, whatever those
things are. And so that's a that's a powerful way to look at it, but I really like the heart of it being imagined. Don't compare. I think the other thing that comes up relatively often, and again I'm gonna quote Danielle Laporte because she had good things to say about it is she basically says, wish well for people, you know, the rich, skinny and love, confident powered people quicker than you can say, I wish I had that, say to yourself, or even better to them, way to go,
you look great. I admire you. With envy out of the way, you'll have more space for your own greatness to step forward. And uh, I know from past experience this does tend to work. It's not easy at first, but it does tend to work if I focus on trying to wish well for people I'm envious of. And then the last thing that came up in an article I saw was the idea of opportunity cost An opportunity costs simply means that when I do something, I can't
do something else. And so when we're looking at other people who have certain things, we're not looking at the opportunity cost that was there. So an example would be if I see somebody who lives in San Francisco, I could feel jealous about that, but they're not getting that I got is the time with my son, the big
backyard with the dogs. There's always trade offs in everything in life, and when we narrow ourselves into very focusedly looking at one thing, we almost always end up myopically unhappy. So I know this is one that I wrestle with, I think a lot of other people wrestle with. So hopefully this has been somewhat helpful. And UM, one other thing I am going to start on October thirt I'm going to send out for emails one each week where I'm going to cover the key point in Stephen Covey's
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It is a book that has been read so widely, and it's often dismissed because it seems like it's a business book and it's really not. He does talk about some business concepts, but so many of the things that have been critical to me in making changes in my life I learned in that book. And so many of the things that get recycled today really have a lot of their origin there. So I'm gonna do just the key pieces in there.
UH an email every week for four weeks and UH it's free and all you have to do is sign up to our email list. So if you go to one you feed, dot net slash email, you can sign up there or on our front page. Thanks everybody, have a good evening. Bye. Wo