Excerpts from “Compare Yourself To Who You Were Yesterday, Not Someone Else Is Today” chapter of “12 Rules for Life” by Jordan Peterson.
Jordan Peterson: Benchmark Yourself Against Your Past Self
The most important benchmarks for entrepreneurs is past performance, current improvement over past performance, and results achieved compared to plan.
Rule 4: Compare Yourself To Who You Were Yesterday,
Not To Who Someone Else Is Today
“There is not just one game at which to succeed or fail. There are many games and, more specifically, many good games–games that match your talents, involve you productively with other people, and sustain and even improve themselves across time. The world allows for many ways of Being. If you don’t succeed at one, you can try another. You can pick something better matched to your unique mix of strengths, weaknesses, and situation. Furthermore, if changing games does not work, you can invent a new one. […]
It’s also unlikely that you’re playing only one game. You have a career and friends and family members and personal projects and artistic endeavors and athletic pursuits. You might consider judging your success across all the games you play. Imagine that you are very good at some, middling at others, and terrible at the remainder.
Perhaps that’s how it should be. You might object: I should be winning at everything! But winning at everything might only mean that you’re not doing anything new or difficult. You might be winning but you’re not growing, and growing might be the most important form of winning. Should victory in the present always take precedence over trajectory across time?”
Jordan Peterson in “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos“
Jordan Peterson makes several excellent points here: to learn and to grow you have to experiment and explore new approaches and methods, which means you have to accept setbacks and honest mistakes. The only way to win for a long period of time is to stop experimenting, but that sets you up for long-term failure.
We are always and simultaneously at point “a” (which is less desirable than it could be), moving towards point “b” (which we deem better, in accordance with our explicit and implicit values). We always encounter the world in a state of insufficiency and seek its correction. We can imagine new ways that things could be set right, and improved, even if we have everything we thought we needed. Even when satisfied, temporarily, we remain curious. We live within a framework that defines the present as eternally lacking and the future as eternally better. If we did not see things this way, we would not act at all.
But we can see. We can even see things that aren’t there. We can envision new ways that things could be better.We can construct new, hypothetical worlds, where problems we weren’t even aware of can now show themselves and be addressed. The advantages of this are obvious: we can change the world so that the intolerable state of the present can be rectified in the future. The disadvantage to all this foresight and creativity is chronic unease and discomfort. Because we always contrast what is with what could be, we have to aim at what could be. But we can aim too high. Or too low. Or too chaotically. So we fail and live in disappointment, even when we appear to others to be living well. How can we benefit from our imaginativeness, our ability to improve the future, without continually denigrating our current, insufficiently successful and worthless lives?
Jordan Peterson in “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos“
You have to see possibilities for improvements and better solutions to current problems. But that requires a certain amount of dissatisfaction with the status quo. If you are fully satisfied with the status quo, finding the motivation to explore potential improvements is hard. But if you are too dissatisfied, you can become dispirited and see improvements as impossible, or at least too hard and unlikely to be worth the effort. It requires a balance perspective that appreciates what’s good about the current situation but comprehends opportunities for improvement.
The first step is to take stock.
The future is like the past, But there’s a crucial difference. The past is fixed, but the future–it could be better. It could be better, some precise amount–the amount that can be achieved, perhaps, in a day, with some minimal engagement. The present is eternally flawed. But where you start might not be as important as the direction you are heading. Perhaps happiness is always to be found in the journey uphill, and not in the fleeting sense of satisfaction awaiting at the next peak. Much of happiness is hope, no matter how deep the underworld in which that hope was conceived.Five hundred small decisions, five hundred tiny actions, compose your day, today, and every day. Could you aim one or two of these at a better result? Better, in your own private opinion, by your own individual standards? Could you compare your specific personal tomorrow with your specific personal yesterday? Could you use your own judgment, and ask yourself what that better tomorrow might be?
Jordan Peterson in “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos“
This is good advice: start from where you are with what you have. Secondly, your ability to enjoy the “journey uphill” is essential to persevering as an entrepreneur. Most startups take years to achieve even modest success, much less to reach a substantial one. You must pick customers you want to serve and problems you enjoy wrestling with. You cannot focus on the finish line: it’s too far away from your start. You have to enjoy many small victories along the way to be able to go the distance.
Aim small.
Set the following goal: by the end of the day, I want things in my life to be a tiny bit better than they were this morning. Then you ask yourself, “What could I do, that I would do, that would accomplish that, and what small thing would I like as a reward?” Then you do what you have decided to do, even if you do it badly. Then you give yourself that damn coffee, in triumph. And you do the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. And, with each day, your baseline of comparison gets a little higher, and that’s magic. That’s compound interest. Do that for three years, and your life will be entirely different.Jordan Peterson in “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos“
One of my rules for thumb for bootstrapping is “zoom in for traction, zoom out for impact.” This phrasing by Jordan Peterson makes the same point in a slightly different way. It’s also a very good advice to celebrate small victories. You cannot defer all of your rewards to a distant peak, you will burn out.
All in all I found this book, and this chapter in particular, offered a wealth of practical advice.
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