Caught Up In Other People's Success Stories
We can learn a lot from the success stories of other people. But if we’re not careful about how we process and relate to those stories, we can start to get caught up in them and use them as a template to measure our own success - instead of studying the through lines or the nuggets of wisdom they contain.
In this episode, we discuss how we can avoid getting caught up in other people’s success stories, and use them instead to promote our own growth.
Episode Transcription
Intro:
We can learn a lot from the success stories of other people. But one of the things that can happen if we’re not careful about how we process and relate to those stories is we can start to get caught up in them - and we can start to use them as a template to measure our own success instead of studying the through lines or the nuggets of wisdom that they contain.
So in this episode let’s talk about how we can avoid getting caught up in other people’s success stories, and use them instead to promote our own growth.
Here we go.
Main:
Today I want to talk about something that I think a lot of us get caught up in, and it’s the way we process the success stories of other people.
Now when I say the success stories of other people I want you to call to mind someone who when you see what they’re doing or what they’ve accomplished, or you hear about what they’ve done, it causes you to get a little stirred up inside.
So it could be anyone from someone famous who has achieved stardom, or a certain level of excellence, or it could be someone who’s much closer to you like a acquaintance or someone you look up to, maybe someone who’s building the kind of business you want to build or who has created a certain kind of career or relationship or lifestyle that you admire, anyone who when you look at them you think: “Wow I really wish I could do that or have that in my life.”
Sometimes when we hear the success stories of those people we get caught up in doing this thing where we try to compare where we are to where they are, and we do it in a way where we try to make a one to one comparison.
So we look at what they have and where they’re at and what they’ve accomplished and we automatically use that as a way to gauge how we’re doing.
So a simple example that I can offer you is one that I know a lot of us struggle with - and it’s one that I struggled with and that I continue to get caught up in from time to time - which is comparing the trajectory of your career to someone else’s career.
When I started my company and I was just beginning, I would study other successful entrepreneurs and what they were doing, and I would sit there and listen to their success stories on podcasts or in person or I’d read about them, and they would talk about what their business was accomplishing.
And the information that I was learning was helpful but lurking under the surface every time I’d hear a success story was this anxiety around thinking - how the hell am I gonna do that? Like I hear the message, but the uncertainty around my own path and my inability to see how I can translate where I am now into some form of where that successful person is would be completely overwhelming for me - to the point where I didn’t want to hear about someone else’s success and I started to tune important information and stories out, because it would just put front and center for me how much different my story was than theirs and how far I had to go.
And I know for many of us, whether we’re just starting our career or even if we’re pretty far down the path, or if we’re trying to switch careers, this is a thought loop we can easily get stuck in.
So the challenge becomes when we see the results of someone else’s success, it can be very easy to feel disconnected and discouraged because we have a hard time envisioning what it would take to get from where we are to a point that’s analogous to where that person is - to the point where we don’t want to hear about anyone else’s success because it make us feel so inadequate or confused.
And another way to put it is we get stuck when we try to measure our own success through the lens of someone else’s experience.
And when our mind tries to set up this one to one comparison to try to take stock of how we’re doing, the difference between where we are and where the person is who we admire seems so massive that we get caught up in thinking that our story and our path is not good enough, that what we’re doing isn’t big enough, it’s not sexy enough, we’re not moving fast enough, we don’t have what it takes to do what that person did.
In other words there’s a gap and a chasm that we can’t account for that causes us to experience a lot of self doubt and question our own intuition and decisions.
One of the other things we tend to do when we see the success stories of other people is get caught up in focusing too much on the climax of their personal or professional story and not the entire journey.
So in other words, many of the stories we hear about successful people involve some sensational turning point or event - like a defining moment, or an act of grandeur, or a stroke of luck that solidified their path - maybe it was their big break or the moment when years of hard work actually paid off.
And we can hear someone’s entire success story but we can get stuck on focusing on those big moments. We tend to focus too much on the “climax” of someone’s success story instead of what led to it.
And when we do that we end up dramatizing the success stories of other people in a way that it makes us feel like what we’re doing each and every day just isn’t good enough, it’s not big enough, it’s not bold enough, and we’re not moving fast enough. We feel so stuck in the minutiae of our day to day and we don’t see enough of the big things - like the ones we hear about in success stories.
And when we get caught up in that type of thinking, we start to overlook the many, many nuggets of truth that are in success stories, and instead of feeling inspired we get discouraged because we’re trying to see ourselves through the lens of someone else’s experience and success and we just can’t see it.
So what to do about this. If this is happening for you in any part of your life - personal, professional, anything - I want to give you 3 things to think about.
And the first one involves a metaphor that I continue to go back to all the time for myself that I think is helpful here.
So in Asia there’s a species of bamboo that’s called the Chinese bamboo tree.
Now once the seeds for this particular tree are planted, there’s no immediate visible growth on the surface for a long time. And by a long time I mean a long time. Nothing happens in the first year, nothing happens in the second year, a third year passes and then a fourth year passes, and still nothing is happening above the surface.
Then suddenly in the fifth year, after no visible growth above ground, something miraculous happens. The tree starts to sprout. And not only does it start to sprout, within one week it grows up to 90 feet tall! 90 feet in a single week. And it’s growing so fast you can actually hear it growing, you can hear it expanding.
Now the question is: Did the tree grow in one week or 5 years & 1 week?
It’s growing the entire time but it’s not visible necessarily to anyone who’s only looking for the typical indicators we look to when we’re measuring growth - which is the kind that we can see above ground.
But for that five years guess what it’s doing? Growing an elaborate root system, making connections underground with the things around it, it’s curling it’s roots around rocks, it’s expanding horizontally and vertically, it’s taking in nutrients, and it’s developing the foundation that will later support its VISIBLE growth above ground.
And so after years of foundation laying, it’s ready and it has its moment, and then it’s ON. It experiences exponential visible growth.
So bringing this back to the success of others, I love this example of how things unfold because as observers we usually only get to witness the above-ground success of people we admire.
We weren’t there with them when they were just seedlings trying to figure it all out. We weren’t observers of the monotonous day after day routines and habits they had that were not sexy at all, and we didn’t see all of the foundation laying it took for them over the years. We didn’t see them overcome challenges and make incremental progress day over day over day. All we generally see is the 90 feet worth of above ground growth.
So my first thought for you is that I want to encourage you to consider how you define growth, and be open to the possibility that not all growth is outwardly and immediately “visible” or measurable. I want you to keep in mind that there’s an entire backstory to the success of others, and that what you’re doing day in and day out may not feel glamorous or exciting and may not feel like it’s leading toward the big thing - but you are growing. That’s the natural growth process for most people, for most businesses, for most relationships, for just about anything. And the people who you admire and look up to, they experienced the same thing.
The second thing I’d like you to consider is that your path doesn’t need to be glamorous or splashy or high profile or filled with major ups and major downs in order to work. A lot of the success stories we hear involve some level of glamour or grandeur because those are the ones that are sometimes the most interesting to hear because it’s like a story that’s being told. It has twists and turns and drama and all of the hallmarks of a story - and so those are the success stories that get repeated and that’s how we hear about them. And also storytelling, as we know, can also include a component of exaggeration for the sake of the story - it just makes it more interesting.
But I want you to remember that there are so many people who you’ve never heard of before who have achieved incredible levels of success just by focusing on steady, incremental progress. They achieved everything they wanted to achieve just by knowing themselves and what helps them show up at their best, by working a process, and by believing in their own ability. And they stuck to their plan long enough and were resilient enough to get what they wanted.
So their success stories are not defined by grandeur but instead they’re defined by consistent practices, faith in their ability, and the courage to show up every day and pursue their own path with intention. They may not get the publicity or the hype, but they got what they wanted in the end.
So in other words, if you’re sitting there thinking that you’re doing it wrong because no one’s paying attention to you yet or you haven’t had that big climax storybook moment, or you feel like the process is monotonous, I want you to know that it’s not necessary for you to have splashy moments to succeed. Those are not necessarily indicators of success. You don’t need them to be a part of your story in order for you to experience success, using whatever definition of success you’re using.
And then last, I encourage you to focus on the through-lines or concepts you hear in success stories - instead of using the story as a template to measure your own success. So listening to the success stories of others is important and a healthy way to gain new insights or inspiration, but we have to make sure we’re not using those stories as templates to measure our own success.
The reason we want to latch on to comparing our story to someone else’s story is because if we can find indicators that what we’re doing is similar, then our day to day doesn’t feel as uncertain. But again, when we look at our story and try to compare it to someone else’s at the granular level, at that level it’s harder to find commonalities because each of our paths are so different.
So instead of trying to use their stories as a template for yourself, listen to their success stories and focus on the through lines or the concepts or the nuggets of truth that they hold.
For example, if you listen to enough of these stories, one of the common themes is that people who build successful businesses and careers just never give up. They get up everyday, work the process, solve problems, and they keep repeating that over and over and eventually they get it. Now that’s just one theme among many, but that’s the type of throughline that we should be looking for as we’re listening.
The last thing I’ll say is that I want you to remember to anchor yourself in the the reality that we each have our own individual path, and the more we focus on our own path, and invest in building our own version of success, the more receptive we’ll be to the true value and wisdom we can gain from success stories, and the less susceptible we’ll be to getting caught up and stuck in them instead.
Go have a great workday.