Prompt: Write about measuring yourself against others.
Hey folks,
The prompt for today, June 16th, 2026, is: Write about measuring yourself against others.
This right here is my undoing.
I think, if I wasn’t already prone to it, social media has exacerbated my anxieties around this a hundredfold—maybe a thousandfold. One of the biggest things I have to work with and wrestle with is learning to stop measuring myself against others and to live within my means. And I don’t mean that just financially, but also in terms of my comforts, my interests, and my abilities.
I need to stop pushing myself outside of those things simply because I’m comparing myself to what other people are financially able to do, physically able to do, emotionally able to do, or whatever talents and skills they happen to have.
Having said that, I also think that seeing other people succeed in an area I’m interested in doesn’t mean I can’t succeed there too.
For example, if I go on Instagram or YouTube Shorts, there are a number of woodworkers who I think are fantastic. They’re doing amazing things on their social feeds that I don’t think I can do. And when I’ve tried to do those things myself, they’ve never turned out the way I envisioned or hoped they would.
My inclination is to decide that I can’t do it and then give up on it.
But what I have to realize is that there is something—either I’ve already discovered it and failed to recognize it, or I’m still on my way to discovering it—that I’m good at. And there may be things I do that those same people would look at and think, Wow, that’s pretty good. I’d like to be able to do that.
In that respect, there exists room enough in this world for everybody to be good at the thing they’re good at—to do it well, to do it often, and to find success with it.
While it’s valuable to look at other people’s work and judge it on its merits, I think the additional step of comparing it to what I’m capable of doing is my undoing.
So how do I fix that?
I don’t know.
I guess I have to accept what I’m capable of doing.
And I think this goes back to something I’ve said before: being proud of what I’m able to do and measuring myself against my own progress instead of someone else’s.
I really wish I didn’t measure myself against others so much. I wish I didn’t feel the need to keep up with the Joneses, as it were.
You can find this prompt and more at Letters Lounge.
Of course, I want to hear your thoughts on this, so please leave a comment or a link to your blog, audio journal, or whatever it happens to be.
I’ll talk to you tomorrow, folks.
This transcript was lightly cleaned up with the help of AI to improve readability while preserving the original voice and intent of the recording.
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