Incomparably Awesome

Sure you're bigger than me...but you're not better

I like to read blogs other than my own.  I regularly follow quite a few, and they have had tremendous impact on my development as a blogger thus far. Amongst my favorites is Very Smart Brothas. Its primarily a relationship blog – and I love its humor, creativity, snarkiness, and intelligence. With that being said, the great respect for the writers of this blog and the blog itself was almost the undoing of The Awesomeness Consultant. Why? Because I made the critical mistake of comparing my blog to theirs.

You see, a post on Very Smart Brothas is (toward the high end) gonna get in the neighborhood of 1000 comments. A post on The Awesomeness Consultant is (toward the high end) gonna get in the neighborhood of 4. And if I just throw the math out there and say that they get 250 times as many comments as me, it sounds pretty bad. Not “pretty” bad, but “I’m not gonna blog anymore because I obviously suck” bad. Needless to say, I’ve obsessed over getting more readers, more followers, and of course, more comments.  So I read and re-read posts at VSB hoping to discover the philosopher’s stone. What was the secret formula that eluded me? How could I too perfectly blend humor, wisdom, sarcasm, and pop-culture reference?  What is the key to transmutation? Reveal thy wonders VSB!

Then the realization occurred that made me understand that I was going about the whole thing the wrong way: I’m The Awesomeness Consultant not Very Smart Brothas.  There are a million reasons why they are where they are, the least of which is not that fact that they’ve been doing this for three years and have over 700 posts. In contrast, I’ve been doing this for 1.5 months and have…hold on let me check…16 posts.  I should slap myself shouldn’t I?

So I came to the conclusion that comparing yourself to someone else will invariably lead to two places:

Misplaced contentment with self – At this destination, you have compared yourself to someone else and have found yourself to be “superior.” Understand that this feeling of superiority is a completely manufactured product of your ego – and it is false. You are not superior.

Misplaced discontentment with self – At this destination, you have compared yourself to someone else and have found yourself to be “inferior.” Understand that this feeling of inferiority is a completely manufactured product of your ego – and it is false. You are not inferior.

You’re probably thinking…Wait AC, those sound like the same place. And my response is…Yup, just with different scenery.

The only person that you can reliably measure yourself against with any validity is YOU. Everything that makes you who you are – your ambitions, your failures, your philosophies, your fears, your strengths – makes any external measure/standard completely unfit and useless. Why? Because you are incomparably awesome.