Following Footsteps or Blazing a Trail?

What is it about comparing yourself to others that is so counterproductive, if not self-destructive? 

First of all, envy focuses our energy entirely on someone else rather than ourselves.  While we have no control over what enviable career path a particular person has taken, we do have control over what choices we make for ourselves.  And, generally speaking, do we really know what led them down their so-called enviable path?  Or what sacrifices they made to get there?  Maybe they sacrificed nothing valuable to them, but to you the compromises would have to be very significant.

Secondly, is it realistic to think that you will take the same exact path of someone else and excel in the same exact way?  Everyone has his or her own cocktail of aptitudes, preferences, experiences, upbringing, education, and financial circumstances so why would you follow in someone's exact footsteps?  It’s extremely draining and futile to match someone else’s tracks.  And, most importantly, it’s NOT YOU!

One of my favorite quotes that has seen me through some pretty self-doubting (and envy-ridden) times is by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“Do not go where the path may lead.  Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

 
There are many ways to get what you really want, but when you limit yourself to the paths others have taken, you are least likely to find personal fulfillment or your “sweet spot” as career experts like to say.  Someone else’s path of becoming a revered, published Harvard professor may have been an appropriate and even satisfying endeavor, but is it yours? 

We all tend to salivate over someone else’s degrees or talent or fame or salary, but I have found that I lose my ability to creatively invent my own niche when I am preoccupied envying someone else.  That preoccupation is actually fear that I’ll never be as good as that other person and therefore not be as successful. 

But this train of thought misses the point of career success entirely.  In most fields, the simple economic rule of supply and demand prevails.  We must meet a need that is not being met in some way.  Attempting to follow someone else's exact path does not fill an unmet need- that person is already supplying the need that is in demand.  Your job is to supply a need that no one has yet supplied and that only you, in your unique way, can offer.  And that, as Emerson said, is "leaving a trail."