Self Evaluation vs. Comparison

One of the things I struggle quite a lot with is my self-worth. Part of that is due to how I evaluate myself, my skills, and my place in life.

One of my strongest personality traits is my overall curiosity. I can find something interesting in (almost) every hobby, subculture, profession, person or topic, that I would want to explore. Which in turn leads to me usually starting quite a lot of new hobbies, projects etc. on a regular basis. I can immerse myself quite quickly in something new and it usually starts with me reading a lot on that topic.

While I absolutely love this side of myself (after all it tends to lead to a lot of new skills, and I tend to have a very good time trying out something new) it regularly leads to the situation that I am a newbie and am comparing myself and my newly aquired skillset to that of the pros. This leads to a very skewed self-perception. Always the newbie, always comparing myself to the pros.

A well known saying says: “Comparison is the thief of joy”. In my case I think this is especially true. Comparing myself to experts and seldomly being able to live up to my very own expectations.

I struggle to find a good way to deal with this as I don´t want to stop trying out new hobbies and interests, don´t want to strive towards getting better in a field even if I just started taking an interest in it and I do not foresee any change in my attitude towards comparing myself to the people that are better in something than me, rather than to the random average people I might have surpassed already just by starting to read up on the very basics of something.

The only mitigating factor I can think of to still raise my self-worth a little (or at least to prevent it from further taking a nose-dive) is to start celebrating the smalls wins and achievement on the way. Just aknowledging what I achieved and comparing my current self to a past version of me. Trying from time to time to put an emphasis on the things I learnt along the way already and any new skills I might have picked up.

One of these little and maybe insignificant seeming achievements is the creation of this blog. While in it self this might not be impressive I still can take some pride and joy in the fact that I created this. More or less from scratch. This site is created via a static site generator, self-hosted on a VPS. This is also a perfect example of what I mentioned before. In and of itself the creation and setup of this blog might not be a huge deal. It definitely is not a big deal to those who know what they are doing. For me I can take some pride in the fact that I applied some knowledge of nginx, DNS entries, html, hugo, etc. that I did not have 2 month ago. The resulting site is also not that impressive. Most somewhat tech savvy layman could generate something a lot more aesthetic or gripping using Wordpress or any other CMS or blog/website service. For me, the fact I did not take any “shortcut”, opted for the route that provided me with more opportunities to learn and applying existing knowledge and have something (even something small and seemingly insignificant) to show for is worth something.

I think in conclusion the lesson here should be that to truly built up self-esteem, self-love and self-worth (or however you would want to phrase it), you need to stop comparing yourself to others, stop to always try to see yourself through their eyes. Start doing things just for you. And for no one else.

– cheers