I remember there was a point in my life where I looked around me and felt like I wasn’t really doing enough in my life. I didn’t really talk about it with people, I just kind of kept it to myself. But on the outside and to everyone everything looked normal. I would go about my daily activities and put a smile on my face like nothing was bothering me. But deep inside, I just felt like I was behind of life.
What worsened the matter was when I would see other people; like some of my peers that I started off with back in college or in my neighborhood, making progress and succeeding in their fields. It felt like they just took off without even notifying me. There they were on one side looking like they had everything figured out and here I was on the other still trying to figure out what to do with my life. It’s not like I conceived envy in my heart against them, I was actually happy for them, but deep down I just couldn’t help but wonder when it was going to be my own turn.
I found myself gradually cultivating the habit of measuring my progress with respect to what other people were achieving. Sometimes, I would just look at how far someone had gone and then I would begin to look down on myself because I felt like the little things I have achieved is nothing compared to theirs. The difficult part of it was that even if I wanted to explain what I was feeling I wouldn’t be able to. It’s that kind of feeling that you just don’t know the right words to put together in order to explain. All I just kept on feeling and telling myself that I needed to do more, become better and achieve something and do it really fast.
Eventually, I realized that I was just making things unnecessarily difficult for myself. All my mind was just focused on where I wanted to be that I failed to realize where I was some years back and appreciate where I currently was. I also began to understand one thing with people which is they rarely share the difficult and not so perfect aspects of their lives. All they bring to display is just the perfect areas.
There were few times I was opportune to stay with some people that looking at them on the outside I’d say in my mind that everything is working fine with this person. But in due time I began to see that such individuals also had some downsides in life occasionally.
This realization made me to start making changes. Rather than worrying about what everyone else was doing, I began paying attention to my own business and focusing on my own goals. I came to realize that the reason why we often seem undecided or switching from one goal to another is because we are trying to mimic other people’s success pattern and implement it in our lives. That is why when we see other people doing well we ask them how they managed to do it and then try to do the same thing not knowing that everyone has what works for them and we were all assigned different paths to take in life.
I started learning the value of patience and stop tracking my progress with others and the time it took them because just as different seeds have different times of maturity so do we humans have different timings for things to manifest in our lives. I put a stop to the chase for immediate results and learned to start trusting the process.
When I look back now, I wouldn’t really say that I have completely overcome that feeling. There are still few times that I really didn’t do great especially when things don’t go as planned. But then, I no longer allow it to determine how I see myself or the progress I have managed to make so far.
One thing I would say that is experience taught me is that every has their own pace in life. The moment I realized that life is not a competition things began to take a new look in my life, because this taught me how to be patient with myself while working towards what I want.
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