Upon Comparing Oneself to Others

It is a fact of life that there will always be people who are more accomplished, more productive, more organized, more articulate, more creative (more you name it) than we. Whether we like it or not, what others do matters to us because it sets the context to our own activity and performance. This is true in all walks of life, just talk to anyone who is trying to develop a career in sports, music, dance, or as a YouTube influencer. We deal with this reality in many different ways, some positive and some quite negative. In this regard, in academia and research we have a particularly pervasive tendency to compare ourselves to our peers, friends, and sometimes nemeses. The reason I think this is the case is because the very foundation of contemporary academia and research rests on the premise of comparison and competition (often for scarce funding resources, jobs, and sometimes even ideas). The system is based on ranking things (people, projects, papers, ideas) along gradients of perceived merit, publication output, realized (and very often constructed or manipulated) impact, funding success, progression, networking ability, student popularity, social media impact, and the list goes on. Needless to say these rankings, metrics, and comparisons have a strong bearing on our professional careers, and this is why we care so much, but clearly they also have a profound emotional, personal, and psychological impact as well, one that we seldom discuss or consider. I think we need to talk more about this.

Peer review, accountability, rigor, transparency, and relevance are indeed some of the pillars of our academic and research system, but competition and the ensuing comparison have taken a disproportionate and rather perverse center role, and this has some negative consequences. There is nothing wrong with admiring and looking up to highly talented, accomplished people, and from learning from colleagues or friends who are gifted and proficient at things we may struggle with. After all, is this not what good mentorship is all about? It is not about preaching, imposing, or coercing, but about offering humble examples of positive traits; mentees who are receptive benefit greatly by learning from these examples, at least I think I have. What is confusing and often becomes negative is feeling the need to be as good as those people because this is what the system requires, or being frustrated because we are not. There is a fundamental difference between the desire to do better, within our possibilities and context, and the sense of having to be something or someone we are not, yet the system sometimes encourages us towards the latter. In this regard, one insidious behavior that further compounds the problem in research and academia is that we tend to compare ourselves to others but one dimension at a time: If a colleague is highly productive in terms of papers or grants, we compare ourselves to that dimension. If a colleague seems to be highly regarded and listened to by their peers, we compare ourselves to that trait. If a colleague seems very self-assured, well, there you go. By doing this, we tend to place ourselves consistently on the inadequate side of the equation.

There is an analogy to be made with parenthood, where there is naturally much insecurity and therefore a tendency to compare and to some extent compete. We see fellow moms and dads doing heroic and almost extra-human things for their children, their babies understand three languages before they are even born, they do yoga when they are one, they play Bartók when they are three, they are so beautiful and cool. With so much conflicting information circulating, so many gurus, influencers, and peers out there exposing so much of their lives, there is no lack of opportunity to feel inadequate as parents, and to have the sense that we are not doing enough or that we are dooming the future of our children. The good news is that, as long as we love our children in the right way, they will generally be fine, even if they have only mastered the triangle by age 16, yet we tend to discover this a posteriori. Interestingly, early parenthood often overlaps with the most competitive and vulnerable stages of our careers, so we are comparing, and often diminishing ourselves, on multiple fronts and at key stages of our lives, which can be emotionally exhausting.

The bottom line is that our lives have multiple dimensions, each with their challenges, rewards, highs and lows, and it is rare that any one person excels in all dimensions and is accomplished and fulfilled in every single aspect of their lives. I do not mean to imply that exceptionally brilliant and accomplished people are necessarily unhappy or unfulfilled, absolutely not, but rather that we should never assume that because someone is accomplished at some tasks, all other dimensions of their lives are similarly fulfilled and follow suit. For all of us, it is the balance of all these dimensions, and not any single one of them, what ultimately defines our identity, our fulfillment, our contribution to society, and our happiness or lack of. We do not need to be good at all or excel in any, and we can even be bad in quite a few, what is important is to do our best, that we are content and fulfilled with the overall balance, and that we feel respected and appreciated for who we are.

Easier said than done, I know. When I look back, I realize that this has been an issue for me as well, one that I did not always recognize. As I write this text, I have a career spanning over 30 years in research and academia, and I am now squarely within the senior category in my research community. I have been able to develop a satisfying, and hopefully to some extent useful, career in science and academia, not without its fair dose of frustration and defeat, insecurity, and, of course, comparison. I recently passed that threshold where it is not so much what I am going to become (not because I do not have plans and expectations, I have many), but rather what it has cumulatively been. Yet, I have become comfortable with the many things I will not do or be, including being part of the pantheon of the most brilliant, creative, articulate, impactful, and productive scientists around. This is not out of choice, I did not opt out of the pantheon, but rather it is a reflection of who I am, what I have been capable of, and importantly, the life choices I have made. At this stage I have come to terms with myself, with my weaknesses, short-comings, and modest accomplishments, and when I reflect upon all of the dimensions of my life, I have no doubt that this is where I belong and where I want to be. I have true admiration for my most accomplished colleagues, but I have the most profound respect for colleagues who have achieved the best they can in their respective circumstances, as I have come to realize that our system actually rests upon the collective who are trying their best, not upon the exceptional few. In retrospect, colleagues I met when I was a grad student and as a young researcher, who I felt were so much smarter, talented, cooler in every sense, turned out to be people just like me, struggling in some things, succeeding in others, also likely measuring themselves against everyone around, all trying their best with their own talents and limitations. In retrospect as well, there was no point in subjecting myself to this unfair and undermining comparison, I should have trusted myself more. Easier said than done, this self-trust is at times hard to come by, especially within an academic world where we are constantly ranked, reviewed, judged, failed, sometimes humiliated, and, indeed, compared. I am grateful that it generally worked out well for me in the end, and I guess the good news is that often we do find our place, our self-respect, the recognition we aspire to, yet it is important to constantly remind ourselves of the system in which we are immersed, and to try to avoid the trappings of useless and unproductive comparison, whether it be in research, in parenthood, or other aspects of our life (some very basic reminders in Box 1).

Extreme competition sometimes elicits negative behaviors and traits. In academia this may be expressed, for example, as exploitative and selfish traits over collegiality and generosity in professional and academic relationships; quantity and superficiality over depth and quality in research output; loudness over reflection; flashiness over substance; cockiness over modesty; at times we may be inclined to adopt some of these negative traits under the mirage that they pay off somehow, but in the end they probably do not, and this is where comparisons are not only useless but counterproductive. We should not strive to emulate any of this, and the community certainly does not need more of it. There is something amiss in a system that at times leads us to be something we are not, when in reality what the system needs are people who feel respected and accepted, and who respect and accept themselves for who they are.