Rule #4, 12 Rules for Life — An Entrepreneur’s Perspective

Rule # 4 Compare Yourself to Someone who you were Yesterday and not to who someone else is today.

Summary of the rule

We compare our accomplishments to the reference points within the family, friends, and community. Digital connectivity has shrunk the world, and now we are connected to a much larger number of people. We now compare ourselves to the exponentially numerous reference points and map our hierarchies on a much larger scale. As a result, there is always someone out there who could make your accomplishments look mediocre.

It becomes difficult to ignore the constant barrage of the internal voice, reminding us of our mediocrity. Your Internal voice will arbitrarily choose a single criterion like money, power, or fame as the only thing that matters, and compare you with someone genuinely stellar, taking away all your motivation to do anything.

“Talking yourself into irrelevance is a cheap trick of a rational mind.”

Jordon Peterson

Everyone engages in activities related to various areas like career, friends, family, projects, artistic endeavors, athletic pursuits, etc. A single activity does not define your overall worth, and you should assess yourself across all the activities. You are bound to be good in some, mediocre in others and bad in few because if you were good at everything, it would mean that you are not growing, which could be considered the essential thing in life.

The combination of your circumstances and activities that you undertake is so unique to you that comparison with others is not appropriate.

Be cautious when you are comparing yourself to others as you are a singular being with your unique stories. Compare “yourself” tomorrow to a “yourself” Yesterday. Attend to the day but aim for the highest good. Look for incremental daily improvements, which will add up to a tremendous change after a period.

The world is full of things demanding your attention, your focus. You can only focus on a few things; hence it is called the focus. You are on a journey of self-improvement, going from the present which could be made better in the future. In this journey, you have to decide on things to focus on. You have to negotiate with yourself to do the little things necessary to reduce the chaos in your life. Reward yourself when things get done. Be kind in these negotiations, as a little careful kindness goes a long way, especially towards yourself.

Aim high, do the little things daily, and don’t worry about tomorrow as it will sort itself out.

“Past is fixed, Present is eternally flawed, but the future could always be better.”

Jordan Peterson

Relevance for Entrepreneurs and Startups

Benchmarks are in place to compare a traditional business across the sectors with other companies, like turnover, profitability, YoY growth, and different financial ratios which speak of the health of the business. It becomes a lot more complicated when it comes to startups, often without profitability, evolving business models, ever-changing competitive landscape, and pressure to be unicorns. Measuring progress often becomes art rather than science in these circumstances.

With profitability not on the horizon, indicators like GMV, customer acquisition strategy, customer acquisition costs, and revenue growth guide startups in their progress. Startups could, however, end up comparing themselves to established businesses or even other startups in their field, which may be unfair.

The biggest pitfall of making an unfair comparison is at best, a distraction, and at worst, an injudicious allocation of precious resources. Most startups differentiate either their offering or the business model to establish themselves and to have hope of getting funded in the future. After all the effort put into differentiating your startup from the others, it’s quite a waste to then try to compare yourself to them.

It serves the organization better if they can set their aim high and then work every day to make progress no matter how small, and continuously move towards the lofty goal. Small consistent and continuous improvements (Kaizen), over a while, will yield exponential results.

There is a tale about a famous Olympic wrestler, Milo of Croton from around 2500 BC. A newborn calf was born near Milo’s home. The wrestler decided to carry the small animal on his shoulders. Milo continued to do this for the next four years, picking up and carrying the calf on his shoulders each day as it grew, until it was no longer a calf but a four-year-old bull.

My startup had somewhat limited means, and no budget for niceties. Our goal was to change the consumer behavior and get them to consume our Cold Coffee on the go, after buying it from the cart on the street. It was a considerable challenge as products on the street-carts are not considered very hygienic, and there was massive resistance to buying something premium from the street-carts. The only exception was ice-cream carts, which have been around for decades and well-entrenched into the consumer behavior norms.

We decided early on to focus on achieving maniacally hygienic standards in our production, getting more carts (point of sales) on the streets and selling more cold coffees when compared to Yesterday. Not a day went by where we did not tinker with our business processes to further these three things.

We did this day after day, week after week, and month after month, till the time we had a sizeable business. Whereas on day one, it had seemed we would not sell anything. After a year and a half, we were still lagging in sales compared to the national chain of stores. It was true even when compared to the sales of their stores within our area of operation.

We could have easily spent time and money and efforts trying to beat our competitors in product variety and revenue. However, we stuck to the plan on focussing on our three things, and after a while, we had managed to take a substantial chunk of our competitor’s business in one category — Cold Coffee. We became the guys to beat in this variant.

We focused on being better, even a little bit better every day. It led us to many exciting product partnerships, where we placed the new co-branded products on the carts, which kept our customers coming back to our carts,k improved our sales, and created a massive brand recall. It kept us in the hunt, even in our hibernation months.

The flip side of this coin is when startups are doing well as compared to the competition, and it sets in a state of complacency. It could be fatal for the organization. It is an excellent feeling to establish a product superior to your competitors. But where do you go from there? What happens when you are already ahead in the race? Well, you must then realize that the person to beat is yourself.

Hence, every day, be better than what you were yesterday.

Compare yourself to someone who you were Yesterday and not to who someone else is today.