We’ve all reached that point in our lives where we feel stuck. Someone hit pause on us and we sit and watch as everyone else runs ahead. Whether you’re fresh out of high school, struggling in college, or stuck in your golden years looking back at the past it is easy to look at yourself and compare to those around you.

With the rise in social media, this can be especially difficult. When you scroll through media to forget about your struggles, all you see are other people’s successes.

While once it was just your social circles you would compare yourself to, with the internet, you can now see the successes of people around the world. It can be easier to see people who are younger than you, more successful than you, who show no signs of struggle and then look at yourself. You look at the deadlines, the bills are due, your homework is due, the chore you’ve left undone for too long, and so many other things. Then it’s easy to think, “Wow, I must be behind.”

It can be hard to catch a break.

Today I wanted to go over ways to get back on track and remove this mindset that you are behind where you should be. This is an older article, but one I come back to a lot as a reminder whenever I feel unmotivated.

Comparisons

“If you feel you’re always behind, stop comparing yourself to people who are at a different stage in success.”

As people, we will always compare ourselves to others, it’s just a natural thing to do. We are even raised with this more often than not. From comparisons of grades to comparisons of work ethics. So it’s important to not compare yourself to the rare success stories of ultra-rich and talented teenagers. It is also important to not compare yourself to people you feel that you’re ahead of. This also leads to a rather lacking feeling.

The best thing to do in terms of comparison is to compare yourself to people who inspire you, people who gradually reached success in realistic and achievable steps, and people who make you feel like you can be a better person.

Compare yourself to where you’ve been before. Though you might not be as far into success as you want to be, you will always be a few steps ahead of where you were the day before. I find this to be the most motivational for me. While I may not be exactly where I want to be, I’m closer to my goals than I was even a few weeks ago.

Younger Age does not Equal Better Success

The biggest problem that leads to feeling behind is the idea that there is a set age for success. The younger you are when you achieve things the higher your success appears. This just isn’t an accurate or healthy to view it at all. The sad truth is, the younger you are when you reach success the faster you will burn out.

By working and slowly building the blocks for your future path to success rather than rushing to it while you’re younger, it is not only going to be a little more stable, but it is also healthier for yourself and better long term.

Let’s say the success you want to reach is publishing a book and becoming extremely well known. Let’s say you muddle through and manage to publish one and it does excellent but then… Nothing. You didn’t plan far ahead, and you aren’t really sure what else you want to do but now you’re out there and people expect more of a specific genre from you.

If you aren’t careful you can become a slave to your own success. There are so many stories of young child stars who become a slave to success and are pigeonholed into one way they must be perceived by the public eye. Just because success seems flashy and desirable on the outside, doesn’t mean that it equates to real success and happiness behind the curtains.

This is why it’s important to set realistic and achievable goals for yourself and ask yourself the big questions. What kind of impact do you want to make? What does success mean to you? and How can I begin my journey today?

Success, What Does it Mean to You?

Chances are if you’re feeling behind it’s because you haven’t reached the point of success you expected to by this point — but what does this success mean to you?

Do you pursue success to feel worthy of being loved? Or in order to love yourself? The two most important things to remember when pursuing success are that you cannot associate it with making yourself worthy of love, or needing it in order to love yourself.

Everyone is deserving of love, with and without success. The moment you put the requirement on love of needing success is the moment you’ve ruined your chances of success.

So define what success means to you, and redefine it as something realistically achievable. Such as:

“Success to me means being able to affect those around me in a positive light, and leave a lasting and bright impact on people.”

or

“Success to me is being proud of my work’s quality and putting the same effort into it for one person as I would for one thousand people.”

Define success as not only something realistic and achievable — but something that will make you a better person. Something positive and good.

“When you strive to become better than you are, everything around you becomes better too.”

Conclusion

“Feeling behind in life is normal; everyone goes through this stage at some point in their lives; it’s a part of the process.”

When you feel behind in life, don’t panic! It’s completely normal to go through this stage. It really is a part of the process. Sometimes it takes going through a time of feeling lacking to help you find your drive in life and what you want to do.

It can help drive you to realize changes need to be made before going forward. Maybe it’s time to reflect and realize if you’re comparing yourself to unrealistic standards, to realize age has nothing to do with the measure of success, or maybe it’s time to entirely redefine the definition of success.

Overall, no matter where you are or what you’re doing you are at the stage you need to be at in life. The question isn’t where is the person next to you going in life or what are they doing, the question is what are you doing, and what will you do next?