First thing in the morning, I check Twitter, only to have it list off for me all the ways I’ve already fallen behind. A colleague has released a new e-book. Two of my design heroes are announcing a collaborative project. One of my old college buddies has posted a video trailer for an upcoming online program, and she looks phenomenal, polished, charismatic (I’m still in bed, bleary-eyed, and definitely not at my most telegenic.)

每天早晨，我的第一件事就是刷推特，因为它会显示出来在哪些事情上我已经落后了。比如：我的同事已经发布了一本新电子书，我崇拜的两个设计英雄声明一起合作项目，我的一个大学朋友在网上发布了一段即将上映的节目的视频预告片，她看起来美貌惊人、闪闪发亮、充满魅力(而我还窝在床上，睡眼惺忪，肯定是不能上镜的。)

Am I really falling behind? Is anybody actually keeping score? Did any of these people post any of the updates with the intent of making me feel bad? Of course not. But if I’m not careful, it’s terribly easy to view my social media streams as a constant reminder of all the stuff I’m not doing and dreams I’m not fulfilling.

那么，我确实落后了吗?其他人一直都在取得成绩吗?这些人发布的任何状态更新都是为了刺激我?当然不是。但是如果我不是很细心的话，那么很容易觉得我的社交媒体流一直在提醒我没有做的事情和没有实现的梦想。

This isn’t a social media problem. It’s a comparison problem. There isn’t a single thing about Twitter – or any of the other social media platforms I use – that’s designed to make me ask how I’m measuring up. That’s all me – an automatic, internal mechanism. It’s part ego (“But what does this say about me?”), part creative drive (“What more am I capable of?”), and part deep soul yearning (“How can I make an impact, leave a legacy, and matter?”).

这其实不是社交媒体的问题，这是一个攀比的问题。推特以及我使用的其他社交媒体平台本身没有任何问题，它们的设计初衷本就不是让我用来进行自我估量的。这都是我的问题——自动的内部机制。一部分出于自我因素(“但这说到了我什么?”)，一部分出于创新驱动(“我还可以做到更多吗?”)，还有一部分出于内心深处的呐喊(“我如何才能产生影响、留下遗产并发挥作用?”)。

And I know it’s not just me. I’ve spent the past year collaborating with leadership coach Tanya Geisler on researching how comparison works, what it costs us, and what it can teach us – and we’ve discovered that it runs rampant among just about every creative, growth-oriented person we know. In our comparison-soaked culture, it’s hard to avoid looking around at what other people are doing with their short time on earth, and slipping (often unconsciously) into “How am I stacking up?” mode. Here’s what we learned:

我知道不仅仅是我存在这样的问题。去年一年我都在跟领导学教练坦妮娅·盖斯勒合作研究攀比是如何发生的，它会让我们付出怎样的代价以及它教会了我们什么。我们发现，攀比心在创新型、增长型的人身上蔓延比较迅速。在我们这样一个充满攀比的文化中，很难避免去跟其他人比较究竟他们在短时间内做了什么，然后不由自主地进入“我怎么获得”的模式。我们的研究结果如下：

Don’t compare your insides to someone else’s outsides

别拿自己的内在和别人的外在来攀比

The first time I heard this excellent, if hard-to-implement, advice, I was suffering from a terrible case of envy. Some competitor or other had achieved an inspiring degree of success and I was complaining to a mentor about how unachievable it seemed to me. Her warning took me aback: Look, she told me, You have no idea what it took for them to get there. Don’t act like this was unearned, effortless, or pure dumb luck.And for Pete’s sake, don’t go thinking that because you read the press release, you have a single clue about what’s really going on behind the scenes.

我第一次听到这个优秀的、但却难以实施的建议时，我刚好在经受一种可怕的嫉妒。当看到一些竞争对手或其他人取得了令人欢欣鼓舞的成功时，我就向导师抱怨在我看来是如何无法实现的。她的警告使我十分惊讶：看，她告诉我，你并不知道他们为获得成功付出了什么。不要总觉得这是不劳而获、毫不费力的，或者纯粹的狗屎运。不要再那样想了，因为你一看这个消息的时候，你就只想到了一点，而不会考虑到他们背后发生了什么。