Comparison is Killing You
We all do it. Voice actors included. Newbs and veterans alike.
We look to the left, and to the right, and we see our colleagues doing well. We see their wins. Their successes. Their triumphs.
And then that little green goblin of envy and jealously starts to rear its warped and ugly head.
We get insecure. We feel less than.
We start to believe that because we don’t have their successes and wins and triumphs that somehow that makes us less successful.
We compare ourselves to others. And it’s killing us. Emotionally and mentally, it’s eating away at our self-esteem, our dreams, and our effectiveness. And it has to stop.
The word compare comes from the Latin comparare "to liken.” The problem is that we liken ourselves to others without context.
For example, we may see that another voice actor just booked a gig of the size and profile we’d love to book. How often do we have context? How often do we know the hours of training that actor put in? We don’t know how many similar roles they auditioned for and didn’t get. We don’t know if they, in fact, had the best audition, or if they simply reminded the casting director of their Aunt Millie and got the gig in some part because of that.
Comparison warps our perspective. A new voice actor will often look at an accomplished actor with years more training, years more experience, hundreds or thousands of more mistakes and lessons learned.
Here’s what we always forget: if someone is more successful than you, it’s almost always because they also have more failures than you.
In today’s world of social media and quantitative rankings, we see everyone else through a highly curated and groomed lens of their own making. We don’t see the blood, sweat, tears, sleepless nights, mistakes, missteps, misfortunes, embarrassments, and countless losses that are part and parcel of success.
We see others post their wins and rather than choosing to be happy for them and celebrate them, we make it about us and our perceived lack and we instead throw a pity party for ourselves.
Is that who we want to be?
One of the issues is that we’re wired for competition. It’s human nature. It’s what helped us survive for hundreds of thousands of years. But that wiring is the result of living in a world where there was a scarce amount of food, shelter, and safety. And that primitive brain is the one that sees someone else’s big piece of wildebeest as our small piece.
There is more work out there for voice actors now than at any other time in history. There’s more work out there than you and the person you’re comparing yourself to can book in 10,000 lifetimes. There is no scarcity of work. Period.
There is only one form of comparison that is healthy: Comparison to self.
Am I better than I was last week? Last month? Last year? How far have I come in 3 years? 5 years? 10 years?
When you become your only competitor, you free yourself to celebrate your wins and everyone else’s. You shut down your insecurity. You channel your energy into your own improvement and growth. You grow your self-esteem by putting in the work, developing better habits, and doing what you know is necessary to get 1% better every damn day.
We’re all on a journey. Some of us are further along than others. Some not as far along. It doesn’t matter where we are. What matters is the direction in which we’re moving. Are we getting better every day? Are we doing what’s doable and necessary?
If we stop comparing ourselves to others and become our only competitor, we free ourselves to be the best we can be and we celebrate each other’s victories and successes with a genuine and full heart.