In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
Bertrand Russell
1872 – 1970
It’s not uncommon to want to evaluate ourselves and our performance. It’s human nature to want to know how we stack up compared to others. But everything we do must be judged in context. To use an athletic example, if you talk about running a 10K, your completion time isn’t meaningful unless you consider your skill level: a poor time for a pro might be an excellent finish for an amateur. The same holds true with golf, bowling and bridge; you can’t evaluate your score without a frame of reference.
If we shift the discussion to financial matters, the value of your retirement account and investments need to be considered in the context of your age, income level, and lifestyle. A twenty-year-old with no dependents doesn’t need the same account balance as a fifty-year old widow who likes to travel.
Clearly, we need a yardstick to measure different aspects of our lives. So I have to pose the question: are you using the wrong yardstick?
My feeling is that we often measure things in life using a yardstick which isn’t appropriate. Let me give a specific example. Some time ago, I received a question from a young lady in Pakistan. She was concerned because her husband and mother-in-law thought she should be following a traditional path: stay at home, have and raise children, and pay total respect to husband and elders. She was conflicted because she wanted to be self-sufficient, build a career and be responsible for her own life. She wrote to me because she couldn’t decide how to measure success in her life. She knew what she wanted, but she felt it necessary to conform to the standards set by her husband, her mother-in-law and her culture.
She was torn because she was measuring herself using someone else’s yardstick.
It’s easy to see that she’ll never feel comfortable with life as long as she judges herself by the standards and expectations of others. But what about you? Do you ever engage in this behavior?
Do you always go along with what your friends want to do because you’re afraid to object? Do you stick with a job you hate because your parents are impressed with your employer? Are you living above your means to keep up with your social network?
We all judge ourselves. But too often, we beat ourselves up because we’ve judged ourselves unfairly; we’ve used the wrong frame of reference. I encounter far too many people who are miserable in life because they try to measure up using someone else’s yardstick.
What’s the correct yardstick? Decide what you stand for and measure your life against those core beliefs. If your values are sound and you live according to them, you’ll always measure up.
What we see depends mainly on what we look for.
John Lubbock
1834 – 1913
Copyright © 2023 John Chancellor