The Comparison Trap
Public figures are the target of recurring adoration for various reasons. Until a few years ago, the most common reason was to admire their work, by itself, or the products of that work.
With the advent of social media, we all began to have different access to the personal and professional lives of some of these figures. In addition to the usual interest in the lives of celebrities, there has also been growing the dissemination of information related to the work habits of some of them, especially on more professionally oriented platforms like LinkedIn, with the proliferation of information about the daily routines of some of today's top entrepreneurs, for example.
In this way, the schedules and strategies of people like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk have become easily accessible and have allowed everyone to, at least, draw inspiration from them and make some adaptation to their personal lives. This trend started a few years ago, with some extreme examples. It was common to come across videos promoting the image of people who boasted about starting their day at 4:00 AM; going to the gym; having a quick breakfast; working all day; sometimes while walking on treadmills; listening to podcasts/audiobooks at double the playback speed; and still managing to have dinner out with their spouse. All of this, of course, while performing highly paid roles. Fortunately, the goal of maintaining a 200% attitude is slowly changing in a positive direction.
Access to all this information brings positive aspects and can help achieve success; however, it always has a detrimental element: it can lead some individuals to constantly compare themselves to extremely productive personalities with large organizational teams behind them, often ending up disappointed. It's almost like someone casually playing a sport for their health and constantly comparing him/herself / themselves to one of the top professional athletes in that field.
It is very important for each of us to have our professional idols, and studying how each of them achieved success in their field can bring immense benefits: we gain motivation; learn new organizational techniques; evolve through the mistakes they made; and so on. However, everything should be taken with a grain of salt.
Every human being is unique and has completely different ways of living life, in general, and, consequently, professional life, in particular. There are no miraculous recipes that fit everyone, and it is important to know how to take lessons from those who are more successful and adapt them to our personal reality: to our type of work; the support we have; the physical environment in which we perform our profession, among others.
The key is always to remember that our examples are just that: examples. They cannot be rigid models that we aim to blindly emulate. They are different from us; with some better and some worse abilities; different working conditions; and a different network. This should lead us to learn what is good from them, but from the perspective of individual growth, not an attempt at imitation that will invariably be ineffective. And of course, we should never forget that in these situations, the internet almost always shows the good side, leaving aside the true sacrifices that many of these people make daily to achieve their goals.
