Early in the morning, I got a message from a girl who had attended Delhi BTR. That girl had messaged me on Instagram as well as on Telegram, something very, very specific. She said, Sir, I cannot stop comparing myself to the person I used to study with, who has now cleared need and is working, who was a very good friend, but everyone keeps telling me that you should not compare.
So she asked me that, Sir, honestly, you should tell me how you never compare to other people. Is it true? Is it? Am I wrong? Because it is not happening with me. I tell myself daily that I should not compare.
People tell me I should not compare. But every day I go through the same cycle that I keep on comparing. So this is the exact message I got in the morning.
So I thought that this might be relevant to a lot of people who are preparing for the entrance. So first of all, to compare, nothing is wrong if you are in a comparison like, no, at that moment, I thought in the early morning, I’ll Google it up and I sliced the entire Google says one should not compare with others, one should compare with yourself only. I disagree with Google, that most codes don’t help you in life because you will think you will not compare and you just competing with yourself that doesn’t have any practical relevance.
So I’ll tell you what I do in practical life. It’s perfectly OK to compare. OK, first of all, it’s perfectly OK to compare.
So there are four or five components when you how you can analyze your comparison. Comparison is like an inflammatory disease and it has been described by a term called comparisonitis. There’s a novel written by Melissa Ambrosini on a disease called comparisonitis.
It’s a novel. It’s one of the New York Times bestselling novels, Comparisonitis and in this age of social media, all of us some days or the other suffer from this ailment, Comparisonitis. So how do you channelize your comparison? For this, first of all, there are four parts to it.
You first need to understand what’s your control, number one. What second is, what is your comparison? Third is, what is your relative velocity of chasing it? And the fourth is, what will you achieve once you conquer it? So I’ll take you through these four parts. This is my philosophy of how I pursue comparison because that girl asked me a very specific question.
So you tell me honestly, you never compared yourself to anyone because I do because she wanted to know. So I thought I’ll address it in public today. I am always in comparison with something.
That is, that is the fuel for ambition, right? I do compare. I compare with the only thing which might be different between me and you is that my control is very different. The problem with people is that their control is very weak.
Their control is, as you understand case-control study. So in a case-control study, if your control is very weak, your comparator is very weak, so generally the comparator and the control we keep is the person who is just very closely associated with us. Some might be a very close friend, a study partner a senior or a junior or your boyfriend or your girlfriend or your siblings.
Your control is very weak. So the problem is, with that control, you never achieve that velocity of chasing. You are not able to chase it.
So if you can see in this image, someone is running ahead of you on this scale and you are chasing that person. Now, what is your control that will determine whether you can actually pursue your chase or not? Most of the time, the person we choose as a control is the person we are insecure from and the person we feel insecure from, we already don’t consider that person worthy of the achievement he or she has. Okay? So the problem happens is that the person you want to beat or chase down, you don’t consider that person worthy.
So your control becomes weak and that only breeds jealousy and hatred and dissatisfaction and it doesn’t make you attain that relative velocity to chase it down. So how I would do it, had I been sitting in this audience like that girl or all of you who would have come to attend BTR, I’ll take Dr. Zainab Vora as my control. Okay? Because I feel she is worthy of something.
I’ll not take my partner or my girlfriend or my boyfriend or personality next to me or my senior who might have clearly one year ahead as my control. She should be the control. Then, first, then you compare where you are lacking as compared to her.
That I’ll tell you. From the 20th of January till now, she has had class almost every day. Every day.
She is the fifth BTR. It is 15 days. For 15 days, you have to speak for a minimum of 12 hours in continuity.
Okay? How many people in this country are able to do it? Because after some time, it becomes repetitive. Okay? The students are new but for her, the subject is the same. And you don’t get voiceless.
You are having a cough, you are having a cold, you are having a fever. But this is an audience setting. So, how many of you, on those days, where you are not well, push yourself hard enough like she does? It’s very easy to be amazed and by thinking that someone is there because someone was lucky.
It’s not about luck. Anyone who has achieved anything great landed up in a situation where that person didn’t have a choice. The choice of giving up.
Most of you, on a daily basis, get a choice of giving up. Either because you are not feeling well or not feeling mentally happy, not feeling relaxed, or not feeling in the right ecosystem or right environment, you can come up with a thousand excuses. But if Zainab Vora is your control, she doesn’t give up.
She has a two-year-old daughter who is alone at home. She doesn’t let that come and affect her. It is a huge mental barrier.
People will not understand till they become parents. Because you are continuously worried about your child at home. You are continuously worried about your health.
You are continuously worried about your fatigue. But when your control is such that it does not let fatigue or any mental trauma affect herself, then that control you consider worthy and that control you have to chase. And it might happen that in your lifetime, you might not be able to beat that control.
Still, it’s okay. But to chase that control down, your relative velocity, your acceleration will be far more than people who are around you. So don’t compare yourself with someone who got a rank earlier than you and me.
That is too small a target in life. It is too small a target. And if you think that you cannot take her as a control, that is just an excuse.
Life will always give an option. So when you achieve the first two parts, you have control, you compare your strengths and weaknesses with that control, and then you try to chase. The moment you compare, you have two choices in life.
There are two pathways to this expressway. Either from having control to comparison, the next two steps can cry and crash or the next two steps can be chase and conquer. So it’s a bifid arm.
Okay, you need to understand. So you have control, you have a comparison, and then you move on to either you cry and you crash or you move on to chase or you conquer. So most of you can be a crybaby and say, I am not that intelligent.
I cannot work that hard. Then there’s no point in comparing. Okay, you can endlessly spend your life being a crybaby.
But when Zainab didn’t become Zainab in one day. There were so many days she could have stopped teaching and cried. Trust me.
I was there on those days. She could have stopped teaching and cried and ultimately crashed. See, Zainab’s pregnancy was very, very tumultuous.
Most of the organic you read in real life was happening to us. And when it happens to you, it’s not easy. She was suffering from Dengue.
She was suffering from gestational diabetes mellitus. Zara was a low birth weight baby. She was having breastfeeding jaundice.
We were having a lot of feeding issues. Her six weeks weight was less than thirds in time. Despite all that happening, she never stopped teaching.
But she was also chasing someone. I don’t know who. Maybe herself, her future self.
So you always will have a choice to take that chase or you sit down and cry. But this cannot happen. There was a time, when Zainab told me that now obviously being a mother, I have to take care of Zara.
How will I pursue my profession? I said you don’t have a choice. It was in her third month of lactation, I said you don’t have a choice. Zara will grow at her own pace.
So you just keep this mental block away. Okay, she will grow. But you cannot sacrifice your professional growth just because you became a mother.
That is not a choice. So when you guys compare, you compare yourself to a person like her. Because life also gave her many chances that she could have chosen not to work hard.
She could have easily told that okay fine, I am running a fever. You cancel tomorrow’s BTR. I am not going to come, I am not well.
That is not a choice. I was supposed to go to Hyderabad, but BTR couldn’t get leave. Zainab decided to go alone.
She asked me, how will you manage Zara? I said we don’t have a choice. We will manage. So anything great you will ever achieve is when you don’t give yourself a choice that you can give up.
That is not a choice. And people, so that’s why you need to have very strong control in life. Someone who is worthy of so much appreciation.
Someone who is worthy of so much commitment. Not the person sitting next to you. Because that will just breed insecurity.
It will not breed motivation. It will not breed an awe. So Zainab should be that control you should be training.
It’s very difficult. But in your pursuit to change her. Be as hardworking as like her.
You will leave so many people behind. Because the scale on which you will then run has a totally different logarithmic progression. It is not a linear scale.
It becomes a logarithmic scale. So that’s what you need to change. It’s okay to compare.
But it’s not okay to have a weak control. Thank you.
Download Cerebellum NEET PG Preparation Android app
Download Cerebellum NEET PG Preparation iOS app
Download Cerebellum NEET PG Preparation iphone app
