Comparison is killing your joy in life

Republished from Quincy Clark Hoops, March 2, 2023.

A big part of life and specifically the sport of basketball is comparing people.

It’s perfectly fine for others to compare you to your peers or other players. It all turns bad when you start to compare yourself to others.

I’ve done it before throughout my whole career, and it has made me miserable. I was so concerned about what another player was able to do better than me that I lost sight of my own strengths. I began to play my game trying to prove I could do the same things the person I was comparing myself to could do. It made me play worse, because I wasn’t being myself… I was being someone else.

The offseason is a great time to improve the weaknesses in your game. Where a lot of players go wrong focusing so much on improving their weaknesses that they don’t keep their strengths sharp.

As people and athletes we have to find the healthy balance of admiring and learning from others, while not losing ourselves.

It’s a hard task seeing the social media driven world we live in today. We are constantly seeing people our age or younger doing bigs things. There’s nothing wrong with that, but social media is designed for everyone to be in constant competition with one another. This can cause you to neglect everything good you have going on, wondering why you don’t have another person’s blessings.

Everyone wants to be happy, and being an athlete, you have to love the game to play at an elite level. If you are constantly comparing yourself to others, you will never be happy. Now talk to yourself and ask are you constantly comparing yourself to others?