This article gives you a glimpse of what you can learn with Shortform. Shortform has the world’s best guides to 1000+ nonfiction books, plus other resources to help you accelerate your learning.
Want to learn faster and get smarter? Sign up for a free trial here .
Are you overly critical of yourself? Do you feel like you’re not measuring up to your peers in some way?
Everyone has moments when they’re feeling like a failure in life. This sentiment is especially common in the modern day of social media and highlight reels. But criticizing yourself does nothing except demoralize you and diminish your sense of self-worth.
Below are some recommendations for coping with feelings of failure.
1. Stop Comparing Yourself to Others
Comparing yourself to others is pointless and often makes you feel that you’re lacking in some way—in reality, everyone’s at a different point in life at different times based on our priorities, values, and other external factors that are out of our control.
Consequently, another person’s life position is irrelevant to you because you’re a different person—you have different values, a different family and upbringing, and different life circumstances. While they might be in their prime now, you might be on the rise and reaching your prime while they’re on their decline.
Many aspects of our society thrive by making us compare ourselves to others like social media and marketing campaigns for clothes, makeup, and other material goods—if we don’t have this thing, this life, or look this way, then we aren’t good enough. Mind coach Vex King (Good Vibes, Good Life) recommends distancing yourself from social media and other pressures if you’re falling trap to the self-comparison complex.
2. Set Your Own Goals
In 12 Rules for Life, Jordan Peterson echoes King’s idea that comparing yourself to others is pointless. But Peterson takes it further and explains that if you’re feeling like a failure, you need to stop judging yourself by other people’s yardsticks. Instead, you need to set your own. You need a total reworking of your goals, starting with understanding yourself as though you were a stranger. There are three steps to it:
Step 1: Take a broader view of your existence and of other people.
You’ve likely identified a single, arbitrary dimension as THE single most important thing to achieve—like money, fame, or status—and you’re feeling like a failure because you don’t have it. But as Peterson points out, your existence is multidimensional: You have a lot of components to your existence—family, friends, personal projects, hobbies. So, you should judge your success across all the games you play.
Furthermore, there isn’t a binary condition of “success” vs “failure.” There are many gradations in between. What matters is whether you can get better, not whether you can achieve binary success.
Finally, you’re likely only seeing the highlight reel from other people. They don’t expose their deep problems and failings. You’re likely overvaluing what you don’t have and undervaluing what you do. Even the very people you envy might secretly envy you, in ways you’re not aware.
Step 2: Drill deeply into your discontent and understand yourself.
You’re likely discontent about not having something (like money, a particular job, an achievement). Drill into your discontent and transform it. What do you want? Why do you feel this way?
As you question yourself, you may realize that there are multiple conflicting desires at play. List them all out, realize the conflict between them, then prioritize them into a list.
Is the subject of your discontent within your control? If not, look somewhere else. Find something you can fix.
Step 3: Transform your goal into something achievable.
You might have big goals, and that’s good. But break it down to something tractable you can do today. Then you’ll start building ever upwards.What one small thing can you start doing right now that will improve your life? Do that for a month, then three months, then three years, and now you’re aiming for the stars.
3. Celebrate Your Successes
It’s common to focus more on our failures than our successes. In fact, you may be doing very well in life, but you’re feeling like a failure because you focus on failure. According to Jack Canfield, the author of The Success Principles, there are three main reasons we tend to focus on failure rather than success:
- As we grew up, our family and teachers emphasized our failures. For example, your parents may have reacted to a good grade by saying, “Nice work,” but to a C or less by giving you a lecture. Or maybe your teachers marked wrong answers with a red pen rather than marking correct answers with a check mark. As adults, we may continue to emphasize our failures rather than our successes.
- We remember events associated with negative emotions better than those associated with positive ones. Failure produces strong negative emotions. As a result, many people think they have many fewer successes than they actually do because their memory emphasizes failures.
Want to fast-track your learning? With Shortform, you’ll gain insights you won't find anywhere else .
Here's what you’ll get when you sign up for Shortform :
- Complicated ideas explained in simple and concise ways
- Smart analysis that connects what you’re reading to other key concepts
- Writing with zero fluff because we know how important your time is
