Imagine telling a swimmer, who's struggling to time their strokes to quickly gulp air without choking on pool water - "well if the breathing part's hard, don't breathe, just swim!"

It contradicts every aspect of physiology.

Telling a human to not compare themselves to others is an equally anti-gravity impossibility.

Almost every part of the human nervous system is designed to give you a relative, i.e. comparative, sense of reality

Try to describe for me the precise orangeness of that funny new fruit at the supermarket. Can you do it? Now, what if I said, it was orange like you mixed a lemon, an apple and an orange together.

Is the room temperature hot or cold? Well, did you walk in from a frosty blizzard outside, or did you just get out of a warm shower?

Almost every step your brain takes to build a sense of reality, and learn, is through comparisons and progress.

So if you're beating yourself up because you heard successful-confident-happy people, "don't comparing themselves to others," they're lying and you can stop doing that. You can focus on making better comparisons.

Compare the baby-bottle's temperature to your body-temperature, not your coffee.

Try these:

• Triangulate Your Ego Out: Compare yourself to somebody like you, but who's struggling and to somebody you admire - what advice would be given?

• Believe the Signal Not the Messenger: Is that person's fitness, family, or success really telling you, "Hey! You care about this thing, but aren't prioritizing it!" Is there an area of your life you need to be more loyal to?

• Seed to Seed, Trunk to Trunk: The acorn is smaller than even the sickliest oak tree. How are you doing compared to somebody at your stage of growth?

Every instinct in your mind wants to compare you others so you can learn and gauge your progress. Don't fight it, direct it.