Benchmark Yourself Against Your Past Self

Excerpts from "Compare Yourself To Who You Were Yesterday, Not Someone Else Is Today" chapter of "12 Rules for Life" by Jordan Peterson.

The most important benchmarks for entrepreneurs is past performance, current improvement over past performance, and results achieved compared to plan.

Rule 4: Compare Yourself To Who You Were Yesterday, Not To Who Someone Else Is Today

“There is not just one game at which to succeed or fail. There are many games and, more specifically, many good games–games that match your talents, involve you productively with other people, and sustain and even improve themselves across time. The world allows for many ways of Being. If you don’t succeed at one, you can try another. You can pick something better matched to your unique mix of strengths, weaknesses, and situation. Furthermore, if changing games does not work, you can invent a new one. […]

Jordan Peterson makes several excellent points here: to learn and to grow you have to experiment and explore new approaches and methods, which means you have to accept setbacks and honest mistakes. The only way to win for a long period of time is to stop experimenting, but that sets you up for long-term failure.

We are always and simultaneously at point “a” (which is less desirable than it could be), moving towards point “b” (which we deem better, in accordance with our explicit and implicit values). We always encounter?the world in a state of insufficiency and seek its correction. We can imagine new ways that things could be set right, and improved, even if we have everything we thought we needed. Even when satisfied, temporarily, we remain curious. We live within a framework that defines the present as eternally lacking and the future as eternally better. If we did not see things this way, we would not act at all.

You have to see possibilities for improvements and better solutions to current problems. But that requires a certain amount of dissatisfaction with the status quo. If you are fully satisfied with the status quo, finding the motivation to explore potential improvements is hard. But if you are too dissatisfied, you can become dispirited and see improvements as impossible, or at least too hard and unlikely to be worth the effort. It requires a balance perspective that appreciates what’s good about the current situation but comprehends opportunities for improvement.

The first step is to take stock. The future is like the past, But there’s a crucial difference. The past is fixed, but the future–it could be better. It could be better, some precise amount–the amount that can be achieved, perhaps, in a day, with some minimal engagement. The present is eternally flawed. But where you start might not be as important as the direction you are heading. Perhaps happiness is always to be found in the journey uphill, and not in the fleeting sense of satisfaction awaiting at the next peak. Much of happiness is hope, no matter how deep the underworld in which that hope was conceived.

This is good advice: start from where you are with what you have. Secondly, your ability to enjoy the “journey uphill” is essential to persevering as an entrepreneur. Most startups take years to achieve even modest success, much less to reach a substantial one. You must pick customers you want to serve and problems you enjoy wrestling with. You cannot focus on the finish line: it’s too far away from your start. You have to enjoy many small victories along the way to be able to go the distance.

Aim small. Set the following goal: by the end of the day, I want things in my life to be a tiny bit better than they were this morning. Then you ask yourself, “What could I do, that I would do, that would accomplish that, and what small thing would I like as a reward?” Then you do what you have decided to do, even if you do it badly. Then you give yourself that damn coffee, in triumph. And you do the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. And, with each day, your baseline of comparison gets a little higher, and that’s magic. That’s compound interest. Do that for three years, and your life will be entirely different.

One of my rules for thumb for bootstrapping is “zoom in for traction, zoom out for impact.” This phrasing by Jordan Peterson makes the same point in a slightly different way. It’s also a very good advice to celebrate small victories. You cannot defer all of your rewards to a distant peak, you will burn out.

All in all I found this book, and this chapter in particular, offered a wealth of practical advice.

Related Blog Posts

• Zoom in for Traction, Then Slowly Zoom out for Impact
• Zoom in for Traction, Zoom out for Impact
• Key Takeaways From Two Survival to Thrival Books
• M. C. A. Hogarth on Business for the Right-Brained
• Andrew Grove on Recognizing Reality
• Etienne Garbugli on Opportunities: Finding New Products
• Austin Kleon’s “Keep Going” Offers Practical Advice on Perseverance

This article originally appeared on the SKMurphy Blog as "Jordan Peterson: Benchmark Yourself Against Your Past Self" (c) SKMurphy, Inc. all rights reserved.