(these are auto generated, so may be 95% accurate)

[00:00:00] Chris Furlong: Yo, yo yo, welcome back to the further, your lifestyle podcast, conversations on lifestyle passions and hustles. My name's Chris , I'm your host and super excited to be back here, having the conversation with you and today episode 48, which is great because we're two episodes away from 50. I'm excited to get to 50, just because it's a nice milestone number.

[00:00:19] Chris Furlong: And um, if you didn't know this year, I am trying to grow this podcast. And the best way I can do that is with the help of you already, you listening to this helps it goes a million miles. I really do appreciate it. But if you feel like there's an episode that you think will resonate with someone else or was of great value, then please go ahead and share it.

[00:00:39] Chris Furlong: That would mean the world to me. Um, and I would greatly appreciate it in advance. Today. I want to ask you a big question. That is when was the last time that you caught yourself or found yourself, I guess, scrolling through Tik TOK, Instagram, YouTube, social media, of any sorts. And you were comparing, you were comparing yourself around, you know, your current position to their position, your progress, to their progress.

[00:01:03] Chris Furlong: Uh, you're looking at differences. You're seeing how they make things look so easy, or maybe you're even feeling a little jealous and you can sometimes find yourself feeling a little toxic against them as well. Oh, look, I'm going to be the first one to admit it, but we do this far too often. And I think, I mean, for me, especially a good example is like, when we refer to YouTube is I'm a YouTube array, you know, my personal channel.

[00:01:27] Chris Furlong: And you're seeing people come into the space and all of a sudden they're hitting crazy numbers. They're getting all the followers, they're getting all the views and the numbers are just going up, you know, booming up skyrocketing. Whereas me I'm chugging away. I feel like I'm getting nowhere when it comes to a comparison to them and you know, I'm not getting the views.

[00:01:46] Chris Furlong: I'm not getting the same video. Um, I guess reactions or comments or likes and all that jazz, it feels unfair. Right? Well, yes and no. Right? I mean, it's not fair of you to compare yourself to them. I don't think it's fair and we shouldn't be doing it. And, and as I said before, um, I put my hand up first and say that I do this all the time, but unless they started at the same.

[00:02:07] Chris Furlong: Time is you at the same starting line as you at with the same experience, the same knowledge skills understanding, then it's not fair to compare because you say we, we look at others. Yeah, we, we, we tend to just jump straight to judgment and we jumped all these ideals. We jumped to this conjecture and we don't actually know that much.

[00:02:27] Chris Furlong: Right? Like how much do we actually know about them? What they're about, what they've done, you know, their past and all that jazz. However, we tend to come up with all these ideas that, you know, maybe it was given to them or maybe they got lucky or this or that. And we make all these excuses and we try and justify.

[00:02:43] Chris Furlong: Or we also bring ourselves to a higher level by trying to bring them down because we think Ana obviously they got this, you know, we trying to justify that it's not worth comparing because we're saying, oh yeah, well, they got lucky or they got this. Or they got that when that's not really the case. Right.

[00:02:58] Chris Furlong: I mean, look, there's going to be circumstances that puts them ahead, but to go ahead and, and just to think that they were giving it to on a silver platter or things like that, that's not really the way to go about it regardless. It shouldn't really matter whether it's. Got it given to them, or they've worked harder than you to get it because at the end of the day, and this is where it comes to.

[00:03:17] Chris Furlong: I think it is fair. If you do want to compare, you need to give yourself something worthy of comparing to, and has to be relevant. It has to be relevant and worthy of a compare. And the only answer to this is yourself, right? And you got to hear me out. You need to humor me a bit here. I think if you pick something that you are always comparing, we know whether it's, I'm going to talk some relevant things to myself and just things that are in my own ecosystem, but it could be YouTube.

[00:03:45] Chris Furlong: It could be socials, it could be money. It could be investments. It could be NFTs. It could be your body. It could be your weight. It could be running. It could be anything. What is it? Think of something now that you've picked. Do this for me, think about your current situation that you're in, you know, everything where you're out at the moment, your status, what you've got, um, what you've been progressing in, you know, when you did some exercise last or what you've been eating or how much money you've made or all this just think about, depending on what you just picked your current situation today, based on that thing that you picked.

[00:04:16] Chris Furlong: Now, if we jump back a day, are you better or worse today than you were yesterday in that area? Are you, are you progressing. Are you progressing? Are you doing a little bit better or maybe you're the same. It's been one day. What about a week? What about a month ago? What about 90 days or three months ago?

[00:04:34] Chris Furlong: What about six months? Where were you? Six months on this journey of whatever it is that you're thinking about. What about a year ago? Two years ago, five years ago, eight years ago. What about 10 years ago? When you bring this into perspective, right. And you can even go further, right? If you want to, but you get my point, right?

[00:04:51] Chris Furlong: I mean, if you reflect back and you compare yourself to see how far you've come or have. Right. And this is where you need to start to ask yourself some of the real tough questions. Have you changed? Have you grown, have you made movements or some movements in the direction of where you're wanting to go now?

[00:05:10] Chris Furlong: If you have, that's great. That's awesome. Right now, start to understand and say, okay, you are progressing. You have, you have changed. You have grown and see the differences, right? And you can now start to reapply some of that mentality for a forward-looking. You say, look, I want to tell you a story. I mean, crazy enough.

[00:05:30] Chris Furlong: And this, this blows my mind. When I think about it now I have a good giggle. I have a good laugh, but it's I think how could I have been so stupid thinking this or asking this, but let, let me explain. So when I first started running, like I'm going back must be about fake years now. I kid you not. I remember Googling, is it okay to run two, five kilometers or two 5k run?

[00:05:51] Chris Furlong: In a single day, like seriously, now that I think about this, I'm like, of course, of course you can. I mean, people are running 10 K people are running 20 K people are running marathons and here I am thinking, oh, you know, is it okay? Like, will it be an issue? Is it safe to run two runs in. Or five Ks in a day.

[00:06:08] Chris Furlong: And I'm thinking now I look at this and I'm like, how could I be so stupid? Like, of course people can do it, but people run marathons all the time and people run ultras. Heck that's what I can do. But, but back then, you see, I couldn't fathom running anything more than five to seven kilometers at the time I was thinking about doing my first 10 K and that was a big deal.

[00:06:29] Chris Furlong: It was like, Biggest run ever. Well, it was, and at the time I couldn't even understand a marathon in looking back at this. It's comparing to where I am now. It's to see how far I've come in. My ability to be able to show up and get these runs done and run again. The day after I'll do two runs in one day.

[00:06:49] Chris Furlong: It's, it's crazy to think about it, but I use this and I remember and reflect on this cause it helps me remind myself how far I've come, just from knowledge, understanding, experience confidence, and my ability to continue to progress forwards in my running journey. And it's also very amazing to see how you can grow, how you can learn and how you can adapt and become a better version.

[00:07:11] Chris Furlong: Of yourself. So my urge to you is this it's, it's quite simple. You need to stop worrying about what others are doing, how far they are. Are they better? Are they worse or. If they have something that you don't, you need to do, you, you do, you, that's all, you need to worry about, worry about being a better version of you today.

[00:07:31] Chris Furlong: So tomorrow you can be leveling up or doing exactly the same thing in terms of working on a better version of yourself. The best time to start is today. Of trying to be a better person tomorrow. And you are the baseline each day is a new baseline, but you are the baseline that you can compare to. Don't go leveraging and using other people as a foundation or a baseline to compare to, because there's a whole lot of context there that you can.

[00:07:56] Chris Furlong: I understand you don't have you, you don't know all the circumstances. And like I said, some people might get me born into this, or they might just naturally be good at things. Um, which is okay, you're naturally good at things too, which they won't be good at, but you just don't know that that's what you're good at compared to them.

[00:08:14] Chris Furlong: Right. Because you're only comparing yourself to one part of their life. Okay, you get my point. You need to be the foundation. If you want to be building a better you and start with 1%, start from, you know what you've been reflecting on over the last one week, one month, six months, one year, two years, five years, and see how you can progress from there.

[00:08:34] Chris Furlong: And of course, if you're struggling with this and maybe you're confused and maybe a bit overwhelmed and it's all a bit too. Let's have a chat. Let's chat about it. You can reach out on, on the different platforms. I'm on Twitter at further your life. You can reach out on Instagram, drop me DM at further your lifestyle.

[00:08:49] Chris Furlong: Otherwise drop me an email at hello at for the, your lifestyle.com, more than happy to continue the conversation and, and help you, you know, work through this or whatever it might be. But I urge you, I urge you. If it's coming to comparing, start with comparing to yourself, use those metrics that I just mentioned, you know, on a weekly, monthly, daily.

[00:09:08] Chris Furlong: Um, couple of years reflect back on those and just actually see how far you've come. And don't just do it as a whole generic, do it as actual areas in your life. If you're doing YouTube, where were you a year ago? When you did YouTube, if you haven't started YouTube, well, there you go. You've got a baseline to just start from zero, but you get my point.

[00:09:26] Chris Furlong: I hope you get my point anyway. I really do appreciate you being here. If you've enjoyed this, let me know, reach out. Let's continue the conversation. As I said before, and it's been great being able to have this conversation and I am trying. Really, really push myself to, to help others. Right. And I cannot urge enough of how important I feel like this is because once you, and it's, I'm not saying that I've got it perfect by all means.

[00:09:50] Chris Furlong: No, but once you can start to focus on you and not focus on what other people are doing and focusing on what they think about you or how further they are. Well, it's going to be very hard to further your own lifestyle, but once you can start to get rid of those things, remove the compare, remove the worry of what others think.

[00:10:08] Chris Furlong: Then you will be able to further your lifestyle so much easier. And that is the big takeaway for this episode. Go get it. Cheers. Now, if you didn't know, we do have the podcast merch and this is with a key focus. on enamel pins. Now, if you haven't checked these out, make sure you do because the intent of these are really just to be a small token and a reminder for you to charge on, to push on and to further your lifestyle, whether it is a gift for someone else to encourage them or maybe to inspire them, or maybe it's a way to motivate.

[00:10:38] Chris Furlong: Or you can simply just make a purchase to simply support the podcast, which would be greatly appreciated. We do also have some sweaters and some long tees, so make sure you check it out, link in the description and in the show notes, really to appreciate it. Cheers.