The Wilful Sunflower

I vividly remember my schooldays where Mom would say, "Why can't you be like so-and-so? She participates in all those extra-curricular activities, and STILL manages to be one of the top 5 in class!"

To which I would reply, "But look, I'm better then your friend's son, the one she's always complaining about. I don't cut class, I do my homework, and I might not be in the top 5 but at least I'm in the top 20..." (there were about 40 students to a class)

"Of course there will always be people who are worse than you! Why compare yourself with them? You're not going to improve that way!"

Question is, why compare yourself at all?

This culture of comparing starts very young. Which baby starts to talk first, learns to crawl first, begins to walk first, picks up the ABC's first, and so on so forth. Then you go to school and you're comparing exam results. As a teen, you have the "coolness quotient" to beat, besides tallying up who has the most friends (ie., is the most popular), and, if you're a girl, you start comparing your looks with other girls'. In the working world, we compare salaries, then gadgets (bluetooth-equipped-GPRS-enabled-3.2megapixel-camera-MP3 player-3G-phone, anybody?), then cars and finally houses -- the bigger, the better. It never ends.

Because we compare ourselves with others, we can never allow ourselves to just be who we are. I think about this every time somebody tells me they wish they could write like me. Each person who says that to me can do about 5 things I can't, which I also wish I could!

I think I must learn to celebrate who I am and what I can do instead of always comparing myself with others and wishing I could be like them. I am me, and I should be rejoicing in my 'me-ness' rather than always thinking less of myself for not being able to do what my friends can do. Self-improvement is one thing, but why must self-improvement always mean working on our weaknesses? Why can't it mean improving on what's already there, the strengths we already have?

In fact, in Courage & Calling, Gordon T. Smith suggests that what we commonly consider our weaknesses may not really be a "weakness" after all:

There are definitely true weaknesses in every person -- character traits that undermine our capacity to fulfil our potential. But when we say that we must understand both our strengths and our weaknesses, we somehow imply that a weakness is something I do not do well. Why is this a weakness? Just because I do not do something well does not mean that it is a weakness for me; rather it is a limitation or perhaps a "nonstrength"... Nobody does everything well; what is imperative is that we each discover what it is that we are able to do well.