RULE 4

COMPARE YOURSELF TO WHO YOU WERE

YESTERDAY, NOT TO WHO SOMEONE ELSE

IS TODAY

THE INTERNAL CRITIC

It was easier for people to be good at something when more of us lived in
small, rural communities. Someone could be homecoming queen. Someone
else could be spelling-bee champ, math whiz or basketball star. There were
only one or two mechanics and a couple of teachers. In each of their domains,
these local heroes had the opportunity to enjoy the serotonin-fuelled
confidence of the victor. It may be for that reason that people who were born
in small towns are statistically overrepresented among the eminent.^68 If
you’re one in a million now, but originated in modern New York, there’s
twenty of you—and most of us now live in cities. What’s more, we have
become digitally connected to the entire seven billion. Our hierarchies of
accomplishment are now dizzyingly vertical.
No matter how good you are at something, or how you rank your
accomplishments, there is someone out there who makes you look
incompetent. You’re a decent guitar player, but you’re not Jimmy Page or
Jack White. You’re almost certainly not even going to rock your local pub.
You’re a good cook, but there are many great chefs. Your mother’s recipe for
fish heads and rice, no matter how celebrated in her village of origin, doesn’t
cut it in these days of grapefruit foam and Scotch/tobacco ice-cream. Some
Mafia don has a tackier yacht. Some obsessive CEO has a more complicated
self-winding watch, kept in his more valuable mechanical hardwood-and-
steel automatic self-winding watch case. Even the most stunning Hollywood
actress eventually transforms into the Evil Queen, on eternal, paranoid watch
for the new Snow White. And you? Your career is boring and pointless, your
housekeeping skills are second-rate, your taste is appalling, you’re fatter than