"Comparison is the Thief of Joy and other trite sayings

When you operate in a corporate - or even public sector* - world, you can guarantee your days will be peppered with the latest buzzwords or the phrase of the moment.  They will irritate, grate but occasionally they'll resonate and stick with you for life.  And hopefully that's a good thing.

In early lockdown, you might have played buzzword bingo to ease the tedium of yet another Zoom or Teams meeting.**  Someone even gave me a coaster (okay, I might have bought it myself) with a bingo grid on it.  It definitely got used.

You might associate these phrases with people you admire, respect or are glad you don't work with any more.  They might stay buried in your subconscious - because you zoned out at the time - only for an event to happen and suddenly the phrase becomes apt and part of your everyday vernacular for a reason, season or lifetime.

My mother used to drive me mad by saying "It is what it is".  I'd give anything to hear her mutter that down the phone whilst I relayed my latest crisis.  But she's no longer here - and "it is what it is".  I have to "put my big girl pants on and get on with it".  Thanks for that one, Bestie!

I find myself mentoring my anxious teenage daughter with things like "don't cross your bridges until you come to them" - something my grandmother used to say to me as a teen. 

"With great power comes great responsibility" - Ben Parker (Spider-man 2002)

And I chuckled to myself the other day reading Mark Manson's "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck"*** where he talked about trotting out the line "With great power comes great responsibility” before he furiously Googled to find which eminent philosopher had uttered these lines; only to discover latterly that it was Peter Parker's Uncle Ben in Spiderman.  I'm sure we've all been there with film quote philosophies...

However, these sayings can come into their own when you're at a bit of a low point and need to maybe reaffirm that "Things Can Only Get Better" (sorry if you've now got the D:Ream earworm).  After a rough few years myself, and during recovery from a major operation, I decided to start journalling each day.  I cheated by buying a pre-organised journal with daily prompts to get me thinking about what positive qualities, values and skills I have and recording my affirmation for the day.

I'd like to say the affirmations are deep.  They're not.  I'm not that profound; but actually I don't mind about that.  It just gets me through the day and can have the power to redirect me towards a more positive path.  Most are likely stolen from popular culture. They might be lines from songs; quotes from films; and occasionally something a leader I admire might have uttered.  But they resonate positively with me rather than making me shudder.

So why particularly "Comparison is the thief of joy"?  The person this reminds me of was an HR leader that I worked closely with a number of years ago.  We were trying to reconcile data for a payroll migration and the error rate on the second parallel run was 1%.  In my book, that was a pretty good number across the huge and complex ruleset and dataset we'd spent several months rebuilding and refining.  In previous projects, I'd borne witness to second parallel runs with a comparative accuracy as low as 39% (or 61% error rate).

Another senior stakeholder piped up and took the shine off of my excitement by noting that in a normal month on the old system, they had a 0.5% error rate so I'd in fact doubled the number of errors, not made an improvement.  This individual totally ignored the fact we'd started automatically paying maternity pay properly for the first time in years; improved the quality of pension data and simplified the process for non-clerical staff to claim their overtime payments in a timely manner - removing a three month lag so staff were paid for overtime in the month they worked it.  All this individual could focus on was that headline figure of 1% vs 0.5%.

The HR leader took me aside to reassure me that my leadership of the project team to this result was exceptional and reminded me that "Comparison is the thief of joy".  The phrase (likely not the first time I'd heard it) has stuck with me to this day; from a work perspective when I need to motivate others in a leadership capacity and to myself when I'm wallowing in some sort of "Keeping Up with the Jones'" self-pity.

Ryan Gosling as Ken in The Barbie Movie

It also pops up when I am learning a new skill.  Be that buttercream flowers on cupcakes, lifting weights in the gym, falling off my paddleboard when everyone else is gliding serenely along or most importantly wondering if I'm good enough at my job and wondering if I'll ever be half as good as someone else whose style I admire.  I am perfectly imperfect and good enough.

And, when I've felt particularly low in a work context and the dreaded 90-day password reset policy has kicked in, I've used a motivational passphrase to remind me each day that !v3G0tTh!$ or I@mK3nouGH.

Tell me below which sayings drive you potty and which have resonated with you and become a mantra by which you try to lead your life.

#sayings #mantras #comparison #buzzword #bingo #markmanson #quotes

*I've done both

**Other collaboration platforms are available.

***The Responsibility Fallacy from "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck" by Mark Manson