Transcript
Brian Buffini (0:00)
Give me a minute on how to avoid the comparison trap. I always say, don't compare your behind the scenes with everyone else's highlight reel. People ask me all the time, been interviewed hundreds of times, tell us your story, tell us your success story. And I go, do you want the story or do you want the whole story? From people on the outside looking in, looks like I never made a bad move in my life, never made a bad decision. I got a great business, built a fortune. I got a fantastic marriage, great family. So from the outside looking in, I have it all. The truth of the matter is it never feels like you're winning when you are. You need to know that most of my life in business has been a life and death struggle. You need to know that I've made financial and personal mistakes all the time. Just learn from them. So if you really want to know what's up, understand that life is a struggle, but it's a struggle worth winning. Top of the morning to you. I'm Brian Buffini. We've got a great show lined up for you today. Have you ever felt great about your progress until maybe you scrolled social media? Then you're familiar with the comparison trap. It's kind of sneaky. You can be building a solid business, a solid life, making steady progress, doing the work, and then one scroll later, you're behind. Someone's making more money, launching faster, parenting better, aging backward, and abs are showing and somehow they're doing it all before 7 o', clock, laying on a beach. So many solid questions I'll be exploring a little bit later in the show with Anna about separating performance from identity, competition versus comparison, and a whole lot more. But first, we're diving in today's edition of Brian's Blueprint. Teddy Roosevelt said comparison is the thief of joy. You know, comparison has a way of stealing the joy from our own journey and replacing it with pressure you never signed up for. But here's the truth. Comparison doesn't inspire excellent. It distorts perspective. It pulls you out of your lane and into someone else's highlight reel. And you can't win a race you were never meant to run. I will say this. In our coaching program, we've seen this thousands of times. In fact, one of the challenges we have is we'll often put out our numbers of what our average client earns and how much time they take off and those kinds of things, and it can often depress somebody. Sometimes a person's got a much lower average sales price, a much smaller market area, or they've been in the business a shorter amount of time. I think one of the great ways to understand comparison is to understand your own story and understand that everybody else has a story themselves. Everyone you deal with has a story. And that story is far more than anybody knows. And in the clickbait world we live in today, all that's presented is just these positions of how somebody's doing, these perspectives on how somebody's doing. I play golf right here in La Costa in Carlsbad. And there's a gentleman there who's one of the top photographers in the world. People will pay him $150,000 for a photo shoot. So he was recently working with one of the most influential people on social media. And she paid $400,000 to him and his team for four days of shooting. $400,000 for less than a week. Now he has 20, 25 staff. They're doing all this image work and she's doing all these glamour shots. She's selling makeup and other products that she has. So this guy, who's a genius by the way, he brought his daughter along. He's in the conversation with his daughter the next day and she had been crying and he's like, what's going on? And she was looking at the original pictures of that, what he had taken. And she goes, dad, I can never meet these standards. And he turned to her and said, honey, you were there all day, you know that she doesn't look like this. She doesn't look like this. That's why she pays dad. It was actually interesting because some months later we had a conversation. He was kind of having an existential crisis of his whole career because he said, am I causing young girls all over the world to set an impossible standard? That is actually not true, he said, because I'm creating this artificial standard. And it impacted him because for the first time ever, his own 11 year old daughter was trying to compare herself. Well, we know we have body images and what it looks, you know, what does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a success? Let me say this. I haven't spent very much time in my life focused on the competition. In fact, I would say a weakness for my company is many of my staff don't even know we have competition. And it's always important to know what other people are doing in the marketplace. So I'm really not built that way. I've always competed against myself. And this is something that's a real strength of mine. But I'm going to share with you a story of how I got caught out in something I didn't even think I suffered from. Now again, can sound very self aggrandizing. For 17 years I had my own private jet. And the reason being was because that allowed me to go to do seminars all over North America and be home for dinner. It wasn't practical, it wasn't economically sensible for a company of my size to have a jet. But I wasn't going to do the work unless I had a way to put my family first. So that was always behind us and that was what I did. And the plane I had for the longest was a Lear 45. And we could fly up to 51,000ft. So one day we're at 45,000ft and Edgar, my lead pilot, comes over the radio and says, brian, if you look to the left, you'll see a plane coming at our same altitude. So I look out the window and you can see this condensation trail coming towards you. Now, we're going about 560 miles an hour and this plane is coming towards us. And normally you see a plane moving, it looks like it's hardly moving at all in speed, but when it's coming towards you on a similar line, the planes literally zip past one another in a supersonic speed. And I was like, what in the world? And I remember I got up out of my seat and I walked up to the pilot's cabin and I said, edgar, what in the world was that guy flying? What was he flying like? He is going so much faster than us. Because when we looked outside the window, it looked like we were barely moving. We looked at this plane, he zipped past us and Edgar kind of got this wry smile and he said, brian, he's in Lear 45, the exact same plane I was on. It's just I looked out my window, it looked like we were barely moving until such time as I saw the other plane. He looked out his window and he probably said to his pilot, man, what's that guy flying? It's just very easy. No matter what you're doing or how you achieve in life, there's always someone with a bigger plane. There's always someone with a tighter set of abs. There's always someone with better skin or whatever it is. But how do we compare ourselves with the thing that really matters, which is who we are and who God made us to be? So let's talk about how to avoid the comparison trap. Not by lowering our ambition, but by anchoring our Identity and clarifying our purpose on what really matters. Learning how to measure our progress against who we are and who I was yesterday, not someone else, is really what it's all about. Yeah, I was embarrassed that day because I got caught in the fact that I was comparing myself at the peak of my success, flying on his own jet at 47,000ft. But apparently someone else was going faster. So the last thing I'd leave you with here today is I think it's important to have a scorecard for yourself and your family. That's why goals are critical. I think where contentment comes in is when you're content achieving and pursuing your goals, not someone else's goals. Like here's my goal for myself. You know, I have different goals at 58 years of age than I had at 28 years of age. So the only person I really want to compare myself is to the Brian of yesterday. You know, we started this brand new venture of the Brian Buffini show. We were 10 years with hit podcast on our hands. So why change it? Well, we took in feedback, we heard what people wanted more of and we endeavor to take a risk and go do something to show something new. We're not comparison to someone else's show. I have no idea what someone else's show looks like. We're comparing to ourselves. We're listening to our audience and we're saying how can we serve you more and do better? People said, I want more original content like this. Here it comes. People want to hear more gritty Q and a. Here comes Mr. B. People want to know how can they get involved and participate in the show. Here comes Coach Em up. This show is an example of not comparing ourselves to anyone else's show. This format doesn't look like anyone else's show that's out there. We've decided to do what we feel is best, to go and reach your needs and make our show better and make it better than what we did before. So whether it works or not, we'll see. I'm enjoying it. I hope you are. I hope you're subscribed to the Brian Buffini show and you come see me in person when we do these programs. It's a great honor to do this every day. These blueprints are designed for you to change your mind, to change how you think, to change how you approach some of the challenges and opportunities you have in your life. So hopefully today's blueprint will leave you with this. Don't compare yourself to someone else. Compare yourself to the gifts God gave you and the opportunities that are in front of you at the stage of life you're in today, try to get just a little bit better than who you were and what you were yesterday. In my book, you are a winner. And that is of no comparison.