World Leading Psychologist ON Why You’re FAILING and Why Discomfort Will UNLOCK Success | Adam Grant

He explains that comparing yourself to others can be useful for inspiration and learning, but it becomes destructive when it turns into wanting what others have or believing you “should’ve” achieved what they did.

He suggests that when judging progress, it helps to consider different starting points and to compete primarily with your past self while raising the bar for your future self.

He describes deliberately putting himself into highly uncomfortable speaking situations (volunteering to lecture in large classes) and says the experience accelerated learning by making improvement opportunities clearer.

He argues that asking for “feedback” tends to produce unhelpful cheerleading or demoralizing criticism, while asking for “advice” generates more forward-looking, concrete suggestions; he then looks for patterns across multiple people.

He describes learning from diving that a “10” is excellence, not perfection, and says he uses ratings and suggestions as a “judge” system—then checks whether his past-self who set the goal would feel proud.