There’s always someone better. So what?

Last week we caught a sneaky thought together…

a personal one, mine, on a dance floor.

This week I want to name the one almost all of us carry. The universal one. The one that’s talked more women out of their own lives than any other I know.

Comparison.​​​​​​​

It shows up the moment you let yourself want something — a business, a book, a painting, a bolder way of showing up, a different kind of life altogether.

You look up, you see someone already doing the thing beautifully, and something in you deflates: she’s so much further along. Who am I, next to that?

And right behind it comes its twin: I should be further along by now.

Between those two, so many dreams go back in the drawer. Not because they weren’t real. Because the comparing mind made them feel pointless before they ever got a chance.

I heard Elizabeth Gilbert talk about this once, and it reorganized something in me.

She was asked whether she’s worried about AI writing books better than she can — whether she’s scared of competing with a machine.

And she said, more or less: Why would that change anything? There have always been people writing better than me. Thousands of them. If I waited until I was the best, I’d never have written a single word. I write because I’m called to. For the love of it. That was always the only reason.

There it is.

There has always been someone better than you. Always will be. A better dancer, a better writer, a better speaker, a better mother, a better whatever-your-thing-is. And now, apparently, a machine too.

But here’s what the comparing mind never tells you: ​​​​​that was never the point.

You weren’t put here to be the best at your thing. You were put here to do your thing — the one that lights you up, the one your soul keeps nudging you toward through pings and little synchronicities, even when it makes no logical sense at all.

(And on AI — because I know it’s on everyone’s mind: I don’t see it as the thing that takes your work away, or our humanity away (unless we let it). I see it as the thing that clears the mundane, so you can finally do the work only you can do. The soul work. The human work. It can’t out-you you.)

Your energy — the particular way only you make a thing, do a thing, are a thing — is what calls in the people who are meant to find you. Not your ranking. Not whether you’re “the best.” Your realness. Your authenticity. Your you.

So here’s what I most want you to feel today.​

Comparison doesn’t just keep you from your dreams. It keeps you from yourself.

From the thing you came here to create. To live. To give. The thing that is so specifically, unmistakably yours that no one — and nothing — can make it the way you would.

And that is far too important to hand over to a passing comparing thought.

So this week, when comparison comes for you — and it will — try this.

Notice it. Name it: ah, comparison. There you are.

Then ask: am I measuring my day one against her year ten? Am I holding my messy, unedited insides up against the one polished sliver she chose to show me? (You almost always are.)

And then come back to the only question that actually matters: not “am I the best at this?” — but “does this light me up? do I keep being pulled back to it?”

If it’s yours, the comparison is just noise. Beautiful, convincing, utterly irrelevant noise.

Do your thing anyway. For the love of it. The way only you can.

And next week, on the podcast, I’m pulling both of these letters together — the sneaky thought and the comparison trap — into the one thread running underneath them. I think it might be my favourite one yet.

With so much love,

Carmen xo

P.S. — Tell me in the comments: what’s the thing comparison has talked you out of — or almost? I read every one. ♡

P.P.S. — This is the kind of thing I write about first (and most personally) in my letters — and the podcast I mention lands there first too. If you’d like them in your inbox, come join us. ↓

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