Comparing Yourself to Other Artists

One of the Best Ways to Sabotage Yourself

Comparing yourself to other artists only serves to hold you back. You are literally beating yourself up for nothing. We are all unique, down to the cellular level. No two humans are 100% alike. Because of the millions of differences between us all, we see things differently (you don’t see blue the way I see blue, for example), we perceive things differently, we have unique points of view, and we have unique ways of expressing ourselves. Our styles are even as unique as our handwriting or our fingerprints.

You and your art are as unique as your fingerprints. Don’t compare apples to oranges. (Photo Credit: 123RF.com Fingerprint Copyright: Jelena Zaric Apple & Orange Copyright: Ratchapol Yindeesuk)

Therefore, it’s pretty pointless to compare yourself to anyone else. It would be like comparing your fitness to others. Your uniqueness means that your metabolism is unique to you. And the other person’s metabolism is unique to them. So are their cells, their hormones, their muscle structure, their bone structure, etc. So it would hardly make sense to compare yourself to other people.

Comparing yourself to other artists is like comparing apples to oranges.

No two people are alike.

Now don’t get me wrong. You can admire other artists. Just don’t compare yourself to them.

Nothing good comes from comparing yourself to others. (Photo Credit: 123RF.com Copyright: Vladimir Gjorgiev)

When you are comparing yourself to other artists, you do one of two things. One, you become self-critical and shoot down your own work. There is no chance of that being beneficial to you and will only serve to discourage you.

Two, you criticize other people’s work. Now I don’t have to remind you what mama used to say.

“If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

It’s about being a nice human being.

Because guess what? It will come back and bite you in the butt. If that’s how you’re going to be, there’s always someone out there who is better than you and thinks the same about your work. So how about we just be nice and encourage each other?

The only comparison that can be beneficial is comparing yourself to YOU. (Photo Credit: 123RF.com Copyright: ostill)

There is only one person you can compare yourself to without sabotaging yourself, and that is…YOU!

If you always strive to be better than the artist you were yesterday, you will grow much quicker than by comparing yourself to others. You can only truly gauge growth by comparing today’s work and past work. You can easily see where you have improved and where you still need work. That’s impossible to do if you are comparing someone else’s work to your own.

So stop comparing and start documenting. Keep photo documentation of your work. Compare your work a month, three months, a year from now. Watch how much faster you progress when comparing you to you.