I was at a dinner party last year when someone asked what I’d been working on. I started talking about an article I was writing about attachment styles, and before I’d finished my first sentence, I caught myself doing something I’d done a thousand times before.
I was watching the faces around the table, gauging their reactions, adjusting my enthusiasm based on how interested they seemed. By the time I finished explaining my project, I wasn’t even sure if I actually sounded excited about it anymore.
Later that night, I kept replaying the conversation. What struck me wasn’t that I’d been nervous or seeking approval. It was subtler than that.
I’d been using everyone else as a measuring stick for whether my work mattered. Their interest determined my interest. Their validation shaped my sense of whether what I was doing had value.
The thing I finally stopped doing was this: making other people the standard by which I measured my own life.
I’m talking about the habit of constantly referencing external markers to determine if you’re doing well enough, being enough, choosing correctly. The practice of treating other people’s lives, opinions, and reactions as the baseline against which you evaluate yourself.
When you make others your standard, you’re essentially outsourcing your sense of worth. You’re saying that their metrics matter more than your own, that their approval is more valid than your own satisfaction, that their comfort is more important than your authenticity.
I didn’t realize how deeply embedded this pattern was until I started tracking it. Every day for a week, I wrote down moments when I’d used someone else as my reference point.
I’d felt inadequate about my morning routine after seeing someone’s Instagram post about their 5am workout.
I’d second-guessed my decision to stay home on Friday night after hearing colleagues talk about their plans.
I’d questioned whether my marriage was affectionate enough after watching a couple be more physically demonstrative in public.
None of these comparisons were conscious or deliberate. They happened automatically, like background noise I’d stopped noticing. But they were quietly eroding my ability to trust my own experience, my own choices, my own sense of what mattered.
The exhausting part was that the standard kept changing. One person’s life would make me feel like I should be more social. Another person’s choices would make me feel like I should be more ambitious.
I was trying to meet criteria that were constantly shifting based on whoever I happened to be comparing myself to at any given moment.
Why we hand over the measuring stick
Making others your standard usually starts with genuinely wanting to learn and grow.
You look at people you admire and think about what you might want to incorporate into your own life.
The problem comes when observation shifts into measurement. When you stop asking “what can I learn from this person?” and start asking “how do I measure up to this person?”
But there’s something else happening too. When you make others your standard, you’re protecting yourself from having to define what you actually want.
If you’re constantly chasing whatever seems to be working for other people, you never have to get clear about what working would mean for you. You never have to take responsibility for choosing your own criteria for success.
I noticed this in my own life when I realized I’d been pursuing certain professional goals primarily because they seemed impressive to others. I wanted the validation of hitting markers that other people would recognize and value.
But when I asked myself what I actually wanted, separate from what would look good or sound impressive, the answer was different.
What I actually wanted was more time for deep work, more creative freedom, more spaciousness in my days. But those things didn’t come with external validation markers.
Nobody throws you a party when you successfully protect your creative time. Those achievements are invisible to others, which meant they felt less legitimate to me.
I came across something recently that captured this perfectly. Rudá Iandê writes in his new book “Laughing in the Face of Chaos: A Politically Incorrect Shamanic Guide for Modern Life,” “Most of us don’t even know who we truly are. We wear masks so often, mold ourselves so thoroughly to fit societal expectations, that our real selves become a distant memory.”
That landed hard for me because I realized that’s exactly what happens when you make others your standard. You become so focused on matching external expectations that you lose touch with who you actually are underneath all those adjustments.
The cost of this protection is enormous. You end up living a borrowed life, making choices based on other people’s values and priorities rather than your own. You lose touch with your own internal compass because you’re constantly checking external ones.
What becomes possible when you set your own standard
About two years ago, I started a practice that changed everything.
At the end of each day, I’d write down three things I was satisfied with about how I’d spent my time, and the rule was that they had to be based entirely on my own criteria. They couldn’t be things that would impress anyone else or that anyone else would even necessarily understand as valuable.
Some days I’d write things like “I took a long walk without my phone” or “I rewrote that paragraph until it felt true” or “I said no to something I didn’t want to do.”
None of these were achievements anyone else would celebrate or even notice. But they mattered to me based on what I was trying to create in my life.
The answers weren’t always easy or comfortable. Sometimes what I actually wanted felt small or unambitious compared to what seemed to matter to others. I wanted quiet mornings more than I wanted impressive professional achievements. I wanted deep conversations with a few close friends more than I wanted a large social circle.
Admitting these priorities felt vulnerable because they didn’t match the standards I saw around me. But they were mine, and honoring them changed the entire quality of my life.
When I stopped using others as my measuring stick, I became more present. I wasn’t constantly evaluating my experience against some external standard. I was just having my experience. I could enjoy a quiet weekend at home without wondering if I should be doing something more social or exciting.
My relationship with my husband deepened too. I stopped comparing our dynamic to other couples and asking whether we were affectionate enough, adventurous enough, spontaneous enough.
We have our own rhythms and patterns that might look boring or unromantic to someone else. We spend a lot of evenings reading in the same room, not talking much, just being near each other.
None of this would make for an interesting movie, but it’s what creates intimacy and safety for us.
When I stopped measuring our relationship against other people’s relationships, I could actually appreciate what we’d built together. I could see its value on its own terms instead of constantly wondering if it measured up to some external standard.
The truth is that everyone’s trying to figure out their own life, and most of us are doing it differently because we’re different people with different values, different circumstances, different priorities. There’s no universal standard that applies to all of us, no single right way to live a meaningful life.
When you stop making others your standard, you’re claiming the right to define success on your own terms. You’re trusting yourself to know what matters to you, what you need, what serves your growth and wellbeing. You’re taking responsibility for your own life instead of trying to live up to someone else’s vision of what your life should look like.
This doesn’t mean you become closed off to learning. You can still be curious, still be open to influence and inspiration.
The difference is that you’re filtering everything through your own discernment rather than automatically accepting others as authorities on your life.
I still catch myself slipping into old patterns sometimes. I’ll notice I’m feeling inadequate after scrolling social media or after hearing someone talk about their life. But now I can catch it faster and redirect my attention back to my own experience, my own standards, my own knowing.
You’ll know you’re with the right people when you can live according to your own values without feeling judged or pressured to adopt theirs.
You’ll know you’re in healthy relationships when differences are interesting rather than threatening, when your path can diverge from someone else’s path without either of you being wrong.
You’ll know you’ve found your people when you can each be the authority on your own lives while still learning from and supporting each other.
And when you finally stop measuring yourself against everyone else, you might be surprised to discover that the life you’ve been living all along was enough.
Just launched: The Vessel’s Youtube Channel
Explore our first video: The Brain Beneath Our Feet — a short-film by shaman Rudá Iandê that challenges where we believe intelligence comes from.
Instead of looking to the stars or machines, Rudá invites us to consider that the first great mind on Earth may have existed without a brain at all… and that the oldest form of thought might be living beneath our feet.
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