The Biology of Leadership · Issue 10 · Sent to subscribers 30 September 2026
This week I want to talk about comparison, and I’m going to start by embarrassing myself.
The insight this week
The thief of joy has a job
I find myself driving, looking at people in the cars I would like to drive. The Tesla Model X with the butterfly wings. The matte black Range Rover.
I know I could buy one if I wanted to get into more debt, which I don’t, certainly not over a car, but I still look at the driver and wonder whether they bought it outright or whether they’re in debt up to their eyeballs.
That sounds horrible.
What comes next is worse.
If it’s a beautiful woman, sometimes I wonder whether she has a wealthy husband and, for reasons I don’t entirely understand, my brain turns him into some big-shot executive who has made all of this possible.
Gosh.
Even writing that makes me cringe, because there are a hundred other explanations that could be true and yet somehow my brain reaches for that one.
So I got curious.
Not about whether comparison is a particularly nice thing to do, because obviously sometimes it isn’t, but about what comparison is actually for. What was it solving when this machinery was built, and why does the modern world seem so extraordinarily good at turning it against us?
The short version is that it was built for learning. You watch someone who seems to be doing it well, and you copy what you can see, and mostly that works. It stops working when the person you are watching is too far away to copy. That is where the joy goes.
From the interviews
“I have a friend who’s just exited her startup for a ton of money, and I’m like, ‘Oh my god.’ So, it’s my mental well-being and the stuff in my head. It’s toxic. I go straight from feeling like a winner to 100% I’m a loser.”
“I was kind of like that swan or that duck, calm on the surface, which was my professional persona, but with the people that I felt safest with, I was hard to live with.”
Two different leaders, in two completely different rooms.
One of them is doing the comparing.
The other is the calm surface someone else might be comparing themselves against.
The biology
Your brain is looking for evidence
If you already feel behind, or that you don’t have enough, your attention starts finding evidence that confirms it, not because you’re weak or irrational, but because that is what attention does.
You know the effect even if you’ve never named it.
You buy a red car and suddenly there are red cars everywhere.
Where were they last week?
They were there. Your brain had simply decided they were irrelevant, so it filtered them out as noise. Then red cars became meaningful to you, and suddenly it started handing them over.
Psychologists call part of this the frequency illusion, where selective attention and confirmation bias work together so that what has become important to you becomes much easier to notice.
Which is fine when it’s red cars.
It is less helpful when what your brain has been primed to notice is everyone else succeeding while you can’t find the path, everyone else being praised while you aren’t, or everyone else apparently knowing exactly what they’re doing while you’re still trying to work it out.
And this is where the mask comes back in, because everyone you’re comparing yourself to is wearing one.
The filter runs strongest on whatever you’re already afraid of.
But why filter at all?
I thought I knew this one.
The brain is expensive to run, so I assumed it filtered information to save energy, and I’ve definitely said that out loud before now.
The first part is right.
The second part is not quite right, and that is the bit I had wrong.
Your brain is about two per cent of your body weight, but it uses roughly twenty per cent of your resting energy, which is extraordinary when you think about it.
The brain’s share. About two per cent of your body weight. Roughly twenty per cent of your energy at rest. Two squares of your body, twenty squares of your fuel.
Researchers looking at the brain’s energy budget found that whether you’re concentrating hard or staring out of a window, the brain is still enormously expensive to keep running. The major shift isn’t necessarily in how much energy you use overall, but in where that energy is being directed.
Pay attention to something and the networks doing that job get more of the available resource. At the same time, whatever you’re ignoring gets less.
So the brain has to choose.
All the time.
Your attention was always going to be spent. The question was where.
Which is why deciding to simply stop comparing isn’t especially useful advice.
Your attention was going somewhere this morning anyway. The more interesting question is why it went there.
And underneath it is the gap
This is the part that changed how I think about comparison.
Someone doing well makes a gap visible.
There is where they are.
Here is where you are.
And your brain notices the distance.
But the gap itself doesn’t necessarily decide how you feel about it. What seems to matter is whether that distance feels crossable.
Albert Bandura’s work on self-efficacy showed that watching someone else succeed can strengthen our own belief that we could do the same, particularly when the person is similar enough to us that we can actually picture ourselves in their position.
Which means the same person can create two completely different reactions in you.
The sting
The gap reads like a verdict.
Look where they are.
Look where you are.
It pulls your attention toward what is missing and, almost before you’ve realised it, their success has become evidence against you.
The pull
The gap reads like a route.
Oh.
Maybe that is possible.
The distance is still there, but now it tells you something about what might be available rather than what you’re lacking.
And the irritating part is that the people best placed to inspire you may also be the people best placed to sting you, because the same closeness that allows you to see yourself in their success is also what makes the comparison feel personal.
I’ve noticed this with someone I follow on LinkedIn.
Historically, I’ve really admired them, but my own response to their posts tends to undulate.
Sometimes I read something and think, that’s possible, I can see the route.
Other times I can read almost the same kind of post and somehow come away feeling like I’m behind.
Same person.
Same platform.
Probably, sometimes, even the same message.
Different state in me.
Why it matters
Our comparison machinery wasn’t built for this
Humans learn from other humans because we can’t possibly work everything out for ourselves, and copying someone who seems to be doing something successfully is considerably cheaper than learning everything through trial and error.
For most of human history, though, the people available for comparison were limited.
They were people you actually knew.
You saw the outcome, but you also saw at least some of the work. You saw the bad week, the argument, the failed attempt, the ordinary Tuesday where nothing particularly impressive happened.
Now the comparison set is effectively everyone, permanently, at their best.
People you actually knew
The bad week
The argument
The failed attempt
The ordinary Tuesday
You saw some of the work.
Effectively everyone
The edited highlights
Permanently, at their best.
The machinery hasn’t changed.
The sample has.
The window has.
And the transparency has.
So you’re not simply comparing yourself with your peers anymore. You may be comparing your ordinary Tuesday with the edited highlights of several thousand people, most of whose actual lives you know almost nothing about.
No wonder the mechanism gets noisy.
Five things that have actually helped me
I’m not going to tell you to stop comparing, because I don’t think you will, I don’t think I will, and I don’t think that’s actually the point.
Instead:
1. Decide what you’re looking for before you open the app.
Your attention is going to filter either way, so give it a useful job before the algorithm gives it one for you.
2. Write down what you compared on, not who you compared with.
Was it money? Recognition? Freedom? Fitness? Impact? Usually the person is simply making visible a gap that was already there.
3. Ask whether you could describe their last bad month.
If you can’t, you’re probably comparing your whole life with the part of theirs that made it through the filter.
4. Look for people close enough to teach you something.
If the gap still feels imaginable, someone else’s success can become useful evidence rather than an indictment.
5. Keep your comparison set small.
The more of someone’s actual situation you understand, the more useful the comparison becomes.
In practice
The question I’m using now
When I catch myself doing it, whether that’s in the car, on LinkedIn, or just in that quiet moment where someone else’s life suddenly seems to be saying something about mine, I ask one question:
Is this the sting, or is this the pull?
If it’s the pull, then there is information in it.
Something about what I’m looking at represents something I genuinely want, and that’s worth knowing rather than suppressing.
If it’s the sting, it usually isn’t really about them at all. They’ve exposed a gap I already knew was there, often at a moment when I had less capacity to hold it lightly, and their face has simply become the thing my brain attached that feeling to.
I still get the answer wrong.
Probably about half the time.
But I’m starting to think the asking is the useful part, not getting the answer perfectly right.
The part I keep relearning
The feeling can be almost identical, and I think that’s the whole problem.
The same small drop in the chest.
The same person on the screen.
The same traffic light.
But one is saying:
I want that. Show me the route.
And the other is saying:
Their life is evidence that mine isn’t enough.
Those are not the same message.
Maybe the thief of joy isn’t comparison.
Maybe it’s letting the gap become a verdict before you’ve asked what it is trying to show you.
I’d love to know which one you experience more.
The sting, or the pull?
Just hit reply.
The other signal
The Capacity Wheel is a read on which way your wheel is turning, and on how much you have to spend before you ask yourself to spend it. About three minutes. It is a mirror, not an assessment.
Which way is your wheel turning?
This is Issue 10 of The Biology of Leadership, a weekly note written while I work on Beacon, a book on the biology of leadership. Subscribe here to get each issue a day before it appears on the journal.