What We Miss When We Compare Ourselves to High Achievers

Social media was buzzing as Emma Raducanu, at just 18 years old, became the US Open Champion. Her remarkable achievement attracted millions of new admirers, but what was most interesting was how differently her success made them feel.

On one hand, you had people who saw the performance and felt inspired. An 18 year old had just done something incredible, and if they applied themselves correctly, they could too. Videos of her preparation led to some people adopting it as their new blueprint to model their own successes on.

On the other hand, you had people who felt disheartened. “There she is achieving all these great things, and here I am doing this. She’s so lucky, I wish I was good at something”.

This isn’t unique to Emma Raducanu either. It’s how many people look at high achievers. “They were dealt a good hand and I was dealt a bad one”. Rather than feeling lifted by seeing someone else’s remarkable achievements, they allow it to make them feel inferior and justify it based on luck.

When I see people discussing achievements in this way, I think back to what James Clear explains in Atomic Habits. He talks about the swimmer Michael Phelps, one of the most successful athletes of all time with an amazing 28 Olympic medals.

Biologically, Phelps is built for swimming, which gives him a big advantage over his competitors. It would be easy to look at him and say, he’s built for this, he’s destined to win, he’s so lucky!

But when you dig into the details of his career, you discover that Phelps trained for 6 hours per day, 365 days a year. He claims that for six years straight he didn’t even miss a single day of training — that’s over 2000 days of consistent effort.

So how fair is it for people to say he succeeded because he was lucky to have biological advantages, when he clearly worked much harder than most other people would?

If you committed 6 hours per day, for 365 days straight, how great could you be at something after six years? It’s a choice.

Likewise, we can easily say Raducanu is lucky, she’s going to be highly sought after for sponsorships thanks to her age and appearance. But those factors would mean nothing without the…