Mr. Dean Furness started his TED speech reminding us that humans are always compared to each other. I think it’s the normal human nature. But it’s important to understand, that we are compared all the time and it can be harmful and hinder our ability to grow. Mr. Furness further explains how he look at this, he considers a personal average that he uses to compare with the world around him.
He further said, after his accident he realized that some aspects of his personal average got reset. Because in a matter of days he went from a normal man to someone who can never walk again. He says he had to pretend like his past himself as a different person to keep himself mentally strong during his hospital days because now he has become very different to his former self, and now comparing to his own self has become hurtful.
At one point he said having a good day or a bad day actually doesn’t make any sense without knowing how our personal average is doing at that particular time. This is interesting, I personally don’t think most people including myself will not think like this. I couldn’t help but to assume that he somehow got much more self aware after the accident than most of us. His concept of having a good day is very logical. He further said he realized that moving on to the next thing as soon as possible if he was having a bad time helped him, by making him more time to make the day better. The most important thing I saw here was to make sure not to get our personal average compromised by trying to compare how our day is going, to some one else’.
In these days internet has conquered everyone’s lives, for the best or the worst. And it’s really easy to compare our selves with other people on the internet, may be on social medias. Mr. Furness said this too, he said that he was very careful not to compare himself to others on the internet and how fast they were, and if he did he might not be able to continue going through it. I personally find this very important, and kind of have similar experiences. In most social media, most of the times it’s staring just at how happy and successful all those people in the social media are. I know it’s not the truth, but in general it is hard to not compare our selves in those occasions. We need to keep in mind that no one was a master at anything just when they were beginning. So what we should do is not to compare our selves with those people on social media, but try to learn from them.
This speech was very interesting and how Mr. Furness handled being compared to other people. It’s clear from this, we all normal humans can be easily tricked into comparing ourselves to others. But we should be careful try to minimize it. It’s no mystery that it can be very difficult to not being compared and then feel bad and less motivated about ourselves. But after watching this TED talk by Mr. Dean Furness, I think it’s very possible.