I’m Not Motivated By Others’ Success

Every time I log on to Medium, I see another article insisting that we look at another writer’s remarkable success as a source of motivation.

“Someone earned $19,000 in one month?! Don’t let this discourage you — let it motivate you!”

How about neither?

I’ve grown tired of comparing myself to other people. In the past year, I’ve learned that it held me back in more ways than one.

I used to look at this photo of me and see everything wrong rather than everything right.

I’m a dancer and aerial artist. I used to spend hours perusing other artists’ Instagram accounts, replaying their videos twenty times to understand how they achieved a trick, obsessively tracking their moves and saving their choreography as inspiration. Along the way, I found myself unhealthily concerned with how many followers these artists had and how many likes their posts had. I excused it as “study,” but when I attempted those tricks in my studio and failed, I felt bad. And when I posted my own art and got only a few likes, I felt worse.

I felt like I needed to do it all to be worthy of being an aerial artist, but I was forgetting one important thing: it’s already incredible to be an aerial artist.

The same is true for writing. Sure, it’s slightly more accessible and costs nothing to start, but writing is still hard. How strange is it to translate your random thoughts into…